Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʻAbd Al-Raḥmān Jāmī's Works in the Islamicate World, Ca. 9th/15th-14th/20th Century [Bilingual ed.] 9004385606, 9789004385603

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Jāmī in Regional Contexts

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik section one

The Near and Middle East Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şukru Hanioğlu (Princeton) Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) Florian Schwarz (Vienna)

VOLUME 128

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1

Jāmī in Regional Contexts The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th–14th/20th Century

Edited by

Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: “Men Exchanging Poetry in a Garden” from a collection of tarjīʿ-band by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, copied by the Iranian calligrapher Muḥammad Zamān Tabrīzī in 998 AH/AD 1589–1590. The Walters Art Museum · Works of Art. W.651.3A. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: d’Hubert, Thibaut, editor. | Papas, Alexandre, editor. Title: Jāmī in regional contexts : the reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān  Jāmī’s works in the Islamicate world, ca. 9th/15th–14th/20th century /  edited by Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2018. | Series: Handbook of Oriental  studies. Section one, the Near and Middle East ; volume 128 | Includes  bibliographical references and indexes. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038566 (print) | LCCN 2018047297 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004386600 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004385603 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jāmī, 1414–1492—Appreciation—Islamic countries. |  Jāmī, 1414–1492—Criticism and interpretation—History. Classification: LCC PK6490.Z5 (ebook) | LCC PK6490.Z5 .J36 2018 (print) |  DDC 891/.5512—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038566

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0169-9423 ISBN 978-90-04-38560-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-38660-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Figures and Tables x Notes on Contributors xii Introduction 1 Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas

Part 1 The Routes of Books 1

A Case of Literary Success The Spread of Jāmī’s Poetical Works throughout the Near East 27 Francis Richard

2

Approaching Jāmī through Visual Culture The Popularization of Yūsuf-Zulaykhā in Persianate Societies 42 Sunil Sharma

3

Jāmī and the Ottomans 63 Hamid Algar

4

Scholar, Saint, and Poet Jāmī in the Indo-Muslim World 136 Muzaffar Alam

5

The Arab Reception of Jāmī in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya and al-Durra al-fākhira 177 Florian Schwarz

6

Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī in Sufi Writings in Malay 196 Mohamad Nasrin Nasir

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Contents

Part 2 Translating Islam and Sufism 7

Before the Safavid-Ottoman Conflict Jāmī and Sectarianism in Timurid Iran and Iraq 227 Sajjad H. Rizvi

8

Trading Pearls for Beads Jāmī’s Qaṣīdas in Praise of Sulṭān Yaʿqūb and Their Significance to Āq Quyūnlū History 256 Chad G. Lingwood

9

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and the Ottoman Linguistic Tradition Philosophy of Language and ʿIlm al-Waḍʿ 283 Ertuğrul Ökten

10

Jāmī’s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn 309 Alexey Khismatulin

11 Jāmī’s Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd Merging Akbarian Doctrine, Naqshbandī Practice, and Persian Mystical Quatrain 343 Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek 12

The Recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī 367 Paul Wormser

13

Individual Sanctity and Islamization in the Ṭabaqāt Books of Jāmī, Navāʾī, Lāmiʿī, and Some Others 378 Alexandre Papas

14

Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper 424 Yiming Shen

Contents

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Part 3 Beyond the Seal of the Poets 15

To Round and Rondeau the Canon Jāmī and Fānī’s Reception of the Persian Lyrical Tradition 463 Franklin Lewis

16

“Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh” Jāmī’s Reception among the Safavids 568 Paul Losensky

17

Evaluating Jāmī’s Influence on Navāʾī The Case Studies of the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī and the Sadd-i iskandarī 602 Marc Toutant

18 Foundational Maḥabbat-nāmas: Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Bengal (ca. 16th–19th AD) 649 Thibaut d’Hubert 19

Love’s New Pavilions Śāhā Mohāmmad Chagīr’s Retelling of Yūsuf va Zulaykhā in Early Modern Bengal 692 Ayesha A. Irani

20 Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka Cosmology, Translation, and the Life of a Text in Sultanate Kashmir 752 Luther Obrock 21

A Bounty of Gems Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Pashto 777 C. Ryan Perkins

22

Sweetening the Heavy Georgian Tongue Jāmī in the Georgian-Persianate World 798 Rebecca Ruth Gould



Index of Names 829 Index of Places 839 Index of Works 843

Acknowledgments The two editors of this book would like to thank warmly Francesca ChubbConfer, PhD student at the University of Chicago, for her invaluable editorial work. Francesca has not only read cautiously each contribution but also revised the English language of non-native English-speaking authors. Many thanks also to Eduardo Acosta, PhD student at the University of Chicago, for his work on the indexes of the present volume. Several institutions generously sponsored our project: The Franke Institute for the Humanities; the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), both at the University of Chicago; the Chicago University Paris Center; the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society; the Centre d’Études sur la Turquie, l’Empire Ottoman, les Balkans et l’Asie Centrale (CETOBAC, Paris) and the Mondes Iranien et Indien, both Departments of the French National Centre for Scientific research (CNRS); the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris); the Collège de France. To all, we offer our thanks. We are grateful to Kathy van Vliet (Brill Publishers) and Nathalie Clayer (CETOBAC) for their constant support throughout the publication process. Lastly, our gratitude goes to the chairs of the three conferences that we organized during the project and to our patient yet enthusiastic contributors.

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 545, fol. 291v 39 1.2 MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 822, fol. 1v 40 2.1 Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase—Smithsonian Unrestricted Trust Funds, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, S1986.55.l 57 2.2 [Pashto] Afghan MS 15, 1815, John Rylands Library, fol. 128a, seduction scene 58 2.3 MS Victoria & Albert Museum, D.368-1908, Yusuf approaching Zulaykha, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, Hyderabad, ca. 1750 59 2.4 MS Victoria & Albert Museum, IS.108-1951, Radha and Krishna seated on palace terrace, opaque watercolour on paper, Jaipur, early 19th century 60 10.1 The Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn ascribed by the editor to Jāmī 336 10.2 Scientific Library of the St Petersburg State University, MS 386, fol. 168a. A foreword written in sajʿ by Jāmī to the second redaction of Anīs-1 337 10.3 The “anonymous” foreword written by Pārsā to the first redaction of Anīs-1 338 10.4 Scientific Library of the St Petersburg State University, MS 386, fol. 227b. A chronogram written presumably by Jāmī to the second redaction of Anīs-1 339 10.5 The Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn (Anīs-2) edited by Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārīūghlī under the authorship of Salāh b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī 340 17.1 University of Michigan—Special Collections Library, Isl., Ms. 450, p. 365 640 22.1 [Pashto] Afghan MS 15, 1815, John Rylands Library, fol. 1b–2a 795

Tables 5.1 5.2 6.1 10.1 10.2

MS Princeton, Yahuda 3872, codex contents 187 MS Bedestan, Serez 3916, codex contents 189 Jāmī’s works and title of Malay works quoting Jāmī 223 Comparison of two forewords of Jāmī’s Anīs al-ṭālibīn 326 The number of accounts in the 1st redaction of Anīs-1 in comparison with Anīs-2 328 14.1 Comparison between Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and Zhaoyuan mijue 445

Figures and Tables 14.2 Proper names, place names and book titles in the original Arabic and in phonetic transcription in Chinese 446 14.3 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue 447 14.4 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue 448 14.5 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue 449 14.6 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei 453 14.7 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei and in the Zhaoyuan mijue 454 14.8 Genealogy of Muslim intellectuals linked to She Qiling and Liu Zhi 460 15.1 Ghazals in the Dīvān of Navāʾī/Fānī and the Source of their Inspiration 484 15.2 Response Ghazals in the Dīvān of Jāmī and their Authors per Tabulations of Fakhrī-yi Hirātī 502 15.3 Catalogue of poets, available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ 9789004386600 17.1 The four sections (bābs) of Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī 610 17.2 Jāmī’s Khiradnāma (bāb XVII–L) 613 17.3 Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī (bāb XVI–XIX) 613 17.4 Khiradnāma (XLIII–LX) 617 17.5 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXXVII–LXXX) 617 17.6 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXXXI–LXXXIV) 621 17.7 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXIX–LXXII) 629 17.8 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXI–LXIV) 634

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Notes on Contributors Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Mughal political and institutional history, and the history of Indo-Islamic culture. His publications include The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200–1800 (2004), and with Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400–1800 (2007) and Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2011). Hamid Algar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. During his forty-five years of teaching, he gave instruction on a wide variety of subjects, including Qur’anic exegesis, Sufism, Persian and Turkish literature. The main foci of his research have been the history of Shi’ism in pre-modern and contemporary Iran, and the origins and expansion of the Naqshbandi order. He has contributed numerous articles to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi. Among his recent publications is Jami, published by Oxford University Press in the series “Makers of Islamic Civilization.” Thibaut d’Hubert is Associate Professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Middle Bengali and Indo-Persian poetics and literary history. He published articles in various periodicals and collective volumes, and he contributed entries on Bengal for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE. In his book titled In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) d’Hubert studies the encounter of Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular poetics in the courtly milieus of the kingdom of Arakan (Bangladesh/Myanmar). Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek is Senior Lecturer of Persian Studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, and research staff member of Laboratoire d’Etudes sur les monothéismes in Paris. She has published books and articles on Sufism and Persian Mystical Literature, especially on Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, and ʿIrāqī.

Notes on Contributors

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Rebecca Gould directs the European Research Council–funded project “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared” at the University of Birmingham, where she is Professor of the Islamic World and Comparative Literature. Her books include Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016, as translator) and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015, as translator). Ayesha A. Irani is a scholar of Islamic intellectual traditions of early modern and colonial South Asia, with a focus on Islamic literatures of Bengal and Arakan. She is currently completing a monograph on the Islamization of Bengal, entitled The Muhammad Avatara: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam. Her other major project focuses on recovering the many ‘faces’ of the Bengali fakir/darveś, as portrayed in their own writings and as viewed by multiple early modern and colonial actors. She now teaches in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, prior to which she taught in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto. Alexey Khismatulin is a Senior Researcher at the Middle and Near East Department of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (St. Petersburg) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the Department of Oriental and African studies of the Leningrad State University in 1991 and he received his PhD from the same Institute in 1997 with the major in Historiography and Source Studies (Islamic period). Since then he has been affiliated to the Institute specializing in the fields of Islamic mysticism, manuscript and textual studies. Up to the present time, he has published the results of his researches in different areas of classical Persian literature. Most of them deal with studying, editing and translating classical Persian texts. Franklin Lewis is Associate Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He writes about classical and modern Persian literature, including Firdawsī, the ghazals of Sanā’ī and ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī’s Gulistān, the semiotics of Ḥāfiẓ, the ghazal tradition, spirituality

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in Persian poetry, the social production of literature in medieval Persia, the relationship of painting to poetry, and the shared circulation of tales in Arabic, Persian, English and Italian tale collections of the medieval Mediterranean. Chad G. Lingwood is Associate Professor of Middle East History at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, U.S.A. His areas of research specialization are medieval Iranian history and classical Persian literature with a focus on fifteenth-century poetry and Perso-Islamic works of political advice. His publications include: Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl (Brill, 2014); “Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl: Political Statements and Mystical Advice Addressed to the Āq Qoyūnlū Court of Sulṭān Ya‘qūb (d. 896/1490)” (in Iranian Studies, 2011); and “The Qebla of Jāmi is None Other Than Tabriz’: ʿAbd al-Rahmān Jāmi and Naqshbandi Sufism at the Aq Qoyunlu Royal Court” (in Journal of Persianate Studies, 2011). Paul Losensky (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1993) is Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches Persian language and literature, comparative studies of Western and Middle Eastern literatures, and translation studies. His research focuses on Persian literary historiography, biographical writing, and the Fresh-Style poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His publications include Welcoming Fighāni: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (1998), Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (2009), and In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poems of Amir Khusrau with Sunil Sharma (2013). He has authored numerous articles on Persian literature for journals such as Iranian Studies and is a frequent contributor to Encyclopedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica. He is a former fellow at the National Humanities Center. Mohamad Nasrin Nasir is Head of the Research Centre for Malay Manuscript Institute of the Malay World & Civilization Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His primary research area is the Malay Sufi world of the 17th century and its connection to Ibn ʿArabī. He has published widely in the field of Islamic studies, thought and Southeast Asian Studies. His select publications include Metaphysical Epistemology: The Teachings of Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī (d. 1630) (2017); “Convergences and Divergences in Understanding a Malay Sufi Text of the 17th Century,” Islam & Civilisational Renewal 7/3 (2016); “Presence of God according to the Ḥaqq

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al-Yaqīn fi Aqīdat al-Muḥaqqiqīn fī Asrār al-Ṣūfī al- Muḥaqqiqīn, a 17th century treatise by Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī (d. 1630),” Journal of Islamic Studies 21/2 (2010). He is currently preparing the critical edition of a seventeenth-century Sufi theological text written by al-Rānīrī. Luther Obrock is Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and is interested in Sanskrit literary culture in the second millennium. His research centers particularly on Sanskrit works written under the Islamicate sultanates of North India. He has published on the Sanskrit language histories of Kashmir from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, translation and interaction between the Indic and PersoArabic cultural spheres in South Asia, and commentarial culture. Ertuğrul Ökten is a faculty member at the Istanbul 29 Mayıs University, the Department of History. Among his research interests are the intellectual and socio-cultural history of the Islamic world in the 13th–16th centuries, especially the Persophone section of it. Currently, he works on alfāẓ al-kufr as speech act within the context of the fatwās of Yaḥyā Efendī (d. 1644), the Ottoman shaykh al-islām, and the intellectual history of Sivas in the 13th and 16th centuries. He is in the process of preparing his manuscript on Jāmī. Alexandre Papas is a Senior Research Fellow (Directeur de recherche) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He is a historian of Islamic mysticism since the 15th century to present. His main publications include: Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan (Paris: J. Maisonneuve, 2005); Mystiques et vagabonds en islam. Portraits de trois soufis qalandar (Paris: Cerf, 2010); Ainsi parlait le derviche. Les marginaux de l’islam en Asie centrale, XV e–XX e siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2018; English translation, forthcoming). He is co-editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islamic Mysticism. C. Ryan Perkins is the librarian for South Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at Stanford University and teaches in the Department of History. His research interests include the socio-cultural and literary history of the Urdu and Pashto speaking regions of South Asia in the 18th–20th centuries. His publications include: “From the Meḥfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 50 (January–March

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2013); “A New Pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, Volunteerism and the Anjuman-e Dar us Salam in late nineteenth century India,” Modern Asian Studies 49/4 (July 2015); “London, Lucknow, and the Global Indian City c. 1857–1920,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 27, Issue 4, October 2017. Francis Richard is a Library Curator with an expertise in Oriental manuscripts. He was the Director of the Bibliothèque des Langues et Civilisations (BULAC) in Paris. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and directed the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre. His publications include: Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient (with F. Déroche); Splendeurs persanes, manuscrits du XII e au XVII e siècles; Le siècle d’Ispahan; Catalogue des manuscrits persans, I, Ancien fonds; Catalogue des manuscrits persans. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits. Tome II. Sajjad H. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. He specialises in the intellectual history of the later Persianate East and has also written on mysticism, Quranic hermeneutics and normative theology. He is the author of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (Oxford, 2007), Mullā Ṣadrā and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009), An Anthology of Qurʾanic Commentaries Volume I: On the Nature of the Divine (with Feras Hamza, Oxford, 2008), and The Spirit and the Letter (with Annabel Keeler, Oxford, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph on Islamic philosophical traditions in the 18th century. Florian Schwarz is Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria. His publications include Unser Weg schliesst tausend Wege ein : Derwische und Gesellschaft im islamischen Mittelasien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), Zwischen Alltag und Schriftkultur. Horizonte des Individuellen in der arabischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (ed. with Stefan Reichmuth, Beirut and Würzburg, 2008) and “Writing in the margins of empires: The Husaynabadi family of scholiasts in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands,” in Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (ed. T. Heinzelmann and H. Sievert, Bern, 2010). Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persian & Indian Literatures at Boston University’s Department of World Languages & Literatures. He received his PhD from the University

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of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, during which time he studied and traveled in Iran. He has held various fellowships and is the author of a number of books and articles. His research interests are in the areas of Persianate literary and visual cultures, translation, and travel writing. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Persianate Societies, Studies in Persian Culture (Brill), and Murty Classical Library of India. Yiming Shen is an Associate Professor in the Department of West Asian Languages and Cultures at Peking University. She received her PhD in Sinology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her research focuses on Persian Sufi literature and modern Persian literature, particularly the Chinese translations of Persian Sufi texts made in the 17th and 18th centuries. Shen has published several papers on Persian literature such as “Imitation or Innovation: Some Thoughts on the Language of the Chinese Islamic Works Written in the Late Ming and Early Qing Period”, “A Preliminary Comparison between a Chinese Character dong in Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei and the Corresponding Persian Words in Jāmī’s Lavāyiḥ”. Her Chinese translation of Jāmī’s Bahāristān will be published in 2018, which is the first full translation in China. She is currently responsible for a project titled “The Study on She Qiling’s (d. 1703) Chinese Translations of Islamic Scriptures” supported by National Philosophy and Social Science Foundation in China. Marc Toutant is a member of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. His research focuses on Turko-Iranian interactions and their contributions to Central Asian history and culture. He is the author of Un empire de mots: Pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī (Peeters, 2016), and co-editor of Literature and Society in Central Asia: New Sources for the Study of Culture and Power from the 15th to the 21th Century (Cahiers d’Asie centrale 24, 2015). Paul Wormser is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris). He has mostly worked on Indian Ocean trading networks and the borrowing of AraboPersian literary traditions in the early modern Malay world. His main publications include Le Bustan al-Salatin de Nuruddin ar-Raniri, Regards croisés sur Aceh (Archipel n°87) and “The spread of Islam in Asia through trade and Sufism, 9th–19th centuries”.

Introduction Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas This book is the outcome of a project that started with an informal discussion between both editors in a Parisian restaurant in June 2010. Having reached the dessert, common questioning and nascent friendship encouraged us to continue the conversation in more depth, so much so that a year later we decided to engage in a collective venture that we called A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond. We aimed at filling a massive lacuna in modern scholarship on the cultural history of Eurasia by studying the reception of the works of the polymath ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and, through him, the Timurid intellectual legacy. We also hoped to provide a template for philologically grounded studies of trans-regional and cross-linguistic trends in the Muslim world. The project gathered specialists of literary traditions that, in spite of their common recourse to the renewed canonical corpus produced during the Timurid period, had never been studied in a connected way before. We called upon book historians, philologists, experts in various languages and literatures, and Islamicists to reconnect the different parts of a cross-cultural process. Specifically, we brought together specialists of various languages such as Persian, Arabic, Turkish (Ottoman and Chaghatay), Sanskrit, Pashto, Urdu, Bengali, Chinese, Malay, and Georgian, in order to study the impact of Timurid literature on intellectual history on a global level. First, we organized in October 2012 a symposium at the University of Chicago, in order to introduce one another to the material available in each tradition and define guidelines for a common analysis of this complex subject. Then, after a year of further research, an international conference was held in November 2013 in Paris to present the outcome of this collaborative work. While the symposium organized in Chicago allowed us to map the field of the diffusion and reception of Jāmī’s works, the goal of the second event was to delve into the specifics of each contribution. As one might expect, getting closer to the texts and paying attention to specific contexts highlighted compelling transversal issues and fostered discussions that became more substantial in terms of treatment of the sources. In April 2014, a smaller workshop took place in Chicago to discuss the conception of a specific book for Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies series that would make public this international teamwork in a stimulating way. Following months of writing and editing, not without intense commensality, the final act of the project is the present volume gathering the contributions of almost all of the participants. The twenty-two essays comprising this book

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_002

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d ’ Hubert and Papas

are divided into three parts corresponding to the main paths by which Jāmī’s works left a deep imprint on the intellectual landscape of the Muslim world from the early modern period up until the beginning of the twentieth century. 1

Collective Studies on Jāmī and the Reception of the Works: Previous and Current Contributions

Interestingly, we find in the past scholarship done on “Jāmīana” a similar, though implicit and not presented as such, three-tier understanding of the polymath’s reception. This is particularly true for two conference proceedings published respectively in Kabul in 19651 and in Dushanbe in 1973.2 Both symposia had been organized in 1964 on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of Jāmī’s birth. Largely forgotten today, probably because of the nationalist accents or heavy propaganda of that time and perhaps equally because of the very limited accessibility of such publications, many papers written by Afghan, Tajik, Iranian, Uzbek, Georgian, and Azerbaijani contributors to these volumes appear, nevertheless, as pioneering writings.3 In this regard, our collective endeavor is both an homage paid to our Central Asian colleagues, in a sort of dialogue through space and time, and an attempt to provide an innovative reference book. Instead of summarizing the successive chapters of our three-part

1  Tajlīl-i pānṣad u panjāhumīn sāl-i tavallud-i Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān-i Jāmī (mutawaffā 898): Shāmil-i payāmhā va bayāniyyahā (Kabul: Vizārat-i Maṭbūʿāt, 1344/1965). The foreword gives some reminders on the life and works of Jāmī. It also describes with photographs the speeches given in Kabul by Afghan and foreign officials, including the head of the Cairo Public Library, and the visit of the main Timurid monuments of Herat by a delegation of thirty scholars. 2  Abdurahmoni Jomi: Majmuoi materialhoi jashni 550-solagi (Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1973). Celebrating also the 40 years of the foundation of the Soviet Tajik Republic in 1924, the introduction to the volume presents Jāmī as a progressive thinker and a poet whose legacy is found in contemporary Tajik poets, such as Sadriddin Ayni, Abulqosim Lohuti, Mirzo Tursunzoda, and Mirsaid Mirshakar. 3  After this period, the situation in Afghanistan interrupted most of the academic activities. Significantly, the Afghan philologist Najīb Māyil Haravī, who worked extensively on Jāmī, migrated to Iran in 1971–2. In Tajikistan, a volume has been published on the occasion of the 575th anniversary of Jāmī’s birth, but was deprived of research contributions. It is mainly a listing of 1270 publications about the poet from the Soviet republics, written in languages as diverse as Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, Azeri, even Armenian and Lithuanian. The reference is: L.A. Balueva and N.G. Sherbakova, Abdurahmoni Jomi. Fehristi asarhoi dar borai u, ki dar SSR az chop baromadaand (solhoi 1917–1988) (Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1989). Jāmīana has been essentially carried out by the philologist Aʿloxon Afsahzod who died in 1999.

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book, we simply introduce them conceptually, recalling, when appropriate, some additional data outlined by our predecessors. The first axis of the present volume traces “The Routes of Books,” that is to say, the production, copying, or commissioning of writings either by Jāmī himself or by officials and scholars from abroad. The long itineraries of letters and manuscripts, as well as their material specificities, show not only the continuous spread of the polymath’s works but also how they were read and used by different intermediaries and admirers across the Muslim world. Much more than late medieval or early modern “bestsellers,” Jāmī’s writings formed an œuvre which marked the cultural history of the Persianate world from the fifteenth century onwards. These questions emerged timidly in the 1960s, as evidenced by several essays of the aforementioned conference proceedings. On the Western side of Timurid Central Asia, the Southern Caucasus received and produced a large number of manuscripts of Jāmī’s works. M. Sultanov, a scholar from Baku, estimated the number of copies preserved in Azerbaijan at 188, among which we find, in descending order, the al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (the earliest copy, dated 974/1566, contains miniatures, while the most recent was made in 1317/1899), collections of letters or inshāʾ (earliest copy from 927/1520), the Subḥat al-abrār (earliest copy from 953/1546), the Haft awrang (earliest copy from 980/1572), the Silsilat al-dhahab (earliest copy from 975/1567), and the Bahāristān (earliest copy from 908/1502).4 In Jāmī in Regional Contexts, Francis Richard observes a larger phenomenon—the rapid spread of Jāmī’s poetical manuscripts in the Near East—and deduces from it a “Literary Success.” Not only texts, but also illustrations are telling elements in the sense that they enlighten the process of reception. In the 1960s, the Tajik specialist of miniatures Mukaddima M. Ashrafi found at the Saltykov-Shchedrin (National) Library in St. Petersburg a manuscript of the Lavāʾiḥ copied in 978/1570 by the well-known calligrapher Aḥmad al-Ḥusaynī from Mashhad. It was illustrated with five miniatures, which seem to have been painted by the no lesser-known Tabrizi artist Mīrzā ʿAlī already in the 1530–40s.5 More broadly, in this collection of essays Sunil Sharma discusses the adaptation of the narrative’s imagery to other audiences according to “Visual Culture” in the South Asian environment. Working on the interactions between the Herati poet and the Indian subcontinent, a historian of the Punjab University in Lahore discovered nine 4  M. Sultonov, “Osori Jomi dar maxzani dastnavishoi Ozarboyjon,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 144‒48. 5  M.M. Ashrafi, “Neizvestnye miniatiury Tebrizkogo xudozhnika pervoi poloviny XVI v. Mirzy Ali,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 166‒71.

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letters that Jāmī sent in 883/1478 to a certain Ghiyāth al-Islām, responsible in the sultanate of Bahlūl Lodī for overseeing commercial activity (a malik altujjār). The missives dealt with Sufism and were accompanied by a copy of the hagiographical compendium Nafaḥāt al-uns, completed by Jāmī the same year.6 The chapter authored by Muzaffar Alam for this volume follows these tracks and many others in order to reconstitute thoroughly the presence of “Jāmī in the Indo-Muslim World” over a long period of time. The routes of books certainly did not end in the neighboring areas of the Timurid realm. Several chapters of our book push the boundaries of the polymath’s sphere of influence West as well as East. Florian Schwarz uncovers the poorly studied although significant “Arab reception” of two theoretical treatises of Jāmī in the early modern period. Hamid Algar explores in extreme detail the relations between “Jāmī and the Ottomans” through diplomatic and intellectual exchanges, demonstrating his considerable authority among Ottoman Turkish litterateurs until the nineteenth century. Mohamad Nasrin Nasir presents a comprehensive survey of references to Jāmī in “Sufi Writings in Malay” on the basis of recently found manuscripts copied between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, while Paul Wormser focuses on not simply the translation but the “Recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī,” a major Sufi scholar of the sixteenth century. The second axis is entitled “Translating Islam and Sufism.” The Herati scholar acted as a transmitter, a translator of Islamic and Sufi themes, using his knowledge and narrative skills to spread religious teachings and defend Sufi values. The reception of his works worldwide continued the tradition of translating Islamic mysticism into different languages, thereby introducing subtle variations and new interpretations that while at times in contrast to Jāmī’s own discourse, were still legitimized by the reference to the classical (perhaps the last universal) authority of the late medieval polymath. When we come to religious and philosophical issues, supposedly wellknown texts of or about Jāmī deserve more historical approaches. In the present book, Sajjad H. Rizvi recontextualizes the links between “Jāmī and sectarianism in Timurid Iran and Iraq” through the use of biographical data. Among Jāmī’s writings neglected by scholarship, we also find the odes (qaṣīdas), which are of great interest in many respects. In past scholarship, the Afghan researcher Shaghlī Tawfīq drew from fifteen to twenty qaṣīdas several descriptions or mentions of monuments of Herat (gardens, basins, palaces, madrasas,

6  Muḥammad Bāqir, “Ravābit-i Mawlānā Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī bā Hind va Pākistān,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 53‒55.

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mosques, shrines, and Sufi lodges).7 Ahmad Abdulloev, a Tajik specialist of literature located Jāmī’s odes in the medieval tradition of the genre, and shed light on their particularities in terms of content over form.8 Less expectedly and more specifically, our volume features an article by Chad G. Lingwood, who reveals the spiritual stakes of Jāmī’s qaṣīdas and their “Significance to Āq Quyūnlū History.” The question of language, with its religious and philosophical implications, was also essential to address. Central Asian scholars sketched out some information on this question as early as the 1960s. An article written in Pashto dealt with Jāmī’s conception of language, more precisely his commentary of Ibn al‑Ḥājib’s grammar book al-Kāfiya, the al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. This commentary exerted a great influence in Central Asia and the Middle East, perhaps more so than any other glosses, and has been in turn commented upon by scholars such as his student ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī and later on by ʿIṣmat Allāh Samarqandī (d. 1009/1600).9 On the other hand, Dodxudo Karamshoev, a linguist from Dushanbe, attempted to analyze Jāmī’s practice of language, especially the specific lexis from Arabic and the phraseology of Persian, based on his theoretical and poetical works.10 Going a step further, Jāmī in Regional Contexts includes a study by Ertuğrul Ökten on our author’s “Philosophy of Language” within the framework of the theory of meaning (ʿilm al-waḍʿ) as received in the Ottoman linguistic tradition. Both heir and legatee of Sufi doctrine, mainly Akbarian and Naqshbandī teachings, the Timurid master appears as a key figure in the intellectual history of Islamic mysticism. After having recalled the context of Jāmī’s entry to the Naqshbandiyya, again an Afghan historian, ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī found late references to the master in the writings of the Mujadiddī shaykh Faqīr Allāh Shikārpūrī (d. 1195/1781) and to his treatment of the debate on the unity of existence (waḥdat al-wujūd) among, for instance, ʿulamā of Qandahar in the nineteenth century.11 The present collection of essays features three contributions that greatly expand the discussion thanks to new material. Alexey A. Khismatullin identifies the “Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn,” a hagiography recomposed by Jāmī to encompass divergent views within the Naqshbandiyya. Depicting the similar image of a Sufi reconciler, Eve Feuillebois explains clearly the “Merging of Akbarian Doctrine, Naqshbandī Practice, and Persian Mystical Quatrain” in one specific work. Alexandre Papas reads the Ottoman 7  Shaghlī Tawfīq, “Hirāt va Jāmī,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 128‒42. 8  A. Abdulloev, “Qasidahoi Jomi va ba’ze xususiyati onho,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 106‒20. 9  Qīyām al-Dīn Khādim, “Mullā Jāmī aw Sharḥ-i kāfiyya,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 69‒72. 10  D. Karamshoev, “Munosibati Jomi ba zabon,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 127‒43. 11  ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī, “Ṭarīqat-i Jāmī,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 14‒27.

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and Chaghatay Turkish versions of the Nafaḥāt al-uns as narrative tools mapping “Individual Sanctity and Islamization” in Central Asia, Anatolia and the Balkans. If Soviet scholars did not emphasize the religious dimension of Jāmī’s thought, they at least elaborated on its interpretation by Turkic-speaking poets. The well-known Uzbek writer Ghafūr Ghulām made a brief survey of versifiers close to Jāmī, namely Luṭfī, Suhaylī, Āṣafī, Bināʾī, and of course Navāʾī; he also mentioned the late translations into Turkish in nineteenth-century Khwarezm.12 Two historians of Central Asian literature, Boturxon Valixujaev and Sharif Shukurov, studied lesser-known references to Jāmī among authors such as the sixteenth-century poet Pāshā Khwāja b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Khwāja, the eighteenth-century lexicographer Muḥammad Khāksār, and numerous poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Gulkhanī, Maʿdan, Furqat, Nāqiṣ, etc.) from Russian and Chinese Turkestans.13 An overlooked terrain of reception of Jāmī’s mystical thought is the Far East. In her chapter on the master’s “Texts in China proper,” Yiming Shen performs a thorough comparative textual study showing how recourse was made to Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist terminology in translating Jāmī’s Sufi treatises. The third axis of the book carries the heading “Beyond the Seal of Poets,” alluding to the Prophet’s title khātam al-shuʿarā, also given to Jāmī since the early sixteenth century. As first readers of the poet, Central Asian and Iranian poets reworked his verses in various ways making them the end as well as the beginning of a literary tradition. The narrative poem Yūsuf u Zulaykhā represents a special case, in the sense that it aroused an exceptional quantity and diversity of translations or versions in vernacular languages, such as Bengali, Sanskrit, Pashto, Georgian, etc. There again, the Timurid poet was used as a spark to ignite regional literary production and language formation. Despite the repetitive rhetoric on the humanist (gumanist in Russified Tajik) poet, Soviet researchers paid attention to the legacy of Jāmī’s poetry and poetics. A brief paper introduced the Risāla-yi ʿarūḍ and compared it with Navāʾī’s Mīzān al-awzān;14 a longer piece argued that his poetical thematic and allegories entered Persian-Tajik folklore, musical repertoires, and modern literature.15 In the present volume Franklin Lewis authored a chapter in which he discusses Fānī and Jāmī’s enagement with previous canonical authors, and the latter’s place in the later Persian lyric tradition. In addition to the dīvāns of 12  Ghafūr Ghulām, “Shāʿir va mutafakkir-i buzurg-i sharq ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥmad Jāmī,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 95‒109. 13  B. Valixujaev and Sh. Shukurov, “Jomi va adabiyoti uzbek,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 93‒105. 14  B. Sirus, “Oid ba risolai aruzi Jomi,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 55‒60. 15  M. Shukurov, “Jomi va adabiyoti sovietii tojik,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 36‒44.

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both Timurid poets, Lewis critically surveyed a large array of other texts, “catalogues of poets” and biographical dictionaries (tadhkiras), and thus produces a remarkably detailed account of Jāmī’s role in the conception and reception of the canon of lyric poetry. By providing comparative analyses of lyrics illustrating “Jāmī’s Reception among the Safavids,” Paul Losensky gives a lively account of what was at stake in terms of poetic anxieties in the contrasted fate of the dīvān during this period. Another important work, the Khiradnāma-yi Iskandarī, was the object of two papers in the Kabul and Dushanbe conferences: the distinguished Iranologist Īraj Afshār compared the Alexander romance with its homonymous model by Niẓāmī, concluding on the advantage given to Islamic spirituality on Greek philosophy in Jāmī’s version.16 A Tajik specialist of philosophy, Gafar Ashurov, relocated the work in the long tradition of Alexander cycle (mentioning eighty or so existing versions in twenty-four languages) to underline its ethico-philosophical significations.17 In the present book, seeking to evaluate “Jāmī’s influence on Navāʾī’s poetry,” Marc Toutant shows more meticulously how a foremost architect of the Turkic literary tradition conceived the spread of Persianate ethics and Naqshbandī Sufi doctrine. As we mentioned it before, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā represents a special case that, one may add, our Central Asian predecessors recognized but did not sufficiently assess. An Azeri scholar, A. Quliev, briefly examined the various but less-studied avatars of the story among medieval authors such as Ḥāmidī, also named Durbek, in Chaghatay (composed in Balkh in 812/1409), early modern ones like Nāẓim Hiravī (d. 1068/1657) in Persian, and modern writers, among whom Junayd Allāh Khādhiq/Junaydollo Hoziq (d. 1258/1843) in Tajik.18 The volume introduced here considerably extends the geography as well as the textual analysis of the reception of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, particularly in South Asia. In the case of the late Bengali versions of the text discussed by Thibaut d’Hubert as “Foundational maḥabbat nāmas,” the Quranic origin of the poem is combined with other local figures of religious authority to underline the moral teachings of the story as Jāmī refashioned it. In “Chagīr’s retelling of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” Ayesha Irani provides a detailed analysis of the re-localization of the theme of love in the imaginaire of pre-modern Muslim authors of eastern Bengal. Luther Obrock highlights the courtly framework and playfulness of the religious equivalences and contrasts of “Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka,” a 16  Īraj Afshār, “Khiradnāma-yi Iskandar-i makhlūq-i Jāmī,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 122‒27. 17   G. Ashurov, “Antichnye filosofy ve poeme Dzhami ‘Khiradnomai Iskandari,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 45‒54. 18  A. Quliev, “Afsonai ‘Yosuf va Zulayxo’ va ii’kosi badeii on dar ejodiyoti Abdurahmoni Jomi,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 73‒81.

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Kashmiri Sanskrit rendering of Jāmī’s famous poem. Lastly, Ryan Perkins traces the manuscript transmission of “Yūsuf u Zulayḳhā in Pashto,” and raises questions about the political significance of the transmission of this text during the formative period of a Pashto literary identity in late Mughal India. Prior to this article, Pūhānd Rashtīn, the Afghan expert of Pashto literature, examined succinctly the legacy of the story among Pashtun poets, and reviewed the version written by ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṭṭak in 1112/1700 besides other poetical works influenced by the Sufi ideas of the Timurid Persian original.19 A further rewriting of the famous poem leads us back to the Southern Caucasus. Soviet Georgian academics initiated research in this area through, among others, two essays published in the Dushanbe commemorative volume. The first one was a note about Jāmī’s influence on Georgian classical poets in general and on two existing Georgian versions of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in particular.20 More substantially, the second essay offered some historical reminders and equally questioned the identification of a first version produced between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, just before Teimuraz I’s translation.21 Rebecca Gould’s contribution to Jāmī in Regional Contexts about the Herati polymath “in the Georgian-Persianate world” discusses in more specific terms literary translations to highlight the political implications of the compositional choices of the Georgian king Teimuraz I (1586–1663). 2

The Blueprint of a Transregional Reception

There are many ways to define the geographical domain covered by the contributions in this volume. The outline of this domain may vary according to the vantage point one is willing to adopt. In the original title of the project, “A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond,” we first chose to define this space using the Arabic term Dār al-Islām that conveys a legal understanding of the “Muslim World.” Since the project was not limited to the Islamic reception of Jāmī’s works, we also indicated that it would reach “beyond” this domain through the multiple religious contexts—Christianity, Śaivaism, Vaiṣṇavism, Confucianism, Taoism—of the reception of his Sufi and poetic works. In the various essays of the volume, the reader will encounter other ways to designate the domains in which Jāmī’s texts circulated. The 19  Pūhānd Rashtīn, “Pashtāna adabiyān aw Nūr al-Dīn Jāmī,” in Tajlīl-i pānṣad, 47‒52. 20  D.I. Kobidze, “Dzhami i gruzinskaia literatura,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 82‒83. 21  A.A. Kvakharia, “Gruzinskie versii ‘Iosufa i Zelikhi’,” in Abdurahmoni Jomi, 84‒92.

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term Islamicate (Obrock), although referring to Islam as a defining element, points to the exploration of cultural practices that does not entail a systematic engagement with beliefs and modes of worship, and, in a way, is the most fitting term to designate the realm of the reception of Jāmī’s works. Another term that reflects a cultural geography is “Persianate.” The Persianate world is primarily defined by the currency of cultural and linguistic practices stemming from eastern Iran and it partly translates the notion of “ʿAjam.” Finally, we also encounter a set of terms that underline the combination of Persian adab with other domains, often defined on a linguistic basis, such as Perso-Turkish (Algar), Arabo-Persian (Shen), Indo-Muslim (Alam), Perso-Arabic (Wormser), or Indo-Persian (d’Hubert). Each term reflects a specific approach to the cultural domain under scrutiny and there is no reason to try to limit the multiple vantage points from which the reception of Jāmī’s works can be studied.22 Perhaps at the core of all contributions stands the prerequisite of some degree of familiarity with Arabo-Persian literacy. At some point in their life, each author discussed in this volume sat down and accessed the domain of literacy through the Arabic alphabet, and the basic principles of Arabic grammar and prosody. Through this epistemic frame, literati familiarized themselves with Persian as a literary idiom. It is this common denominator that constitutes the premise of the very possibility of the reception of Jāmī’s works. More than political entities, cultural trends, or religious movements, the prerequisite for 22  Since the mid-1990s several collective projects attempted to define the domain and subdomains constituted by the spread of Persian literacy. See for instance Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, ed., Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions to Indo-Persian Studies (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994); Muzaffar Alam, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, and Marc Gaborieau, eds., The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000); Robert L. Canfield, ed., Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway, eds., Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order, Penn Museum International Research Conferences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012); Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani, eds., Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On the conception of nationalist discourses in literary historiography, see Sunil Sharma, “Redrawing the Boundaries of ʿAjam in Early Modern Persian Literary Histories,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, 49–62. On the notion of ʿajam in the early history of Persian literature with reference to “prison poems,” see Rebecca Gould, “The Geographies of ʿAjam: The Circulation of Persian Poetry from South Asia to the Caucasus,” The Medieval History Journal 18, no. 1 (2015): 87–119. More projects are currently in the making and will allow us to better conceptualize the Persianate world. See for instance Nile Green’s project “Frontiers of Persian Learning: Testing the Limits of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, 1600–1900” and Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf’s forthcoming coedited volume: The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, Iran Studies 18 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

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the spread of Jāmī’s works was the constitution of a space in which AraboPersian literacy was cultivated. Jāmī and his milieu were perfectly aware of the existence of such a space. The poet and Sufi from Herat did not restrain himself from intervening in and writing on the most fundamental aspects of Arabo-Persian literacy. At the core of the phenomenon under scrutiny lies a conception of literacy involving recourse to both languages (i.e. Arabic and Persian), and its ramifications keep increasing the lists of languages involved. In the coming pages, we will argue that the consciously designed blueprint for the reception of Jāmī’s works relied on both multilingualism and a vision of a trans-regional domain for the diffusion of his texts and reputation. Jāmī himself produced texts in Arabic and Persian. Despite the fact that he never wrote using this language, we also know that he was a connoisseur of Chaghatay poetry and would occasionally comment on the verses of his friend ͑Alī Shīr Nawāʾī (Toutant). It is noteworthy that Nawāʾī composed his treatise on the superiority of Chaghatay over Persian in this context, thus providing fascinating insights into the conceptualization of multilingual literacy.23 One could also argue that multilingualism is a quintessential aspect of Persian literacy and the Persophone domain. Persian was not perceived as a monolithic literary idiom, and in that regard it contrasted with Arabic, which was linguistically much more homogenous and bore within it its own epistemic framework (whereas Persian largely relied on the Arabic philological episteme when it came to analysis or speculation). This continuum between Arabic and Persian, and the geography that the combined cultivation of both languages generated, is implied in the Arabic saying that Jāmī’s biographer, ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, quoted when introducing the city of Herat as a major cultural center of the Muslim world: “Knowledge is a tree whose roots are in Mecca and whose fruits are in Khurasan” (al-ʿilm shajarat aṣluhā bimakkat wa-thamaruhā bi-khurāsān).24 In Jāmī’s case, Arabo-Persian bilingualism goes beyond the mere use of both languages to compose individual works; although it was far from being an uncommon practice, Jāmī was particularly keen on mixing both languages in his poems.

23  Robert Devereux, “Judgment of Two Languages; Muḥākamat al-Lughatain by Mir ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī; Introduction, Translation and Notes (First Installment),” The Muslim World 54, no. 4 (October 1, 1964): 270–87. One may add that the languages in question were not colloquial tongues but poetical and mystical languages, see Alexandre Papas, “La makhfî ‘ilm ou Science secrète de ‘Alî Shîr Nawâ’î : le projet d’une langue mystique naqshbandî,” Journal d’histoire du soufisme 3 (2002): 229–55. 24  ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī : gūsha-hāʾī az tārīkh-i farhangī va ijtimāʾī-i Khurāsān dar ʿaṣr-i Taymūrīyān, ed. Māyil Haravī (Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1371), 51.

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Timurid Herat marked an important phase in the formation of the discourse around multilingualism in the Muslim world and in the evolution of philological practices in the Persianate world. It is during this period that the canon of Persian poetry was further standardized. We may also mention the continuation of the longstanding Central Asian tradition of Arabic grammar and philology, to which Jāmī contributed with treatises such as his al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya or his Persian versified treatise on elementary Arabic morphology titled Risāla-yi ṣarf/Ṣarf al-lisān (Ökten). The strong tendency towards compilation and the production of what one may call critical compendia that aimed at monumentalizing Persian literature and reconfiguring its contents, did not end up isolating Persian from the other components of the linguistic economy of the time. This process of canonization turned Persian literacy into the ultimate model for generating new literary idioms in Islamicate domains. The revival of Chaghatay during Jāmī’s lifetime is proof of this phenomenon of vernacularization, mediated by Persian literacy, that was also taking place in the Ottoman world and that would later occur in the Deccan and Mughal India. The role of Jāmī in the formative moments of regional traditions should not be attributed solely to his literary genius, but rather to his being part of a large-scale project undertaken by Timurid intellectuals.25 Studying Jāmī’s multilingual reception is not about tracing the diffusion of a popular author, but observing the realization of a well-designed civilizational project. Reaching the conclusion that Jāmī became a transregional phenomenon based on the extent of the diffusion of his works is one thing; connecting it with a consciously crafted agenda to establish himself as an authority recognized throughout the Persophone world is yet another issue. One does not have to read between the lines to see that Jāmī and his disciples were promoting the image of a universally recognized polymath. In his autobiographical qaṣīda titled Rashḥ-i bāl ba sharḥ-i hāl (“Exudation of the mind in recounting my life”), Jāmī made the 25  See for instance: Lisa Golombek and Maria Subtelny, eds., Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century, Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture 6 (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1992); Subtelny, Maria E., Timurids in Transition: TurkoPersian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran, Brill’s Inner Asian Library 19 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007). For recent studies on individual figures of the Timurid intellectual milieus, see Marc Toutant, Un empire de mots: pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr Alī Shīr Nawāʾī, Collection Turcica 22 (Paris: Peeters, 2016); İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʻAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Christine van Ruymbeke, Kashefi’s Anvar-e Sohayli: Rewriting Kalila wa-Dimna in Timurid Herat (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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following comments about the recognition that his poetry gained throughout the Persianate world: My poems brought me such fame in the wide world, that the space of heavens is filled with their melody. The bride of the age, to adorn her ears and neck, took out a string of rubies from the jewel necklace of my poetry. With my speech the musician composes delightful songs; the singer treads the path of music with my verses. If the caravan of my poems goes to Fars, swiftly Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ come to greet it. And if it goes to Hind, Khusraw and Ḥasan say: “O stranger in this world, bienvenue! viens donc te joindre à nous!” Because people talked about me in all climates, all the kings became obliged to my words. Sometime Caesar sends his greetings from Rūm, sometime Chīpāl writes a message from Hind.26 In these verses that come toward the end of the qaṣīda, the poet relates the fame that he gained thanks to his poetry in the Persianate world—with Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ in the West and Amīr Khusraw and Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī in the East.27 Although it is more a formula than a creative recourse to the language, we have here an example of the seamless shift from Persian to Arabic when the Indian poets come to greet the caravan of his verses (in French in the translation).28 26   chunān ba shiʿr shud-am shuhra dar basīṭ-i jahān/ki shud muḥīṭ-i falak z’īn tarāna mālāmāl. ʿarūs-i dahr pay-i zīb-i gūsh u gardan-i khwīsh/zi silk-i gawhar-i naẓm-am girift ʿiqd-i lāl. surūd-i ʿaysh zi guftār-i man kunad muṭrib/rah-i samāʿ zi ashʿār-i man zanad qavvāl. agar ba fārs ravad kārvān-i ashʿār-am/ravān saʿdī u ḥāfiẓ kunand-ash istiqbāl. vagar ba hind khusraw u ḥasan guyand/ki ay gharīb-i jahān marḥabā taʿāl. zi bas ki sūy-i har iqlīm guft u gūy-am raft/shudand sukhra-yi aqvāl-i man hama aqyāl. gahī zi rūm navīsad salām-i man qayṣar/gahī zi hind firistad payām-i man chīpāl. Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād, (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1999), 2:37. 27  For an appraisal of Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ, Khusraw, and Ḥasan Sijzī in Jāmī’s oeuvre, see Nūr alDīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī: mushtamil bar risāla-hā-yi mūsīqī, ʿarūḍ, qāfīya, Chihil ḥadīth, Nāʾīya, Lavāmiʿ, Sharḥ-i Ta‌ʾʾīya, Lavāyiḥ va Sar-rishta, ed. Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad Jān ʿUmarʿuf, and Abū Bakr Ẓuhūr al-Dīn (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2000), 148–49. 28  According to Kāshifī, the use of those two Arabic words would indicate the recourse to the figure of speech called mulammaʿ (lit. “multicolored,” i.e. made of multiple languages). The example that he gives of mulammaʿ based on the occasional use of words from another language in a Persian verse (as opposed to a sequence of verses in various languages), is a verse by Rūmī, the first miṣrāʿ of which contains this very Arabic expression: khūsh āmadī

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This geography is mirrored in the verses about the kings of Rūm and Hind. The general mapping of the reception of his poetry as depicted in this verse is also significant: first Jāmī mentions the popular appeal of his verses when conveyed through music performance, then turns to the connoisseurs of poetry and locates himself within the Persian tradition and the geography of the Persian-speaking world. Finally, he mentions his official correspondence with rulers and dignitaries in the western and eastern regions—a topic thoroughly treated in various contributions to the volume (e.g. Algar, Alam, Lingwood). Jāmī’s biographer Bākharzī also highlights the geographical scope of the recognition of his master in the very beginning of his Maqāmāt-i Jāmī: The rulers of the kingdoms of the world, from the frontiers of China to the confines of Syria and from the limits of Hind to the western Ocean, all are in his service, and the monarchs on the surface of the earth, such as the Caesars of Rūm and the Kisrās of ʿAjam, the Khāns of China and the Rajas of Hind, all want to question him and express their wish. Verses: From Turan to the confines of Hind and Rūm, the world to him became like a seal of wax. May these words remain fresh among the greats until the Day of Resurrection!29 Such praises of Jāmī’s stature as an internationally renowned poet and scholar are also found in the tadhkira literature of the following centuries (Lewis, Losensky). What remained a hyperbole in the late fifteenth century became a matter of fact by the end of the seventeenth century. His treatises on Sufism and the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī would indeed reach the confines of China with scholars such as She Qiling (1638–1703) and Liu Zhi (ca. 1655–1745) who translated and commented upon his Lavāʾiḥ and his Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt (Shen). The Lavāʾiḥ even reached regions not envisioned in the geography reflected in the passages that we just quoted. As early as the first decades of the sixteenth century, the Malay Sufi author Hamza Fansuri (d. 1527) relied on this text to qamarā, marḥabā! taʿāl, taʿāl! Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, Badāʾiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār, ed. Mīr Jalāl al-Dīn Kazzāzī (Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1369), 150–51. 29   pādshāhān-i mamālik-i jahān az sar-ḥadd-i chīn tā aqṣā-yi shām wa az aqṣā-yi hind tā daryā-yi farang hama dar maqām-i khidmat wa niyāzmandī, va farmāndihān-i ʿarṣa-yi ʿālam chūn qayāṣira-yi rūm va akāsira-yi ʿajam va khawāqīn-i chīn va rāyān-i hind dar ṣadad-i ʿarḍ u sāʾil va iẓhār-i ārzūmandī—qiṭʿa: zi tūrān zamīn tā ḥad-i hind u rūm/jahān shud mar ū rā chū yak muhr-i mūm. hamānā ki tā rastakhez īn sukhan/miyān-i buzurgān na-gardad kuhan. Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 39.

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compose his treatises titled al-Muntahī, Sharāb al-ʿāshiqīn, and Asrār al-ʿārifīn (Wormser, Nasrin). Not all of Jāmī’s works were received in the same way, and did not become equally popular throughout the Islamicate world. For instance, in the two easternmost regions that are China and the Malay world it is mainly his works of vulgarization of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine that seem to have circulated (Shen and Nasrin). In the Ottoman world we may divide the Arabic and the Turkic reception of his oeuvre: in the Turkic domain his Persian poetry and hagiographical texts were translated and imitated early on (Algar, Papas, Toutant), whereas in the Arabic domain, it was mostly his theological treatises written in Arabic that were copied and commented upon. We also find some examples of Arabic translations of his Persian works, in particular his Nafaḥāt al-uns (Schwarz). His grammatical treatise and versified introduction to Arabic morphology were mainly used among Turkic speakers in Central Asia and the Ottoman world, as well as Mughal India (Algar, Ökten, Alam). His ghazals became very popular in the Ottoman and Mughal regions (Richard, Algar, Alam). His collection of seven mathnawīs Haft awrang, although found in many manuscript collections throughout the Persian speaking world, did not become as popular as the two quintets of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw—this is also visible when studying the number and nature of illustrated manuscripts (Sharma). Jāmī was thus a central actor in a broader phenomenon of reformulation of the Persian canon, which became a vector for the formation of new regional traditions. Conscious of the extent of the domain covered by AraboPersian literacy, Jāmī provided the blueprint for the subsequent reception of his works. His texts were meant to travel and he addressed readers of various backgrounds who would use his poems and treatises for various purposes. Although a contextualized reading of his more polemical texts reveals the sectarian debates in which he actively took part or was targeted (Rizvi), Jāmī purposefully refrained from formulating open sectarian discourses in some of his works in order to maximize the potential scope of their audience. For instance, although Sufism and the Akbarian doctrine are omnipresent in his poems, unlike Navāʾī’s khamsa (Toutant), there is no clear evidence that these should be read as “Naqshbandī” texts. This attitude can also be observed in the encyclopedic works of his contemporary Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, whose treatises on rhetoric and divination, and his works on adab and hagiography circulated in a variety of milieus from the Ottoman world to Safavid Iran and Mughal India.30 But unlike Kāshifī, whose persona as an author almost entirely merged with the works themselves, Jāmī generated a wide range of personas. In fact, his figure as a 30  Maria E. Subtelny, “Husayn Va’iz-i Kashifi: Polymath, Popularizer, and Preserver,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 463–67.

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polymath became a productive model and we count several “Jāmīs” of the time in later Ottoman and Mughal domains.31 This observation leads us to raise the following question: what became of this strong authorial voice in the process of the transmission of his works? 3

Echoes of an Authorial Voice: Jāmī and Authorship in Islamicate Literary Cultures

A project such as the one we engaged in that looks simultaneously at the context of Jāmī’s literary activities, the wide circulation of his persona, and the transmission of his texts, requires being attentive to a variety of transformations. Jāmī offers the peculiar case of a premodern author whose life can be reconstructed in amazing detail. This wealth of information allows for the precise drawing of an individual figure that contrasts with the gradual fading away of this individuality in the process of the transmission of his oeuvre. At one end of the paradigm of Jāmī’s persona we thus find a man, apparently illtempered, with an intellectual ambition that found an immediate response in his time throughout the Muslim world, and whose whereabouts were recorded both by himself and by his contemporaries. At the other end of this paradigm stands the author blended with his text: Mullā Jāmī, a term used to designate a grammatical treatise from Daghistan to South Asia, or an impersonal religious and scholarly authority referred to as Mawlānā Jāmī on the far ends of the Muslim world in Bengal and the Malay World.32 In the remaining pages of this introduction, we would like to share some reflections on the topics of self, authority, and persona, which may help us conceptualize the project as a whole. Such an ambitious reflection certainly deserves more than the space allocated to it in the present introduction, but the very issue that we are going to raise—the consistency between an intellectual and spiritual project informed by contemporary modes of sociability and the fate of Jāmī’s oeuvre—directly emerged from our collective endeavor. 31  See for instance Algar on Lāmiʿī Çelebī of Bursa (d. 940/1533), “the Jāmī of Rūm” and a certain Cāmī Çelebī who gained the title “Jāmī-i thānī” (the second Jāmī). In South Asia, the poet from Kashmir Shaykh Yaʿqūb Ṣarfī (928–1003/1521–1594), who wrote his Ravāʿiḥ in imitation of Jāmī’s Lawāʿiḥ, received from his master Shaykh Ḥusayn Khwārazmī the same title “Jāmī-i thānī” (the second Jāmī). See Javād Sharīfī, “Jāmī dar shibh-i qārra,” Dānishnāma-yi adab-i fārsī (Tehran: Sāzmān-i Chāp va Intishārāt-i Vizārat-i Fahrang va Irshād-i Islāmī, S 1375), 4.1:839. 32  On the figure of “Mullā Jāmī” the grammarian in the Ottoman and Mughal traditions, see Ö kten and Alam. On Jāmī as a figure of religious authority in Bengal and the Malay World, see the contributions of d’Hubert, Irani, Nasrin, and Wormser.

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We will first mention the renewed interest in Jāmī’s life, which displays some crucial shifts from the way his oeuvre was treated in modern historiography. Then, we will address the topic of the premodern biographical accounts, not so much to contrast “traditional” versus “scientific” biographies, but to see how we could integrate alternative modes of depicting life trajectories into our interpretative methods. Finally, we will try to go beyond the recording of one’s life and works and postulate a continuum between definitions of the self in Timurid times and their implication in the way Jāmī’s works were received. When we started this project, we realized that the study of Jāmī’s life and works received attention from scholars who had spent a considerable amount of energy studying the works of Jāmī himself or of his contemporaries. The oeuvre of the polymath from Herat also inspired dissertations that ambitiously strove to cover the entire span of his works to provide a unified account of his intellectual life.33 These scholarly works adopted a rather critical stance about Jāmī’s texts themselves, but most importantly about the modern historiography dealing with his literary output. In the present volume Franklin Lewis provided a detailed and insightful review of Jāmī’s place in Persian literary historiography. As Māyil Haravī reminds his reader in his monograph on Jāmī, the question the scholar should ask is not so much whether Jāmī speaks to a modern reader as Firdawsī, ʿAṭṭār, Khayyām, Mawlavī, or Ḥāfiẓ may do, but what contributed to give him such a prominent place in the narrative of Persian literature, and we would argue, of most if not all of the literary languages of the Persianate world.34 One way to address this issue has been the production of those recent studies that foreground a contextualization of the production of his works. Therefore, revisiting the life of Jāmī was not merely writing the biography of a great man, but a necessity for fertilizing the study of this important moment of Muslim intellectual history and, more generally, question “golden age” paradigms and the “decline narrative” of Islamic civilization. In this regard, our project is an attempt to rehabilitate the study of Jāmī not as that of a “great man,” but as one of the architects of the refashioning of canons in Sufism and Persian literature, and to assess the role of his works in the formation of regional and vernacular traditions in the early modern period. 33  Ertuğrul I. Ökten, “Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2007); Shadchehr, Farah Fatima Golparvaran, “Abd al-Rahmani Jami: ‘Naqshbandi Sufi, Persian Poet’ ” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2008). 34  Najīb Māyil Haravī, Jāmī, Bunyāngudhārān-i farhang-i imrūz, vīzha-yi farhang-i Īrān va Islām (Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1999), 133–35.

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Another aspect of those recent biographical endeavors is the fact that Jāmī presents a case that remarkably lends itself to what we would loosely call modern accounts of the “life and work” type. One can rely on a daunting variety of sources to reconstruct his activities and piece together a life trajectory that meets the expectations of the contemporary reader. Interestingly, another case of clear-cut individuality is found in the next generation with Bābur and his memoir, the Bāburnāma. Stephen Dale, in an article published in 1990 titled “Steppe Humanism,” discussed the reasons behind the odd case of a text that, without claiming the invention of a new literary genre and calling itself a tārīkh (history), contains a surprisingly individual voice.35 Dale relocated Bābur’s account in the peculiar context of what we know of the life trajectory of a man who built himself between several worlds—that of steppe nomadism and extreme urban cultural refinement—and, in such contrasted environments, would have developed an acute awareness of himself as an individual. He also adopted a comparative approach and clearly stated his standards to define what an individual voice is and how an awareness of the self—here defined by one’s physical appearance, typical moods or behaviors—ought to be developed. In both Jāmī and Bābur’s case, what is striking is the very possibility of piecing together an account that makes sense for a modern understanding of individuality and self. We are not here formulating a critic of those biographical attempts or interpretation of the autobiographical work, but we want to draw attention to the potential consequences of once again isolating those figures in order to make them more familiar to us—and here I am reiterating what Haravī stated in his book on Jāmī. What seems clear from the transmission of their works and the perennial though unstable nature of their persona is that what makes them so special to the modern reader was probably not what made them important within the tradition. This boils down to the elementary principle of the philological approach, which is to make us familiar to them, and refashion the gaze through which we read their life and works, rather than attempting to make them familiar to us. An alternate understanding of the self as conceived by Jāmī and his entourage may help us shed light on the fate of his literary persona and the contrasted treatment of his works in premodern and modern literary historiography. The aforementioned monographs on Jāmī are largely framed by biographical accounts written by some of his closest companions—Bākharzī, who was 35  Stephen Frederic Dale, “Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir alDin Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 1 (February 1, 1990): 37–58.

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his secretary, and Navā’ī, who stood among his closest friends. Hamid Algar’s monograph follows as a thread Jāmī’s autobiographical qaṣīda titled Rashḥ-i bāl ba sharḥ-i ḥāl.36 We also have a large amount of letters that help reconstruct his biography and his involvement in the social life of his time.37 His poems, both narrative and lyric, provide some insights into his biography.38 Finally, accounts of his life are given in numerous later biographical dictionaries. To this, one could add the autograph manuscripts that are still extant and that were written at various moments during his long life as a poet and a man of letters (Richard, Khismatulin). Another interesting aspect of the presence of Jāmī as an individual is the existence of illustrated dīvāns that depict him in various settings (Richard). Beyond the factual elements and the chronology of his life, it is the diversity of the accounts and documents related to his life that should attract our attention. Rather than a monolithic hagiographical account, what we have here constitutes a series of more or less stylized portraits and artefactual evidence of Jāmī’s existence.39 In his work on Bābur’s memoir, Stephen Dale points to what had been said so far on the issue of literary depictions of the self in Islam and the fact that recording the characteristics of what constitutes individuality was not favorably considered.40 Physical features and peculiar behaviors were usually mentioned with a didactic purpose in mind and not to convey realism. On the other hand, the self is indeed crucially important in those accounts, but rather than a social self it is inner nature defined in a spiritual cosmology that is prevalent. What have been labeled as autobiographical diaries, such as Ghazālī and Rūzbihān’s writings, are thus introspective works and recordings of spiritual states and stations (aḥvālāt u maqāmāt).41 Despite the novel aspect of the increasing importance of individual features in biographical and autobiographical accounts from the Timurid period onward, what also appears clearly is the persistence of a spiritual reading of those individual lives. A recurrent question in the present volume concerns the spread of Sufism beyond restricted milieus and in courtly settings. More than 36  Hamid Algar, Jami, Makers of Islamic Civilization (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 37  Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nāma-hā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, eds. ʿIṣām al-Dīn Ūrūnbāyif and Asrār Raḥmānūf (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1999). 38  See Rizvi and d’Hubert on Silsilat al-dhahab as a memoir. 39  For an overview of the scholarship on biographical writings and “egodocuments” in the Midlle East, see Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, “Deux livres pionniers sur les ego-documents dans les littératures du Moyen-Orient à l’époque moderne et contemporaine,” Arabica 60, no. 3–4 (January 1, 2013): 385–400. 40  Dale, “Steppe Humanism,” 50. 41  See for instance Ruzbihan Baqli, The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master, trans. Carl W. Ernst (Chapel Hill: Parvardigar Press, 1997).

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the diffusion of a set of specific doctrinal views, it is the wide adoption of a Sufi cosmology entailing specific ethical concerns that deeply impacted a large part of Islamicate societies. Jāmī, through his works popularizing Akbarian thought, tremendously contributed to the diffusion of those views. The various ways in which Jāmī was portrayed, from the specific traits of his physical appearance and behavior to the stereotyped descriptions of the ascetic and divine lover, reflect the range covered by the definition of the self within this Sufi cosmology. Recent studies about autobiographical writings in the Mughal context provide fascinating examples of individuals presenting themselves through both mundane features of their personality—social background, education, personal habits, etc.—and stylized tropes drawn from Sufi imagery.42 The recourse to Sufi ethics to shape a widely shared understanding of the self also appears in the way interpersonal relationships were depicted. The framework of the relationship between the master (murshid) and the discipline (murīd) was then found in all sorts of contexts—from depictions of courtly relationships in Safavid Iran and Mughal South Asia, or in literary milieus in which master-disciple relations were modeled on this type of interpersonal relationship. What we are dealing with is therefore a worldview that knew a remarkable success in Persianate societies, and provides us today with alternative ways to think about the recording of one’s individuality and its relation to the self. Jāmī, in his autobiographical qaṣīda as well as the comments that he makes in his mathnavīs (most of which he wrote when he was already an old man), shows this movement from the cultivation of worldly knowledge to the praxis of a spiritually oriented life: Since I was not satisfied with mere knowledge, I resolved to put this knowledge to practice. I joined the ranks of Sufis with pure hearts, because all they expect from knowledge is praxis.43 42  Mir Taqi Mir, Zikr-i Mir: The Autobiography of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Poet: Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir, trans. C.M. Naim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Taymiya R. Zaman, “Instructive Memory: An Analysis of Auto/Biographical Writing in Early Mughal India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54, no. 5 (2011): 677–700; Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary, South Asia across the Disciplines (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015); Prashant Keshavmurthy, “Bīdil’s Portrait,” Philological Encounters 1, no. 1–4 (January 26, 2016): 313–46. 43   nashud zi ʿilm-i mujarrad chū kām-i man ḥāṣil/bar ān shudam ki kunam ān ʿulūm rā iʿmāl. zadam qadam ba ṣaf-i ṣūfīyān-i ṣāfī-dil/ki nīst maqṣadishān az ʿulūm juz aʿmāl. Nūr alDīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran: Muʾassa-yi Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1380), 36, lines 76–77.

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In its basic formulation, this shift from mundane sciences to the spiritual life may appear as an almost universal feature of the narrativization of a life. It is noteworthy that in Jāmī’s writings this polarity does not entail an entirely linear progression of the self, but a constant struggle. Hamid Algar, has highlighted the paradoxical relation to poetry that Jāmī had throughout his life. Poetry was the vehicle of divine realities in this world, and therefore he presented himself as a mere “interpreter of divine signs” and prevented the reader from thinking that some individual talent was at work in the content of his speech: It is hoped that none will see in the midst him who has embarked on this explication or sit on the carpet of avoidance and the mat of protest, since the author has no share save the post of translator (manṣab-i tarjumānī), and no portion but the trade of speaker (shīva-yi sukhan-rānī). I am nothing, and much less than nothing— no work comes from nothing and less than nothing. Whatever secret of Reality I speak, no share have I but the speaking.44 However, in other places in his oeuvre, he complains about the constant urge that he felt to versify about the gravity—here taken literally—of his fascination for mundane beauty. Jāmī translated this torment into his masterpiece of narrative poetry, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, in which the authorial voice is conveyed through the character of Zulaykhā, who was exposed to divine love (maḥabbat) but remained entangled in the creepers of ʿishq—here referring to Ibn ʿArabī’s imagery when defining the stage of passionate love (d’Hubert). In addition to the production of literary canons, what we think is crucial in the phenomenon under scrutiny is the impact of Sufi cosmology and ethics on the architecture of the self, and the way Jāmī built his persona as an author. In this case, as well as many other aspects of his oeuvre, Jāmī became the vector of a longstanding phenomenon. The making of his persona and the self-conscious refashioning of the canons of the Persianate adab as the expression of a multilingual 44  Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Tai-yeu Wang, and Chih Liu, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yeu’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm; with a New Translation of Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick, trans. Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 134; Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Les jaillissements de lumière, ed. Yann Richard (Paris: Deux Océans, 1982), 36.

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cosmopolitan domain provide a template for the variety of trans-regional responses explored in the present volume. Bibliography Abdurahmoni Jomi: Majmuoi materialhoi jashni 550-solagi. Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1973. Alam, Muzaffar, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, and Marc Gaborieau, eds. The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 2000. Algar, Hamid. Jami. Makers of Islamic Civilization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Amanat, Abbas, and Farzin Vejdani, eds. Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Balueva L.A. and N. G. Sherbakova, eds. Abdurahmoni Jomi. Fehristi asarhoi dar borai u, ki dar SSR az chop baromadaand (solhoi 1917–1988). Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1989. Baqli, Ruzbihan. The Unveiling of Secrets: Diary of a Sufi Master. Translated by Carl W. Ernst. Chapel Hill: Parvardigar Press, 1997. Binbaş, İlker Evrim. Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʻAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Canfield, Robert L., ed. Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Dale, Stephen Frederic. “Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22, no. 1 (February 1, 1990): 37–58. Delvoye, Françoise ‘Nalini,’ ed. Confluence of Cultures: French Contributions to IndoPersian Studies. New Delhi: Manohar, 1994. Devereux, Robert. “Judgment of Two Languages; Muḥākamat al-Lughatain by Mir ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī; Introduction, Translation and Notes (First Installment).” The Muslim World 54, no. 4 (October 1, 1964): 270–87. Devereux, Robert. “Judgment of Two Languages; Muḥākamat al-Lughatain by Mir ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī; Introduction, Translation and Notes (Second Installment).” The Muslim World 55, no. 1 (January 1, 1965): 28–45. Golombek, Lisa, and Maria Subtelny, eds. Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century. Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture 6. Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1992.

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Gould, Rebecca. “The Geographies of ʿAjam: The Circulation of Persian Poetry from South Asia to the Caucasus.” The Medieval History Journal 18, no. 1 (2015): 87–119. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Tai-yeu Wang, and Chih Liu. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm; with a New Translation of Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. Translated by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī: mushtamil bar risālahā-yi mūsīqī, ʿarūḍ, qāfīya, Chihil ḥadīth, Nāʾīya, Lavāmiʿ, Sharḥ-i Ta‌ʾʾīya, Lavāyiḥ va Sar-rishta. Edited by Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad Jān ʿUmarʿuf, and Abū Bakr Ẓuhūr al-Dīn. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2000. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Dīvān-i Jāmī. Edited by Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād. 2 vols. Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1999. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Les jaillissements de lumière. Edited and translated by Yann Richard. Paris: Deux Océans, 1982. Kāshifī, Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ. Badāʾiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār. Edited by Mīr Jalāl al-Dīn Kazzāzī. Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1369. Keshavmurthy, Prashant. “Bīdil’s Portrait.” Philological Encounters 1, no. 1–4 (January 26, 2016): 313–46. Kinra, Rajeev. Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary. South Asia across the Disciplines. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine. “Deux livres pionniers sur les ego-documents dans les littératures du Moyen-Orient à l’époque moderne et contemporaine.” Arabica 60, no. 3–4 (January 1, 2013): 385–400. Māyil Haravī, Najīb. Jāmī. Bunyāngudhārān-i farhang-i imrūz, vīzha-yi farhang-i Īrān va Islām. Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1999. Mir Taqi Mir. Zikr-i Mir: The Autobiography of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Poet: Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir. Translated by C.M. Naim. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Niẓāmī Bākharzī, ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ. Maqāmāt-i Jāmī : gūsha-hāʾī az tārīkh-i farhangī va ijtimāʾī-i Khurāsān dar ʿaṣr-i Taymūrīyān. Edited by Māyil Haravī. Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1371. Ökten, Ertuğrul. “Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat.” PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2007. Papas, Alexandre. “La makhfî ‘ilm ou Science secrète de ‘Alî Shîr Nawâ’î: le projet d’une langue mystique naqshbandî.” Journal d’histoire du soufisme 3 (2002): 229–55. Ruymbeke, Christine van. Kashefi’s Anvar-e Sohayli: Rewriting Kalila wa-Dimna in Timurid Herat. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

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Shadchehr, Farah Fatima Golparvaran. “Abd al-Rahmani Jami: ‘Naqshbandi Sufi, Persian Poet.’” PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2008. Sharīfī, Javād. “Jāmī dar shibh-i qārra.” Dānishnāma-yi adab-i fārsī. Tehran: Sāzmān-i Chāp va Intishārāt-i Vizārat-i Fahrang va Irshād-i Islāmī, S 1375. Sharma, Sunil. “Redrawing the Boundaries of ʿAjam in Early Modern Persian Literary Histories.” In Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, edited by Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani, 49–62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Spooner, Brian, and William L. Hanaway, eds. Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Penn Museum International Research Conferences. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012. Subtelny, Maria E. “Husayn Va’iz-i Kashifi: Polymath, Popularizer, and Preserver.” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 463–67. Subtelny, Maria E. Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran. Brill’s Inner Asian Library 19. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007. Tajlīl-i pānṣad u panjāhumīn sāl-i tavallud-i Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān-i Jāmī (mutawaffā 898): Shāmil-i payāmhā va bayāniyyahā. Kabul: Vizārat-i Maṭbūʿāt, 1344/1965. Toutant, Marc. Un empire de mots: pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr “Alī Shīr Nawā”ī. Collection Turcica 22. Paris: Peeters, 2016. Zaman, Taymiya R. “Instructive Memory: An Analysis of Auto/Biographical Writing in Early Mughal India.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54, no. 5 (2011): 677–700.

part 1 The Routes of Books

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chapter 1

A Case of Literary Success

The Spread of Jāmī’s Poetical Works throughout the Near East Francis Richard A manuscript from the National Library of France, referred to as Supplément persan 545, shows concretely the studious activity of the young poet. Prepared in Herat in 1456, probably for Jāmī, by a copyist named Shams b. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Jāmī, also from Jām, the manuscript contains the copy of two commentaries of poems composed in Arabic by Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), one by Farghānī (d. 699/1300), the other by ʿAlī Hamadānī (d. 786/1385).1 We immediately recognize the notes written by Jāmī, whose very characteristic handwriting can be found in a collection of autograph pieces preserved at the library of the Oriental Institute in Tashkent.2 At the end of the Paris document, Jāmī has copied quatrains of the scholar Rukn al-Dīn Khwāfī (d. 834/1431). A few years later, the young poet had already acquired some notoriety. He collected and organized his poems in the form of a dīvān for the first time in 867/1463. This first “edition” was dedicated to the sultan Abū Saʿīd (d. 873/1469), which attests to Jāmī’s seeking out an official role for himself as a court poet. In 872/1468, a second edition was prepared, as evidenced by several manuscripts, still dedicated to the sultan after having been revised by the author himself. Later, in 880/1475, upon his return from Mecca, he completed a third edition, to which he added the qaṣīda Lujjat al-asrār (The abyss of secrets), which dates from the same year. It is this third edition that spread widely, and that was known under the title Dīvān-i qadīm of Jāmī. It includes an introduction in prose written under the reign of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (d. 911/1506). The collection was printed for the first time in Tashkent in 1325/1907. The renown of the poet reached the Ottoman court early, and Bāyezīd II (d. 917/1512) was among his admirers, sending two letters to Herat to invite Jāmī to his court in Istanbul. In 895/1490, the Ottoman sultan even sent him the sum of 1000 florins. One of these letters can be found in fol. 197 of an anthology in oblong format (safīna) from the library of Bāyezīd II himself, preserved at 1  M S Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 545, fol. 291v. The poems inserted after the 6th line are from Jāmī’s hand. See Figure 1.1. 2   Aleksandr A. Semenov, Sobranie vostochnykh rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR (Tashkent: Akademia Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, 1952), 1:150‒1, n° 356.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_003

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the National Library of France under the reference Manuscrit arabe 3423.3 The manuscript was copied in the mid-fifteenth century in Herat and Shiraz. Jāmī’s reply to the sultan comprised fifty-nine distiches, which would be inserted in the third dīvān. As for the prince Cem (d. 900/1495) who had a brilliant court at Konya, during a period of strong influence of the Persian culture in the Ottoman Empire, he was clearly interested in the production of the Timurid poet. The copy of the poetical writings of Jāmī, which was previously in the prince’s library, is now located in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. The prestigious Timurid heritage spread even more significantly in Ottoman Anatolia due to the historical circumstances. Badīʿ al-Zamān Mīrzā (d. 923/1517), the eldest son of Bāyqarā, was in conflict with his father for a time, until when the Timurid vizir Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī (d. 906/1501) helped both parties to reach an agreement in 1498. At the death of his father in 1506, Badīʿ al-Zamān ruled over Herat with his brother until the seizure of the city by the Uzbeks the year after (1507). The prince fled, then returned for a while to Khurasan in 1513, under the protection of the Safavids, the then-new masters of Persia. He was in Tabriz when Selīm I (d. 926/1520) took the city in 1514, and he was brought with great respect by the victors to Istanbul. This is where he died, leaving behind him a son, Muḥammad Zamān Mīrzā, who stayed at the Turkish court. These princes brought with them a part of the literary and artistic legacy of Herat, so that the Ottomans could consider themselves to be legitimate heirs. After his first collection of poems, Jāmī composed two other dīvāns. The fame of the author ensured the rapid and widespread diffusion of these works. Representing homogeneous anthologies, the three dīvāns enjoyed multiple manuscript copies and various critical editions published between 1978 and 1980, thanks to the painstaking efforts of the Tajik scholar Aʿloxon Afsahzod (/Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād) who used essentially the following manuscripts:4 ‒ A collection of Jāmī’s complete works (kulliyyāt) preserved in St. Petersburg under the call number D.204 at the Oriental Institute. Although this is not an autograph copy, it is the main source of Afsahzod. ‒ A copy of all works, dated from 1502–3, produced in Herat by Muḥammad Kātib Haravī. ‒ Other copies of 1504, 1512, 1519–27 kept at the Academy of sciences of Azerbaijan, where the first dīvān is the most voluminous. 3  M S Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrit arabe 3423, fol. 197v. 4  ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Fātihat ash-shabāb, Kriticheskii tekst i predislovie A’lokhon Afsachzoda (Moscow: Nauka, 1978); ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Wāsiṭat al-ʿiqd va khātimat al-ḥayāt, Kriticheskii tekst i predislovie A’lokhon Afsachzoda (Moscow: Shuʿba-yi Adabīyāt-i Khāwar, 1980).

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‒ The manuscript copied in 1492 by Mīr ʿAlī Tabrīzī, the very year of Jāmī’s death, which is located at the University Library of St. Petersburg and has been made from one of the most ancient copies of the first dīvān, and then completed. ‒ A volume decorated with six paintings, copied in 1487 in Shiraz by Naʿīm al-Dīn Kātib b. Ṣadr al-Dīn, which corresponds to C.1697 of the library of the Oriental Institute in St. Petersburg and contains a version of the text, which is very close to the one given in 1492 by Mīr ʿAlī Tabrīzī. ‒ An anthology of Jāmī’s complete works preserved at the National Library of Iran in Tehran, which is very close to the other ones but with only seventeen of his writings. Afsahzod disputes that it is an autograph. In Aḥmad Monzavī’s collective catalogue (fihrist) of the Persian manuscripts stored in the various libraries around the world that the Iranian scholar was aware of (published in Tehran in 1971), there is a list of the manuscripts of Jāmī’s dīvāns.5 What emerges is that the first dīvān was known already in 1469, that is, the year of copy of the book preserved in Karachi, probably even as early as 1465, the date of a manuscript held at the Parliament of Tehran—more will be said about these items shortly. It is therefore hardly surprising that, during this period, the literary anthologies started to regularly include a large selection of Jāmī’s poetry, mainly ghazaliyyāt (lyric poems), inside books made in Herat, Tabriz and Shiraz as well as other cities—a clear sign of the rapid celebrity of the poet. Later on, for the purposes of identification, the first dīvān received the name of Fātiḥat al-shabāb (The beginning of youth). It would be interesting to see to what extent this is the collection that earned Jāmī his reputation. An enumeration of the manuscript copies would allow us to confirm this suggestion. According to the foreword written in prose by Jāmī, the second dīvān, or Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd (The middle of the necklace), was assembled and presented to the public in 1479, when he was already “more than sixty years old.” We read verses praising Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, while others distiches were composed in response to sultan Yaʿqūb Āq Qoyunlū (d. 896/1490) who ruled over Western Persia (Tabriz) around 1478 and was a great patron of the arts. We also find verses in honor of several famous people such as ʿAlī Shīr Nawāʾī and the prince Badīʿ al-Zamān Mīrzā. This dīvān contains 493 ghazaliyyāt and a few other ­pieces, among which are 52 muqaṭṭaʿāt (fragments) and 75 rubāʿiyyāt (quatrains), and some enigmas. The third and last dīvān is entitled Khātimat alḥayāt (The conclusion of existence). Here, we again discover verses dedicated 5  Aḥmad Munzawī, Fihrist-i nuskhahā-yi khaṭṭī-yi fārsī (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī-yi Minṭaqa‌ʾī, 1348/1969), 3:2264‒70.

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to Yaʿqūb Āq Qoyunlū, dated from 1491, along with some qaṣīdas (odes), 296 ghazaliyyāt, 38 muqaṭṭaʿāt, 45 rubāʿiyyāt, and a few other pieces. When Jāmī was presenting to the public this last collection, he composed a foreword to introduce all three dīvāns, a foreword which appears in the new edition of the complete works (kulliyyāt) that the polymath prepared at the beginning of 1491. Aḥmad Monzavī, in the aforementioned third volume of his fihrist, identified a large number of copies of Jāmī’s first dīvān: ‒ A copy showing the date of 869/1465 and preserved at the Parliament of Tehran, devoid of foreword. ‒ A manuscript at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, which would date from 876/1472. ‒ A manuscript at the Senate in Tehran dating from 877/1473, a year during which another specimen was copied by Ḥātif Shirwānī, today referred to as R. 956 at the library of Topkapi Saray in Istanbul. ‒ Three more copies kept at Topkapi Saray, featuring the dates of 1478, 1482, and 1483, followed by additional copies of the late fifteenth century. ‒ In India, the Rampur Library has a dīvān dated from 888/1483. In his collective catalogue of the manuscripts of the libraries of Pakistan, Monzavī added to the above list two copies:6 ‒ The first one is at the National Museum in Karachi, completed in 873/1469 by Sultān ʿAlī, the famous calligrapher of Herat, with the long foreword in prose. ‒ The second one is at the same place, completed in 877/1473 by Muḥammad Baqqāl, containing rubāʿiyyāt and ghazaliyyāt in the margins of a dīvān of Qāsim Anwār. We do not know where it was produced. To these copies of Jāmī’s first dīvān, one might add a book of 297 folios length, including ghazaliyyāt, muqaṭṭaʿāt, and other pieces, copied by Naʿīm al-Dīn Kātib b. Ṣadr al-Dīn on the first of rabīʿ al-awwal 893/February 14, 1488, which was put on sale at the Drouot auction house on April 7–8, 1998.7 This manuscript is all the more interesting for its featured paintings, including an initial double-page, representing a princely audience, followed by seven others. The second one evokes Farhād and Shīrīn, and the fifth one a polo game. The paintings are of Turkmen style and the manuscript would have come from Shiraz. It would be among the first illustrated copies of the first dīvān. Such a relative

6  Aḥmad Monzavī, Fihrist-i mushtarak-i nuskhahā-yi khaṭṭī-yi fārsī-yi Pākistān (Islamabad: Markaz-i Taḥqīqāt-i Fārsī-yi Īrān va Pākistān, 1986), 7:592, n° 440. 7  The document n° 295 has 15 lines on two columns.

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abundance of early specimens confirms, as we have seen already, the immense success that Jāmī’s poetical work achieved. Curiously neglected by the modern editors of the three dīvāns are the manuscripts held by the National Library of France in Paris, which are quite numerous. Let us first mention the great compilation (kulliyyāt) of 620 folios length, under the reference Supplément persan 822,8 in which part of the end is missing. Acquired in India by the colonel Jean-Baptiste Gentil, probably in Fayzabad or Delhi, around 1775, and sent to Paris at the request of AnquetilDuperon, the book came from the library of the Great Mughals. The copyist is Darwīsh Muḥammad b. Amīr Surkh b. Amīr Shaykh Muḥammad, and the dates of execution go from May 27, 1490 to January 16, 1491. The project was carried out during the lifetime of Jāmī, most likely in Herat, just before the completion of the third dīvān (in 1490 or shortly after), whose text is not included in the manuscript. On fol. 420, there is a seal of Abū al-Ghāzī Sulṭān Ḥusayn Khān Bahādur (d. 911/1505),9 which means that the book was in the library of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā himself, for whom it was likely copied. We find in this volume a great amount of Jāmī’s works in prose and in verse. Among the latter figure the Haft awrang (The seven thrones) and the two first dīvāns. For an unknown reason, the second one appears firstly on fol. 420v–463, then the first one, entitled Dīvān-i avval, on fol. 464v–554v, without the introduction but with a foreword in prose, followed by several qaṣīdas, ghazaliyyāt, qatʿas, rubāʿiyyāt, and enigmas. Here, the version of the poems is very close to that of the manuscript n° 1331 of the library of the Oriental Institute in Tashkent, which was produced in 1502–3. From the end of the fifteenth century date two manuscripts, which comprise but a selection of ghazaliyyāt from the first dīvān. The first one, referred to as Persan 349, is an anthology dating from 1497, where we find 178 ghazaliyyāt of Jāmī, and seems to have been copied in Shiraz as evidenced by the writing style. The second one, Persan 323, is also an anthology, which incorporates only 85 ghazaliyyāt from the first dīvān, with neither date nor place. It was most likely copied sometime between the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century.

8  See Figure 1.2. 9  The same seal is found, with the seal of Ibn Ḥusayn, son of the sultan, on fol. 102v of the “Baysunghur’s calligraphy album” n° H.2310 in Topkapi Museum. See David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600, from dispersal to collection (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2005); also Francis Richard, Catalogue des manuscrits persans. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Département des manuscrits)—Tome II, le Supplément persan (Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente C.A.Nallino, 2013), 2:1122.

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The other manuscripts of the first dīvān preserved in Paris contain a variable number of poetical pieces. In Supplément persan 1812, completed in October 1519 by Maqṣūd b. Bāyazīd Harawī, a calligrapher of Herat who went into service with the emperor Humāyūn (d. 963/1556) when he set off for India, we come across qaṣīdas and about 840 ghazaliyyāt.10 In Supplément persan 1834, an anonymous copy of the first dīvān prepared in Shiraz in 1538 on a paper colored alternatively in ocher and salmon, perhaps by the hand of Murshid Kātib Shīrāzī, there is a preface in prose and about 860 ghazaliyyāt. In Supplément persan 548, a copy coming from the collection of Mgr. Le Fèvre de Caumartin and written in 1545 in Torbat-e Jam near Herat, we recognize 882 ghazaliyyāt. In Supplément persan 2000, copied around 1520 or 1530, possibly in Tabriz, by Darwīsh Muḥammad, the Dīvān-i avval on fol. 52v–270 comprises approximately 875 ghazaliyyāt. Supplément persan 553, dating from 1565, which is one of the manuscripts brought from Persia to Italy in 1608 by the Vecchietti brothers, has 844 ghazaliyyāt. Lastly, the manuscript Persan 225, copied in Persia in 1535 by Shams al-Dīn b. Zayn al-Dīn, includes qaṣīdas, tarjīʿ-bands (stanza with refrain), 929 ghazaliyyāt—the Afsahzod collected no less than 1010—, and 184 other pieces. On the other hand, Supplément persan 549, an Ottoman copy of 1559, includes “only” 717 ghazaliyyāt of the first dīvān, and Supplément persan 550, from the late sixteenth century, quotes only 497 and mixes them with compositions from various origins. Several ancient copies of the first dīvān, preserved in Paris and of Ottoman origin, allow us to study the transmission of the text. Among them, Supplément persan 1498 is worth mentioning, which comes from the collection of Charles Schefer, and previously from the Ecole royale des jeunes de langues de Constantinople: this copy, from the end of the fifteenth century, belonged to a citizen of Bursa but is devoid of a colophon. There are 880 ghazaliyyāt. Also from the Schefer collection, Supplément persan 1384 is a collection of the three dīvāns along with their forewords, the first one covering fol. 2v–286v with about 880 ghazaliyyāt. An anonymous copy, this manuscript is posterior to 1492 but not dated. Yet the style of the illuminations is reminiscent of paintings in the ateliers of Istanbul at the very end of the fifteenth century. The binding is equally reminiscent of those issued by the Ottoman imperial atelier at the same period.11 Moreover, a signet—or seal—of the owner in shape of a tughrā (bow) printed at four different places attests 10  Sale at Sotheby’s auction house, London, April 30, 2003, n° 15, where another copy of the dīvān made in Herat in the same year by the same calligrapher was presented. 11  Julian Raby and Zeren Tanındı, Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Century. The Foundation of an Ottoman Court Style (London: Azimuth, 1993), passim.

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that the manuscript was part of the library of the young prince (shāhzāda) Mehmet (d. 950/1543), the son of Suleiman the Magnificent. However, there is unfortunately no evidence about who at the Ottoman court commissioned the book several years earlier. Among these “Ottoman” manuscripts of the first dīvān at the National Library of France, we can also mention the particular case of Supplément persan 552, which confirms that the number—variable from one copy to another—of pieces gathered in a Persian poetical book was apparently not a serious concern for the consignees of these copies. Besides the fact that the quantity of distiches fixed the salary of the copyist, and that the latter often worked from memory, it seems that, especially in the case of Jāmī—whose verses circulated in many ways and were known by heart by men of letters—the most “complete” copy (with the risk of being filled with apocrypha) was not necessarily the most sought-after. Supplément persan 55212 consists of 226 folios on an oriental paper colored in salmon, with large vertical vergeures, except for fol. 114, which was remade around 1520–30.13 The book sections are generally quaternions, according to the Persian usage, at a time when the Ottomans preferred quinions. The text of Jāmī’s first dīvān is written in a fine nastaʿlīq script, but it does not seem to be from the hand of a great calligrapher. There are eighteen lines per page. The titles, written in blue, white, yellow, gold, and brown, seem to have been added during the restoration of the volume, as well as the framing of pages and the illuminated frontispiece at the beginning, which features the invocation Allāh al-kāfī. Supplément persan 552 was part of the oriental collection of the abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés, transferred to the National Library in 1796 as a result of revolutionary confiscations. It came from the bequest made in 1731 to the abbey’s library by the bishop of Metz, Henri-Charles du Cambout de Coislin (d. 1732). The book was a volume of the rich collection of the chancellor Pierre Séguier. When the latter died in 1672, it is likely that the manuscript was discovered and identified by Melchisédech Thévenot and Claude Hardy, who had prepared the notice that appears at the verso of the

12  See also Francis Richard, Splendeurs persanes (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1997), 141, n° 89. 13  This, by using an European paper colored in yellow with a watermark of ox head, close to the n° 15367–15380 types of the index of Charles-Moïse Briquet, Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier de leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1660 (reprint, Amsterdam: Paper Publications Society, 1968), vol. 2 and 4. This paper being the same as the flyleaves, we can date these repairs from 1520 to 1530.

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second flyleaf.14 The book was referred to as E.50 according to the cataloging system of Séguier in 1657, and was estimated at sixty livres. Before belonging to Séguier, the item was actually in the library of Henri-Auguste Loménie de Brienne (d. 1666) and was one of the volumes that the ambassador Denys de La Haye-Ventelet had sent from Istanbul around 1655 to De Brienne. This is evidenced by the notice n° 87 in the hand of Denys de La Haye, which appears on the third flyleaf. At the same place, a note in Turkish indicates that the book belonged to the Ottoman imperial treasury (khazāna-yi ʿāmira). The signet—or seal—repeated on fol. 1 and 226, holding the tughrā of sultan Selīm II (d. 982/1574), shows that the manuscript was located in his library. Other older seals remain more or less decipherable despite the passage of time: for instance, on fol. 143v, a circular stamp, quite erased, holds the motto tawakkulnā ʿalā Khāliqī (we trust in the Creator) along with the name of Muṣṭafā. Of a shape comparable to that of sultan Selīm I, this is probably the stamp of the great Ottoman vizir Muṣṭafā who was in charge between 1517 and 1520. The manuscript seems, therefore, to be one of the spoils of war by the Ottomans in Tabriz after their victory at Chaldiran over the Safavids shortly after 1514. Older seals of Persian notables are visible on fol. 168v, especially on fol. 172v where we read the name of Mīr Muḥammad with the motto Kamīna (the humble) Mīr Muḥammad ghulām-i shāh-i wilāyat (servant of the king of sanctity [ʿAlī]), which shows that he was in the service of the Shiite Safavids. The seal of fol. 156 bears the names of the Twelve Imams of Shiism, and a date, perhaps 907/1501. In fact, this manuscript does not present any colophon and can be dated to the late fifteenth century, or the very early sixteenth century. Devoid of the prose foreword of the dīvān, it does not include any qaṣīdas and only five of the introductory compositions, the n° 37 to 42 of Afsahzod’s edition. Prior to this transformation, the copy had 948 ghazaliyyāt, among which nineteen were erased and covered afterwards. Thus, it was a very complete copy: the ghazaliyyāt followed by 37 fragments, 117 quatrains, and five riddles. Judging from its contents, the manuscript is similar to older items from Herat, especially D.240 in St. Petersburg. While its provenance is potentially Western Persia, the place of copy remains unknown. A copy originally without adornment brought to Istanbul as spoil of war, it is in that city that it received its superb binding, of which the plats and doublures are lacquered. The ornament painted on the plats, probably at the 14  See also Francis Richard, “The extraordinary fame of Abdurahman Jami: Manuscripts of his works in France, French translators and illustrated and illuminated copies of Abdurahman Jami works in French collections,” Abdurahmoni Jomi va padidahoi farhangii zamoni u (Dushanbe: Akademii ilmhoi jumhurii Tojikiston, 2014), 546‒60.

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request of the great vizir Muṣṭafā, combines the classic motif of the polylobé mandorle and the wāq-wāq tree, of which the branches end with heads screaming when the wind blows. This is a classic theme: Alexander saw this tree in India, as evidenced by the Persian version of the Book of Alexander by Pseudo-Callisthenes.15 As for the binding, the technique of the painted lacquer originated in Herat and spread after 1510 to the Ottoman capital, where we find many examples.16 In addition to its frames and initial frontispiece, this manuscript later received fifteen paintings. We can reasonably suppose that they date to about 1530. Yet two things are surprising for us today: on the one hand, the owner of the manuscript did not hesitate to delete and cover the text of the nineteen ghazaliyyāt of Jāmī; on the other hand, the images follow quite scrupulously the text of the poem that precedes them. This is a work entrusted to a painter who read well and who took care to illustrate, almost always, the scene described by one of the verses preceding or following the covered text. For this, the painter seems to have drawn on the classic repertoire of Persian painting of his time. However, no artist’s signature appears. It may now be useful, for each illustration, to give the number of the poem according to Afsahzod’s edition. On fol. 66v, 85v, 102v, 122v, 149v, and 198v, the distiches of the ghazal had to be rewritten on a small piece of paper (European, apparently similar to that of fol. 144) in order to meet the requirements of the layout, and so that the ghazaliyyāt were complete. The work is intended for someone who reads and understands Persian. The paintings are as follows: 1. Fol. 22v (88 × 147 mm), on his throne, a prince (Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā?) is receiving in his presence of musicians two scholars or poets; one of them is Jāmī who is offering to the prince his book (his verses). Ghazal n° 84 in Afsahzod’s edition. 2. Fol. 28 (106 × 114 mm), several characters are in prayer in front of the Kaʿba, while three others (among whom one is Jāmī?) are watching them behind a low wall. Ghazal n°109. 3. Fol. 42v (100 × 101 mm), in front of the balcony pavilion from where a handsome young man emerged, two people (among whom Jāmī?) are chatting. Ghazal n° 175. 4. Fol. 66v (91 × 94 mm), Majnūn is posted the tent of Laylā and a servant is coming near him. Ghazal n° 285.

15  It is represented, for example, in the Jalayrid ʿAjāʾib nāma from the late fourteenth century, Supplément persan 332 at the National Library of France, on fol. 160v. 16  See, among others, John M. Rogers and Rachel M. Ward, Süleyman the Magnificent (London: British Museum Publications, 1998), 80‒81, n° 24-a.

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Fol. 76 (117 × 146 mm), several people are drinking during a party, which is attended by a prince whose squire is holding the mount near the door. Ghazal n° 326. 6. Fol. 85v (119 × 124 mm), during hunting, a hunter is attacked by a lion at which other hunters are trying to shoot arrows. Ghazal n° 370. 7. Fol. 102v (84 × 90 mm), a man (the poet Jāmī) is kissing a young man. Ghazal n° 489. 8. Fol. 122v (94 × 149 mm), several characters, among whom a prince and the poet Jāmī, who is reading a poem, are attending a banquet. Ghazal n° 580. 9. Fol. 133v (80x99 mm), the poet Jāmī is chatting with a young man in the room of a palace. Ghazal n° 629. 10. Fol. 149v (96 × 108 mm), a cupbearer is pouring a drink for a young man next to whom the poet (Jāmī) is sitting; a man is entering the palace courtyard where they are sitting. Ghazal n° 702. 11. Fol. 181 (107 × 117 mm), in the desert, at the foot of a palm tree, a man is conversing with Majnūn, who is surrounded by beasts with which he lives. Ghazal n° 894. 12. Fol. 185v (105 × 138 mm), at a party in a garden, the poet Jāmī is reading a poem to a young man. Ghazal n° 869. 13. Fol. 191 (91 × 100 mm), a young man is drinking wine while the poet (Jāmī) is reading verses and three musicians are playing, one the flute, the second the harp (chang), and the third the tambourine. Ghazal n° 888. 14. Fol. 198v (114 × 167 mm), Yūsuf is sold in Egypt. In the presence of three other buyers, the Egyptian ʿAzīz, who has just bought him, is leading him to the king, while Zulaykhā is watching the scene through a window. Ghazal n° 938. 15. Fol. 206v (116 × 119 mm), the poet Jāmī has just entered the palace courtyard of the young prince and is talking to him; a squire and a horse are staying outside. Ghazal n° 978. We can compare the style of these paintings with those of Supplément turc 993 from the National Library of France, a famous copy of the dīvān in Chaghatay Turkish of Ḥusaynī, that is to say Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā. The copy was completed in 890/1485 by the calligrapher Sulṭān ʿAlī Mashhadī for the library (see fol. 2) of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā himself. Whereas the illuminations seem to date back to the late fifteenth century and, like the titles, to have been painted in the lifetime of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, the paintings are most difficult to date and localize precisely. It is impossible to suppose that they were produced in Herat at the very end of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā’s reign since they are quite different than what we know about “Bihzād’s style.” Rather, these paintings have a lot in common with the Safavid works of the 1520–25s. The turbans, in contrast,

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are definitely not Safavids and bear no trace of retouching. As suggested by Ivan Stchoukine, it is almost certain that, in Supplément turc 993, these paintings of great quality were added in Istanbul before 1530 at the time of the advent of Suleiman the Magnificent. The adornment of marble paper in several margins could be a bit later, since the sovereign represented on fol. 2v is the sultan Suleiman who ascended the throne in 1520. A comparable case is the manuscript of Niẓāmī’s poetry, referred to as Oriental 13948 of the British Library, which was also a spoil of war of 1517, illustrated in Istanbul under Suleiman. We find in this copy paintings of a style that look similar to that of Supplément persan 552 in a manuscript submitted for public sale in London, at Sotheby’s, on April 23, 1997, under n° 86. It is a copy of Wāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 910/1504)’s Akhlāq-i muḥsinī, where one can observe some paintings, including an initial double scene and ten other illustrations. The rosace (shamsa) at the top of the manuscript, if it is authentic, would show that the book was copied in 900/1494 to be offered as a gift to the library of the prince Abū alMuḥsin (d. 913/1507). The latter, one of the sons of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, to whom Kāshifī’s book is dedicated (hence its title Akhlāq-i muḥsinī or Treatise of Muḥsin’s ethics), was the governor of Marv. Abolala Soudavar has convincingly proved that, in the case of Kāshifī’s treatise, the paintings, at least those of the initial double-page, were added to an older manuscript, probably in Tabriz (or in the Tabriz style) around 1530 for an Ottoman art lover.17 It is not the place here to resolve the problem of manuscripts from Herat adorned with paintings, which could have been made in Tabriz for collectors living in the Ottoman Empire. In any case, Persian artists left Tabriz for Istanbul after Chaldiran, and the Ottoman production of the 1520–30s attests to the tremendous success of the Persian paintings from Herat and Tabriz among the Ottomans. The manuscript A.F. 92 of the National Library of Vienna also leads to a close comparison with our Supplément persan 552.18 The copy contains a collection of poems in Persian by the famous Kamāl Khujandī (d. 803/1400). Based on a very precise examination of the ornamentation of the manuscript, Dorothea Duda dated the book to 926–36/1520–30 and placed its origin in Istanbul. The copy has only a name of copyist, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, who is perhaps the famous calligrapher of the last Āq Qoyunlū in Tabriz. On the manuscript, we find a 17  Abolala Soudavar, “The concepts of ‘al-aqdamo asahh’ and ‘yaqîn-e sâbeq’, and the problem of semi-fakes,” Studia Iranica 28/2 (1999): 264‒66. 18  Dorothea Duda, Die illuminierten Handschriften und Inkunabeln der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Islamische Handschriften. Bd 1: Persische Handschriften (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1983), 30‒33.

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signet of the Ottoman prince Mehmet (d. 950/1543), son of Suleiman. The two paintings on fol. 2v–3, a hunting scene forming a frontispiece—where Ivan Stchoukine had thought to recognize Mehmet himself as a hunting prince—, are followed by numerous vignettes painted with small figures of people or animals. On fol. 173v a lion hunt is pictured, possibly painted by another hand than that of fol. 2v–3, but no doubt by a Persian artist. This manuscript from Vienna, copied in Tabriz between 1493 and 1496 by the calligrapher ʿAbd alRaḥīm, was taken around 1514 or soon after as booty in Azerbaijan by the Ottomans during one of Selīm I’s campaigns. Brought to Istanbul, it was illustrated by two Persian painters from Tabriz. The style of these images also reveal the influence of Herat. D. Duda made a similar study of another book, the dīvān of Shāhī (d. 857/1453), with the call number Mixt. 399, also completed in 1520–30 in Istanbul. Closely related to those of the manuscript A.F. 92 of Vienna as well as to our Supplément persan 552, we may mention other paintings, such as the one on fol. 113 of a Selīm name from the library of Topkapi (call number H. 1597–1598), dated to 1525,19 in which Selīm I is represented at the battle of Chaldiran in 1514 against the Safavids. We notice both the same way of summarily representing the vegetation by a series of strokes, and the way of painting in a style that remains very “Turkmen.” Equally worthy of note are the three copies of Navāʾī’s Gharāʾib al-ṣighar, dated to 1520–30 and preserved at the British Library in London, under the references Or. 13061, Or. 4125 and Or. 5346. Norah Titley saw in them an influence of the Tabriz ateliers. Also relevant to our discussion are the illustrations of a dīvān of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā in the collection of Topkapi, referred as EH. 1636, which was copied by Sulṭān ʿAlī Mashhadī in Herat in 897/1492. Could they be “Ottoman” paintings of the 1520s rather than works produced in Herat? The initial double scene, clearly reminiscent of that of Supplément turc 993, shows the extent to which these manuscripts are closely related. At the very least, they help us to better understand the cultural bond that linked, through Tabriz, the court of 1500s Herat to the court of Istanbul after 1515. As in the case of Jāmī’s text itself, we can observe an influx of new patterns coming from Persia to the Ottoman world at the dawn of the sixteenth century. They were admired, imitated, and then transported according to the tastes of

19  J.M. Rogers and R.M. Ward, Süleyman the Magnificent, 104, n° 41. See also Norah M. Titley, Persian Miniature Painting (London: British Library Publications, 1983), 142‒43, and fig. 79, p. 235; John M. Rogers, The Topkapi Saray Museum: The Albums and Illustrated Manuscripts (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1986), 90, n° 61.

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patrons and artists, often Persians or trained by other artists of Persian origin. A certain style of pictorial expression, marked by the genius of creators like the painter Bihzād and influenced by the same Sufi trends as Jāmī’s works, spread in Tabriz and further into the Ottoman world. To ignore these trends would be to do a disservice to the study of the immense influence of Jāmī’s poetry and thought in both the Near and Middle East at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. A more thorough study of the diffusion of the poetical, mystical, ethical, and aesthetic doctrines that Jāmī popularized will allow for a more enlightened approach to the analysis of important changes in the sensitivity and lifestyle of the elite in these countries.

figure 1.1 MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 545, fol. 291v.

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figure 1.2 MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 822, fol. 1v.

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Bibliography Briquet, Charles-Moïse. Les Filigranes. Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier de leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1660. 4 vols. Reprint. Amsterdam: Paper Publications Society, 1968. Duda, Dorothea. Die illuminierten Handschriften und Inkunabeln der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Islamische Handschriften. Bd 1: Persische Handschriften. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1983. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Fātihat ash-shabāb, Kriticheskii tekst i predislovie A’lokhon Afsachzoda. Moscow: Nauka, 1978. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Wāsiṭat al-ʿiqd va khātimat al-ḥayāt, Kriticheskii tekst i predislovie A’lokhon Afsachzoda. Moscow: Shuʿba-yi Adabīyāt-i Khāwar, 1980. MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément persan 545. MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrit arabe 3423. Munzavī, Aḥmad. Fihrist-i mushtarak-i nuskhahā-yi khaṭṭī-yi fārsī-yi Pākistān. Vol. 7. Islamabad: Markaz-i Taḥqīqāt-i Fārsī-yi Īrān va Pākistān, 1986. Munzavī, Aḥmad. Fihrist-i nuskhahā-yi khaṭṭī-yi fārsī. Vol. 3. Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī-yi Minṭaqa‌ʾī, 1348/1969. Raby, Julian and Zeren Tanındı. Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Century. The Foundation of an Ottoman Court Style. London: Azimuth, 1993. Richard, Francis. Splendeurs persanes. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1997. Richard, Francis. Catalogue des manuscrits persans. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Département des manuscrits)—Tome II, le Supplément persan. Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente C.A.Nallino, 2013. Richard, Francis. “The extraordinary fame of Abdurahman Jami: Manuscripts of his works in France, French translators and illustrated and illuminated copies of Abdurahman Jami works in French collections.” In Abdurahmoni Jomi va padidahoi farhangii zamoni u, 546‒60. Dushanbe: Akademii ilmhoi jumhurii Tojikiston, 2014. Rogers, John M. The Topkapi Saray Museum: The Albums and Illustrated Manuscripts. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1986. Rogers, John M. and Rachel M. Ward. Süleyman the Magnificent. London: British Museum Publications, 1998. Roxburgh, David J. The Persian Album 1400–1600, from dispersal to collection. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2005. Semenov, Aleksandr A. Sobranie vostochnykh rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR. Vol. 1. Tashkent: Akademia Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, 1952. Soudavar, Abolala. “The concepts of ‘al-aqdamo asahh’ and ‘yaqîn-e sâbeq’, and the problem of semi-fakes.” Studia Iranica 28/2 (1999): 255–69. Titley, Norah M. Persian Miniature Painting. London: British Library Publications, 1983.

chapter 2

Approaching Jāmī through Visual Culture The Popularization of Yūsuf-Zulaykhā in Persianate Societies Sunil Sharma ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492) occupied a central place in the canon of classical Persian literature, and his works, chiefly poems, were particularly read, studied, copied, illustrated, and translated over the centuries in both mystical and courtly circles. Studying the vast corpus of his poetry is a daunting prospect for those interested in this late Timurid poet-Sufi-scholar-traveler, but the fact that no inventory of manuscripts of his works exists, such as in C.A. Storey’s bio-bibliography,1 poses challenges for research into questions of the transmission and illustration of his works, especially in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Jāmī’s seven narrative poems in mathnavī form, known collectively as the ‘Seven Thrones’ (Haft awrang) had a wide circulation as part of the larger phenomenon of Persian learning and the dissemination of Persian texts in the expanding Persianate world in the centuries after his death. The reception of the Haft awrang, a work that competed for readership with the quintets (khamsas) of Niẓāmī Ganjavī (d. ca. 606/1209) and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d. 726/1325), was primarily a courtly phenomenon. Five of the seven mathnavīs by Jāmī also often circulated as his khamsa, to harmonize his ‘response’ to the two by his illustrious predecessors.2 Among these, the Yūsuf u Zulaykhā tale was one that most often circulated on its own, sometimes only in pictures and even without any accompanying text, but still linked to Jāmī’s work. This was an emblematic work that was part of the complex process of translation, abridgement, and adaptation of the Perso-Islamic text to a localized environment in several Persianate societies. In the Indian context, the Dakhni Urdu and Pashto translations of the latter work, produced in provincial 1  Charles A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-bibliographical Survey. Storey’s original work was continued by F. de Blois but the last volume, v. V, part 2, covers poetry from ca. AD 1100 to 1225. John Seyller has made an inventory of all illustrated and unillustrated manuscripts of Amīr Khusraw’s khamsa in Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amīr Khusraw of Delhi (Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2001), 143‒58. 2  Several sixteenth-century illustrated manuscripts of Jāmī’s khamsa are listed in Marianna Shreve Simpson’s inventory in her book, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 371‒76. Manuscripts with four or six of the seven mathnavīs were also produced.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_004

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contexts during the Mughal period, attest to the vernacularization of Persian literature along with the use of these Persian texts in more elite settings. This paper will both survey a few significant episodes in the copying and illustrating of Jāmī’s work in the early centuries, as well as scrutinize specific illustrated manuscripts in Persian and its related, though distinct, Indo-Persian and Persianate literary and artistic traditions in both courtly and popular contexts. Some of the conclusions derived from this study of Jāmī’s Yūsuf-Zulaykhā also apply to the larger corpus of the poet’s works and beyond him to other poets in the classical canon such as Saʿdī (d. 690/1291), Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw, and Firdawsī (d. 411/1020). The impressive groundwork done by the art historian Marianna Shreve Simpson in the context of her monumental study of a single lavishly illustrated Safavid manuscript of Jāmī’s Haft awrang is the chief source for the history of the copying and illustration of the poet’s works in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The several useful appendices provided in her book are a good starting point for preliminary research on the topic of illustrated manuscripts of Jāmī’s works in the later periods and in related Persianate traditions such as Pashto and Dakhni Urdu. In this period, the concept of translation—here used in a looser sense than merely an accurate rendering of the text—comes into play not just in transferring of texts into other languages, some of them at a nascent stage of adopting Persian literary forms, but also in adapting the earlier illustration cycle for vernacular, and more popular, audiences. According to Simpson’s findings, there were at least 154 manuscripts of Jāmī’s works produced between 1488, when his collection of seven mathnavīs was completed, and the late sixteenth century, the majority of them in Shiraz, Bukhara, Herat and Tabriz. Three of the earliest manuscripts are from the late fifteenth century: a copy of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, with two spaces for illustrations that were not executed; and other poems from the Haft awrang, the Silsilat al-dhahab (Chain of Gold) with two illustrations added later, and an illustrated fragment of the Tuḥfat al-aḥrār (Gift to the Noble).3 It is not surprising that it was more usual for the mathnavīs of the Haft awrang to be illustrated individually or in small groups, sometimes as a khamsa, as mentioned above.4 There are less than a dozen manuscripts of the entire septet, and the extant copies suggest that the 3  Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang, 371. 4  Apparently, there are no early separate illustrated manuscripts of the Laylā-Majnūn and Khiradnāma-yi Iskandarī, perhaps because the versions of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw held their place as the most popular versions of these narrative tales. Another work by Jāmī, Bahāristān (Spring Garden), inspired by his predecessor Saʿdī’s Gulistān (Rose Garden), also had a wide circulation in illustrated and non-illustrated copies, as did his collection of ghazals and odes (dīvān).

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domain of the production of the Haft awrang in its entirety remained largely confined to Khorasan and Transoxiana, closer to Jāmī’s own physical world.5 Similar data is not available for manuscripts from the seventeenth century onwards, and thus it is difficult to make assumptions about the patterns of readership and copying of Jāmī’s poetic works in Persianate societies. Simpson observes that there is no standard cycle for the illustration of the Haft awrang, as is discernible in the manuscripts of Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma and Niẓāmī’s and Amīr Khusraw’s khamsas.6 Therefore, instead of preparing a template that lists the scenes usually illustrated in manuscripts of Jāmī’s mathnavīs and mapping its imitations and permutations, a different approach is called for in this case. I will explore some of the ways in which Jāmī’s Yūsuf-Zulaykhā romance was copied, illustrated, and translated under courtly or popular patronage, thereby becoming a familiar story in Persianate societies, mainly through the paintings that accompanied the various texts. In fact, a very early example of how this process worked can be seen in one of the most famous and recognizable paintings from the aforementioned romance: the love-struck Zulaykhā’s attempt to seduce Yūsuf in her palace of seven halls. Although the most recognizable representation of this scene is not an illustration of Jāmī’s poem but a scene from the poet Saʿdī’s work Būstān (Fragrant Garden), the telling of this Sufi narrative is usually connected with Jāmī because the full story is found in his mathnavī. This magnificent copy of the Būstān, now in the Egyptian National Library (Cairo), was prepared for Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, Jāmī’s patron and ruler of Herat; therefore, the artist and those viewing the painting at that time would have been familiar with both Saʿdī’s and Jāmī’s works. According to Chad Kia, although this scene “corresponds with Saʿdī’s text regarding Zoleyḵā’s seduction scheme, the elaborate architectural setting illustrated by Behzād is that described in Jāmi’s romance, where Zoleyḵā’s palace, its conception, building, decoration, and completion are detailed.”7 In later manuscripts as well, architectural settings continued to play a symbolic role in the illustration of several scenes from this work. The most sumptuous manuscript of Jāmī’s works ever produced, and one whose codicological features have been studied in great detail by Simpson, was the Haft awrang commissioned by the Safavid prince Sulṭān Ibrāhīm Mīrzā (d. 984/1577), the second son of the Safavid ruler Shāh Tahmāsp’s brother Bahrām Mīrzā, when he was the governor of Mashhad. Now referred to as the Freer Jami, this manuscript was a massive nine-year project lasting from 1556 to 1565 that took five calligraphers and numerous other artists to complete. 5  Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang, 330. 6  Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang, 331. 7  Chad Kia, “Jāmi, iii. Jāmi and Persian art,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, 469‒82.

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Five paintings, illustrating various episodes in the romance, would appear to be the norm for illustrated manuscripts of Jāmī’s romance from Safavid Iran and Central Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both Shiraz and Bukhara were important centers for manuscript production in the post-Timurid period, producing books for export to the larger Persophone world. The list of images below from the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā section of the Freer Jami indicates that salient moments of the story were chosen to be illustrated, though not necessarily the most dramatic ones. One would expect the iconic scene of Zulaykhā’s attempt to seduce Yūsuf to be selected for illustration here, but it was not; additionally, an episode that was most frequently painted from the sixteenth century onwards in which Zulaykhā invites the women of Memphis to a banquet in order to demonstrate why she has been mesmerized by Yūsuf’s beauty, and the similar reaction of the women when he comes forward, slicing their fingers instead of oranges [figure 2.1], is also not present here. This is the list of subjects from the story illustrated for the Freer Jami: 1. The ʿAzīz and Zulaykhā Enter the Capital of Egypt and the Egyptians Come Out to Greet Them 2. Yūsuf Is Rescued from the Well 3. Yūsuf Tends His Flocks 4. Yūsuf Preaches to Zulaykhā’s Maidens in Her Garden 5. The Infant Witness Testifies to Yūsuf’s Innocence 6. Yūsuf Gives a Royal Banquet in Honor of His Marriage The illustration of the episode where Yūsuf preaches to Zulaykhā’s maids after they try to seduce him in her enchanting garden is one that repeatedly appears in later manuscripts. While not as emblematic as the dramatic moment of Zulaykhā’s attempted seduction of Yūsuf, it nonetheless holds some deeper significance than its generic features would warrant. Although no building appears in Jāmī’s text here, it is not surprising to find a garden pavilion in the Safavid painting, as such structures were part of garden complexes. In the poem, the point is that this outdoor space “so beautiful that it was the envy even of the Garden of Iram” is later contrasted with the hidden sections of Zulaykhā’s palace. It is in this paradise that Yūsuf preached to the maids all night and “taught each of them to recite the declaration of faith; and […] they attested to the one and only God.”8 It is noteworthy that although the illustrations of the text as rendered by the artists of Yūsuf-Zulaykhā manuscripts were, according to Simpson, for the most part “overt” and “literal,” with a representation of recognizable elements of the story, in the Freer Jami there are extra elements from outside the text that “respond to and parallel the metaphorical 8  Yusuf and Zulaikha, an Allegorical Romance, tr. David Pendlebury (London: Octagon Press, 1980), 71, 74. See Ayesha Irani’s chapter for a discussion of this passage.

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language and mystical messages of Jami’s poems.”9 In his analysis of some of the paintings from this manuscript, Gregory Minissale writes that the viewer “should focus less on the visual details of execution and the materials of the paint used and the skills of illusionism that the artist has used and instead try to decipher the meaning which the text and illustration aim to convey.”10 Other factors come into play, as we shall see, when one applies this idea to instances where there are a disproportionate number of images to text or no text at all. The Freer Jami has a dramatic history that connects the world of the Safavids and Mughals, both heirs to the Timurid cultural patrimony of which Jāmī was a major part. Fortunately the manuscript survived the destruction of Prince Ibrāhīm Mīrzā’s library by his grief-stricken widow, Gawhar Sulṭān Khānum, after he was murdered in 1577, perhaps because by then it had passed out of his hands or been on loan. The many seals on the codex attest to its further travels after being in the collection of the Safavid shrine at Ardabil. Although it is not known how it ended up in the Mughal library, it is possible that it was sent as a gift by the Safavid Shāh ʿAbbās I (r. 996–1038/1588–1629) to the Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1014–37/1605–27) for it bears several Mughal seals all the way down to Shāh ʿĀlam II’s time (r. 1173–1253/1760–1806). There are other instances of manuscripts of Jāmī’s works used in gift giving or as part of the Mughal patrimony:11 Bābur’s son prince Kāmrān’s copy of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā is now in the New York Public Library, and another copy of the same text, once in the Mughal imperial library, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, both of Bukharan provenance. These were passed around to various nobles and functionaries, whose seals they bear. In 1609 the Mughal general ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khānkhānān gifted the emperor Jahāngīr a copy of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā in the hand of the renowned calligrapher Mīr ʿAlī of Herat; this is now in the Khuda Bakhsh Library (Patna, India). Based on the surviving manuscripts, it seems that the only work by Jāmī produced in the royal Mughal atelier was under the emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–1605), who commissioned a copy of the Bahāristān. This manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS Elliott 254) dates from 1595 and was the work of the scribe Muḥammad Ḥusayn. It includes paintings by nine different artists, among them Basāvan, Miskīn and Laʿl.12 It seems that the whole range of Jāmī’s literary output—his Dīvān, the Bahāristān, and the 9  Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang, 331. 10  Gregory Minissale, Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550–1750 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 15. 11  For a short survey on the central place of Jāmī among the Mughals, especially poets, see Hamid Algar,  Jami (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 129‒31 and Muzaffar Alam’s contribution in this volume. 12  http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Shelfmark=%22MS .%20Elliott%20254%22.

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Haft awrang—were read and probably copied in non-illustrated manuscripts, whereas the dissemination and illustration of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā as a standalone work point to the process of its popularization in Persianate societies through several different processes and networks. A striking feature of later non-courtly and popular or provincial illustrated manuscripts of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā is the inclusion of many more paintings, raising questions about the relationship between text and image. The production of illustrated manuscripts in provincial courts or centers in Mughal India is a huge and complicated phenomenon that has not been adequately studied.13 In these cases, although patrons and artists imitated trends in the imperial atelier, there were several modifications made in response to local taste and demands. In the case of Jāmī’s mathnavī, this took the form of increasing the number of images in a single manuscript. Very few sixteenth-century manuscripts have more than half a dozen paintings; only one manuscript listed in Simpson’s inventory has twenty-five paintings, the highest number in the list.14 It should also be noted that a full list of subjects of paintings in sixteenthcentury paintings number 54. No single manuscript in that period included all subjects, but artists who looked at earlier manuscripts for inspiration would have to make choices, adding and subtracting images according to their particular circumstances. A proliferation in the number of illustrations in Yūsuf-Zulaykhā manuscripts seems to have begun in Kashmir sometime in the eighteenth century, perhaps because of the existence of an active industry for the production of popular manuscripts of the Persian classics. There are at least four Kashmiri manuscripts from this period with a large illustration cycle: two manuscripts in the British Library (Add. 7771), dated 1764 with 76 paintings, and Or. 1433, dated 1734 with 41 paintings;15 one in the New York Public Library (Spencer, Indo-Pers. MS 21), dated ca. 1730–35, with 41 paintings;16 and one in the Walters Art 13  For a brief discussion of this topic, see Sunil Sharma, “The Production of Mughal Shāhnāmas: Imperial, Sub-Imperial, and Provincial Manuscripts,” in Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma: Millennial Perspectives, eds. Olga M. Davidson and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Boston: Ilex; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2013), 87. 14  Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang, 373. 15  Norah M. Titley, Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts: A Catalogue and Subject Index of Paintings from Persia, India, and Turkey in the British Library and the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1977), 69‒71; also see Karin Ådahl, “A Copy of the Divan of Mir ʿAli Shir Nava‌ʾi of the Late Eighteenth Century in the Lund University Library and the Kashmiri School of Miniature Painting,” in Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honor of Basil W. Robinson, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 12. 16  Barbara Schmitz, Islamic Manuscripts in the New York Public Library (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 193‒96; also discussed in Schmitz, “Later Indian Paintings and

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Museum with 33 paintings dated 1776. These have almost six to twelve times more images than those in sixteenth century Safavid copies of this romance. The Walters copy, which has been digitized in its entirety and is available online, will be my focus here.17 It has some generic scenes that do not ostensibly carry the narrative along, as well as some images with no text on the page so that they are devoid of any verbal context. One generic image with no text is of Zulaykhā’s banquet for the Egyptian women who are overpowered by Yūsuf’s beauty. Yūsuf is usually present in this scene, but here there are only a group of women calmly gathered together, in contrast to their reaction in Jāmī’s poem: As for Zulaikha’s guests, with their bleeding hands: a number of them were seized with such violent agitation of mind, sense and feeling, that they were unable to fend off the sword of Yusuf’s love; and there and then they gave up the ghost. Others completely lost their mind, and driven mad by their love for that angel, rushed headlong outside, barefoot and bare-headed; they never recovered their reason. A few came to their senses, but only to be henceforward like Zulaikha, companions of the burns and wounds of love, drunken from Yusuf’s cup, their hearts ensnared in Yusuf’s net.18 Architectural details are also not a prominent feature of this setting and do nothing to enhance the dramatic nature of the episode. It is puzzling why the artist would have missed the chance to highlight this very popular scene with these details. The episode with Yūsuf preaching to Zulaykhā’s maids, one that is also present in the Freer is depicted here in two almost identical representations, one with text and one without. In the painting of the attempted seduction of Yūsuf there is again no text, and the architectural complexity of Bihzād’s rendering of the same scene is also absent. In Jāmī’s poem, Zulaykhā’s palace is built by a master builder and is described as “like seven heavens, there were seven adjoining apartments of matchless beauty. Each was built of a different kind of stone, remarkable for its sheen and clarity of hue.”19 The omission of these details from the text not only relates to the question about the degree of the sophistication of the book’s patron and other Illustrated Manuscripts in Two New York Libraries,” in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Barbara Schmitz (Mumbai: Marg, 2002), 147. 17  http://art.thewalters.org/detail/18844. 18   Yusuf and Zulaikha, an Allegorical Romance, 94. 19   Yusuf and Zulaikha, an Allegorical Romance, 77.

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viewers, but also relates to emphasizing the plot rather than subtler aspects of the narrative. Thus, in the previously mentioned painting, the composition is taken up by four wall paintings in Zulaykhā’s palace depicting her and Yūsuf in various stages of foreplay. The suggestive amorousness in the murals, of course, is meant to contrast with her violent pursuit of Yūsuf and ripping his shirt from the back. In these simplistic images, text is not always necessary to orient the reader/viewer to where we are in the story. The mixture of generic and specific scenes, with 8 of the 33 paintings without text, keeps the narrative on course and is really part of the unfolding of the story for the reader. The illustration cycle is increased in some cases by prolonging the dramatic moments of a single scene. In this way, the increased number of images brings the narrative to a slow motion in order to enrapture the viewer without attempting to infuse aspects of symbolic or aesthetic complexities into the pictures. The inclusion of a large number of images is also true for translations of the Yūsuf- Zulaykhā manuscripts that were produced as the story circulated more widely in Persianate traditions in various languages and scripts. Studying translations helps to recover the meanings that the images conveyed to viewers and readers of the text who may have had no or limited access to the original text, but it also forces us to acknowledge that multiple processes were at work in the way the text was popularized and translated. Translation, here used in a broad sense, often involved abridgement of and selection from the original text before the process of linguistic transfer took place. It is worth noting at this point that Jāmī’s version of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā story, including its translations, was not the only one that was current in pre-modern Persianate literary culture. The story was transmitted through various textual strands, in verse and prose. Two well-known examples of prose texts are: the “Tales of the Prophets” (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā), a compilation that included stories of Muslim prophets;20 and “The Assemblies of Lovers” (Majālis al-ʿushshāq) by the late Timurid author Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzargāhī, which is a compilation of tales of famous lovers, mostly Sufi and same-sex in their orientation, but where Yūsuf and Zulaykhā also make an appearance, partly quoted from Jāmī’s poem.21 This last work was especially popular in Safavid and Mughal societies, both at the courtly and

20  Rachel Milstein, Karin Rührdanz and Barbara Schmitz. Stories of the Prophets: Illustrated Manuscripts of Qisas al-anbiyā’ (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1999), 7‒15 and 124‒30. 21  The love story of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā is found in the introduction rather than as a separate chapter, Majālis al-ʿushshāq, tadhkira-yi ʿurafā, ed. Ghulāmriḍā Ṭabāṭabāʾī-majd (Tehran: Zarrīn, 1376/1997), 18‒33. Several scenes that are illustrated in manuscripts of this work are the same as those found in those of Jāmī’s romance.

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popular level.22 It is entirely within the realm of possibility that some degree of cross-fertilization took place between the various versions of this text, both in the composition of texts and illustration of scenes, a subject that requires further investigation. Among the various Indian vernacular versions of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, a Dakhni Urdu version is an early, if not the earliest, translation of the narrative tale. A poet named Aḥmad Gujarātī composed/translated two romances in mathnavī form: Laylā-Majnūn, which is not extant, as well as Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, sometime between 1580 and 1588, the latter with a dedication to Muḥammad Qulī Quṭb Shāh (988–1020/1580–1612), ruler of the Deccani kingdom of Golkonda.23 This is not the place for a comparison of Aḥmad Gujarātī’s work to Jāmī’s poem for the purpose of studying the variations and innovations in terms of plot and use of language, but it would be a worthwhile separate project to explore the problems of translation from Persian to a Persianate language. Surviving in only one incomplete manuscript, one can surmise that since Aḥmad Gujarātī, who was a teacher and Sufi, was not employed at court, his work was not widely copied, or illustrated at all. Another Dakhni version of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā was produced by the order of the ruler of Bijapur, ʿAlī ʿAdīlshāh (r. 1067–83/1656–72), by Sayyid Mīrān ‘Hāshmī’ (d. 1679). Dedicated to the Sufi Shāh Hāshim, there are several extant manuscripts of this work,24 but only one, dated 1812, was furnished with illustrations. It was offered at a Sotheby’s auction in 2003 but its present whereabouts are unknown.25 This book has no less than eighty-two paintings, probably the maximum number 22  For versions of the story by other Persian poets, see Asghar Dadbeh, “Joseph i. In Persian Literature,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XV, Fasc. 1, 30‒34. For the iconography of Yūsuf in paintings other than in Jāmī’s work, see Chad Kia, “Jāmi, iii. Jāmi and Persian art,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, 469‒82. 23  A good survey of Dakhni literature remains David Matthews’ unpublished dissertation, Dakhanī Language and Literature, 1500–1700 A.D., University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1976. 24  The British Library manuscript (Or. 11,368) dating from the early twentieth century is a collection of three Dakhni works; in addition to the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, it includes the mathnavīs Laʿl-Gawhar and Nūrnāma. The section heading in rubrics differs from an earlier manuscript of this work in the British Library, and also from the earlier Dakhni work by Aḥmad Gujarātī where these are given in Persian. The Yūsufnāma in the Trinity College Library, Dublin, is perhaps another copy or version of Hāshmī’s work; I have not had a chance to examine the manuscript and the cataloguing record is somewhat garbled https://manuscripts.catalogue.tcd.ie/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id =IE+TCD+MS+1616&pos=2. 25  http://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/hashmi.-yusuf-wa-zulaikha,-illuminated-manu script-1-c-8awnzfr48f. A photograph of one painting from this manuscript is no longer available online, but present in the published copy of the catalogue.

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to be found in any later manuscript of this romance in Persian and Persianate languages. We do not have access to a complete list of the painting cycle in this manuscript but the one published image is one of the generic scenes previously seen in eighteenth-century Kashmiri manuscripts: Yūsuf is standing in Zulaykhā’s garden observing her maids, presumably this is the same episode as him preaching to them. There is no hint of any architectural detail in this garden; unlike the same scene in the Freer Jami, this one faithfully represents the paradisal setting. Executed in a more Indian style than Persian, the double page gives a sense of gendered space where Yūsuf is alone in one panel, in a pose that is commonplace in Mughal and Deccan portraits, while the two women on the facing page are generic female companions (sakhīs) to be found in Rajput and late Mughal paintings of this period. Other visual clues relating to the story are absent here; only the text contextualizes the images. The appearance of Dakhni Urdu versions of the mathnavī is followed by others in the larger North Indian Persianate culture sphere.26 Generally, stories such as Laylā-Majnūn and Yūsuf-Zulaykhā had more appeal than Iranian courtly romances such as Khusraw-Shīrīn and Vīs-Rāmīn because of their Islamic and Sufi overtones. A remarkable work by ʿAbd al-Qādir Khān, the son of the Mughal period poet Khushhāl Khān Khattak, is a Pashto version of the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā from 1700–01. A manuscript of this work dated ca. 1815, now in the John Rylands Library (Pashto [Afghan] MS 15), has 38 paintings in a style similar to the Kashmiri ones.27 It bears the seal of the Afghan governor of Kashmir, Muḥammad Aʿẓam. Ryan Perkins calls attention to this work as being a “foundational Pashto text” due to its role in the flowering of early modern Pashto literary culture. All the paintings in this manuscript have accompanying text, and both generic and easily recognizable scenes are present, many with simple architectural details in the background. In order to understand the precise function of the images in this particular case, a more detailed and 26  The first Panjabi Yūsuf-Zulaykhā was composed in 1679–80 by Hāfiz Barkhurdār in 1200 dohrās, although the one that enjoyed the most popularity was composed in 1797–98 by Maulwī Muḥammad ‘Āshiq Figār. Also, a Braj Bhasha Hindi version of the work by the poet Nisār can be dated to 1790. These late versions of the romance in vernacular languages are out of the realm of courtly patronage and production, and thus these texts were not illustrated. No other mathnavī by Jāmī’s appears to have been translated into Indian languages, as far as I have been able to ascertain. For the Panjabi versions, see Christopher Shackle, “Between Scripture and Romance: The Yūsuf-Zulaikhā Story in Panjabi,” South Asia Research 15/2 (1995): 153‒88. 27  B.W. Robinson, Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library, a Descriptive Catalogue (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1980), 97‒98. See Ryan Perkins’ paper in this volume for a detailed account of Jāmī in Pashto. I am grateful to Ryan for generously sharing all his images of the John Rylands manuscript.

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informed analysis of the text as translation would need to be carried out, but the images appear to sustain the narrative in this work, functioning almost as a picture book. The attempted seduction scene shares similar features to that in the eighteenth-century Kashmiri Persian manuscript discussed above, with the four wall paintings (one of which is Zulaykhā’s idol here) of the two embracing and kissing taking up equal space along with the actual action in the narrative [Figure 2.2]. In the painting before this one in the John Rylands manuscript, where the two characters are seated, there are actually seven pictures on the wall, rather than four, and even if one row of three paintings is covered by text, the details in the images do not match up, demonstrating a lack of attention to such details. The process of vernacularization of socalled cosmopolitan literary cultures in different cases was accompanied by simultaneous processes of translation, conversion, cross-cultural borrowings, and imitating courtly practices and rituals, in which texts that would have the widest possible appeal in a Perso-Islamic context would have played a central role. Therefore, it is not surprising to find multiple copies of the Pashto YūsufZulaykhā, some illustrated and others not, as in the case of Dakhni versions. A third example of translation, contemporary with the Dakhni and Pahsto books discussed above, is a Judeo-Persian manuscript dated 1853 from Mashhad in Qajar Iran with 26 paintings (Jewish Theological Seminary, Library, MS 1496),28 a number that is fewer than those found in late manuscripts from South Asia, as well as in contemporaneous copies in Persian script from Iran. The audience for classical Persian works written in the Hebrew script were Persophone Jewish communities, who enjoyed the poems of the classical Persian poets, as well as works composed exclusively within their literary culture.29 Given this shared religious heritage, especially with respect to figures such as the prophet Yūsuf/patriarch Joseph, this romance would have had a particular appeal to readers of Judeo-Persian. The use of a nonPersian script to disseminate Jāmī’s poem represents a form of translation of the original work with a Persianate cultural framework.30 The attempted 28  http://garfield.jtsa.edu:1801/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=54005.xml&dvs=153 3833439204~878&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&VIEWER_URL=/view/ action/nmets.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=4&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true. 29  A general overview of Judeo-Persian literature is found in Vera Basch Moreen, In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1‒21. http://www.jtsa.edu/The_Library/Highlights_of_JudeoPersian_Manuscripts_.xml. 30  Several abridged versions of the tale seem to have been produced, not all deriving from Jāmī’s poem. The Jewish Theological Library has an earlier unillustrated version of this work with twelve folios. However, comparison of the texts is beyond the scope of this paper.

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seduction of Yūsuf scene is recognizable, but it lacks the overt elements such as the paintings on the walls or the architecture of Zulaykhā’s palace. Without these features, the tension between the sensual and mystical is not emphasized in the image; rather, the Persian carpets and sumptuous Qajar garb of the characters testify to the opulence of courtly life in the nineteenth century. In terms of style, the paintings in this manuscript can be compared to an illustrated Qajar manuscript of the same work (in Persian, not Judeo-Persian) at the New York Public Library (Spencer Pers. MS 36) that was copied in Tehran in 1858, five years after the Judeo-Persian manuscript. The Spencer manuscript has 46 paintings that are stylistically “typical of mid-nineteenth-century Qajar book illustration and would seem to derive from Persian oil paintings of the 1840s.”31 This story was disseminated in Iran in other non-textual forms as well. From the late eighteenth century in Iran, scenes depicting the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā romance were executed not only in books, but also on textiles and tilework.32 The two Qajar manuscripts demonstrate how the same work was received and further copied in diverse ways within a common larger cultural sphere, the Judeo-Persian manuscript emphasizing the script more than the images to tell the story. The culmination of the process of familiarization is exemplified by the phenomenon whereby the images carry the sole responsibility of sustaining the narrative and conveying its subtleties and significance to a viewer. Kia writes that illustrations of certain episodes “in turn established an iconographic standard that, with the aid of such generic features as Joseph’s flaming aureole, make textual reference for identification of the scene unnecessary.”33 There are several instances of this type of albums or collection of images, two of them in the Chester Beatty Library (Dublin). About the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā dating from ca. 1740–50, with 56 paintings, Linda York Leach writes that it “never had any text, but apparently merely explanations of the miniature series” and as one would expect, “the cycle is a fairly large one.”34 Another set of ten paintings, dated to mid-seventeenth century Kashmir, were originally part of an album, perhaps made for the Mughal prince Dārā Shikoh or for Ẓafar Khān, the governor of the 31  Barbara Schmitz, Islamic Manuscripts in the New York Public Library, 140; the full description is found under II.25, 139‒43. 32  Jennifer M. Scarce, “Yusuf and Zulaikha Tilework Images of Passion,” in Islamic Art in the Ashmolean Museum, ed. James Allan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), part 2, 63‒84. Scarce also found that episode of Zulaykhā and her women friends was the most popular one in this period. 33  Kia, “Jāmi, iii. Jāmi and Persian art,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, 469‒82. 34  Linda York Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995), 605; see 605‒10 for the complete description.

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province in the early reign of the emperor Shāh Jahān.35 Of these, 5 paintings by the artist Muḥammad Nādir were done when the album was put together, while 5 date from a century or so later. Apparently, the album originally did have 10 paintings, from which 5 of the original were dispersed and substituted by later works. Leach makes the point of the absence of text in this case too: “The cycle no longer has, and may in fact never have had, an accompanying text. This romance was so popular in the north that other later Kashmiri series tell the story independently of the written word.”36 Even more remarkable is a set of 66 paintings in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, incorrectly classed as Rajput but more likely from Kashmir as well.37 Short captions above the paintings describing the scene take the place of a narrative text. Questions about the patron and use of this set of paintings are difficult to answer at this point. As for the recurrent question of the high number of images to be found here when fewer would have sufficed to take one through the whole tale, the answer is that without any text at all, an ever larger cycle of images would have been required to produce a successful show and narrate a tale that would engage the viewer’s attention. It is no coincidence that many of the later illustrated manuscripts of Jāmī’s Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, with a higher than usual number of illustrations, including the illustrated Pashto translations, have their provenance in Kashmir. This text played an important role in the blending of Islamic religious and Persian literary traditions, giving rise to a distinctive Persianate culture in Kashmir. From the creation of an ever-increasing number of images with or without some version of Jāmī’s original text, the economy of a single painting that encapsulates the essence of the whole work was, and remains to some extent, appealing to the aesthetic sensibilities of some sophisticated patrons. Such single paintings, made for albums that also have no accompanying text, rely even more on the viewer’s recognizing a particularly iconic scene.38 At the same time, paradoxically, generic elements must be present in the work to allow it to stand on its own, outside of a larger format. This can be seen in single page paintings that depict Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, almost always in the same 35  Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, 927‒35. 36  Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, 928. 37  I am indebted to Firuza Abdullaeva for directing my attention to this series of paintings. I have benefited from discussions with her about them, albeit at the very final stage of completing this paper. This set of paintings has the reference number 34362. The list of paintings is available online but not the images. 38  A discussion of albums, especially Mughal, is found in Elaine Wright, Muraqqa: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Alexandria: Art Services International, 2008), 39‒45.

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scene. A Deccani painting depicting the women of Egypt dazzled by Yūsuf’s beauty, from eighteenth-century Hyderabad and now at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (D.368–1908) [Figure 2.3], is more dramatic with a couple of the women depicted as swooning as they injure themselves.39 The scene here takes place on a terrace overlooking a natural landscape, harking back to the earlier paintings that use intricate architectural iconography to highlight the symbolic valence of the scene and the emotions of the characters. Another album page rendering of the same scene with Yūsuf and Zulaykhā corroborates the point that once a literary or religious character entered into the cultural imagination of societies, then the visual symbolism embedded in an image dispensed with the need for any textual supplement and could be appreciated not just as a story, but for its message. This painting is part of an album (Album 3, fol. 29a) in the Raza Library in Rampur (India) and dates from ca. 1800.40 The other images in the album are non-narrative paintings, mostly portraits, and the juxtaposition of actual people with propheticlegendary ones transfers the latter’s special qualities to the living ones. As seen above, even in manuscripts with text present, artists attempted to let images do more of the work of communication by reducing the amount of words accompanying a picture or including pages with only pictures, but it is with albums that an aesthetic self-containment is accomplished most successfully. This phenomenon of “archetype” has been studied by Molly Aitken with respect to Majnūn, the madman-lover from Niẓāmī’s mathnavī; Aitken persuasively argues that with the emergence of an archetype “the composition [becomes] fixed and [ceases] altogether to respond to specific texts or to suggest individual emotional responses to the story.”41 In the Raza Library painting, the architecture has receded into the background where we are used to seeing a natural setting, and there is a distinct separation, albeit symmetrical, between the foreground and background. Strikingly, this image is quite similar to another in the Victoria & Albert Museum of the iconic Hindu lovers, the divine Krishna and Rādhā [Figure 2.4], with a very similar composition of the characters, as well as the architectural features and landscape. Yet, it is the physical attributes of the two main characters that distinguish them: Yūsuf with his halo and Krishna with his blue skin, both of whom, along with their relationships to their female beloveds, are instantly familiar. Viewing these pictures conjures up not 39  http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O154649/yusuf-and-zulaikha-painting-unknown/. 40  Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai, Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2006), plate 36. 41  Molly E. Aitken, “Repetition and Response: The Case of Layla and Majnun,” The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 178.

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just a narrative, which admittedly in the Yūsuf case is more obvious because this is also the scene where Zulaykhā’s friends cut themselves as they view him in his splendorous beauty, but also their prophetic/divine statuses respectively. No other Persian poetic work in the romance genre, perhaps with the exception of the Laylā-Majnūn story, provides such a detailed map of the complex process of copying, illustrating and translating in an expanding Persianate world as does the Yūsuf-Zulaykhā, a story widely known, though not exclusively so, in Jāmī’s version. This text negotiated its position, according to Christopher Shackle, between “scripture and romance” and even surpassed the khamsas of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw in its popularity. Given the special status of the poet, artists approached the illustration of Jāmī’s works differently than that of other works of classical Persian literature in order to allow for a mystical reading of them, sometimes with several recognizable elements compressed together in one composition. It would seem that the more simplistic and less archetypal paintings belong to popular or provincial traditions in Persian; in translations of the text, such as in the Dakhni and Pashto cases, not only because of the work of less skilled artists but perhaps also due to the fact that this Sufi allegory was being adapted for audiences whose interest in and ability to read Jāmī’s original text would have been shakier than at the centers of imperial power. A significantly greater number of images would have allowed this linguistic and aesthetic gap to be filled, as some paintings function as backdrop while others highlight key moments in the text. At the other extreme, from manuscripts with a high number of illustration cycles are single paintings that convey the entire story, including the mystical subtext, to the viewer, intended for more sophisticated patrons and viewers. In between these two is the phenomenon of the production of a series of paintings that dispenses with text altogether and where the emphasis is still on narrative rather than metaphor. In any case, a fuller inventory of the manuscripts of and paintings related to Jāmī’s works would be a necessary first step to understand more fully the process of their constant circulation and translation, especially in the case of his Yūsuf-Zulaykhā romance. A database of Jāmī’s illustrated manuscripts, such as the one that exists for images in Firdawsī’s epic poem, Shāhnāma,42 is a desideratum for scholars of literature and art history.

42  http://shahnama.caret.cam.ac.uk/new/jnama/page/.

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figure 2.1 Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Purchase—Smithsonian Unrestricted Trust Funds, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, S1986.55.l.

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figure 2.2 [Pashto] Afghan MS 15, 1815, John Rylands Library, fol. 128a, seduction scene

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figure 2.3 MS Victoria & Albert Museum, D.368-1908, Yusuf approaching Zulaykha, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, Hyderabad, ca. 1750

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figure 2.4 MS Victoria & Albert Museum, IS.108-1951, Radha and Krishna seated on palace terrace, opaque watercolour on paper, Jaipur, early 19th century

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Bibliography Ådahl, Karin. “A Copy of the Divan of Mir ʿAli Shir Nava‌ʾi of the Late Eighteenth Century in the Lund University Library and the Kashmiri School of Miniature Painting.” In Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honor of Basil W. Robinson, edited by Robert Hillenbrand, 3‒18. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. Aitken, Molly E. “Repetition and Response: The Case of Layla and Majnun.” The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Algar, Hamid. Jami. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dadbeh, Asghar. “Joseph i. In Persian Literature.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. XV, Fasc. 1, 30‒34. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Yusuf and Zulaikha, an Allegorical Romance. Translated by David Pendlebury. London: Octagon Press, 1980. Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzargāhī. Majālis al-ʿushshāq, tadhikra-yi ʿurafā. Edited by Ghulāmriḍā Ṭabāṭabāʾī-majd. Tehran: Zarrīn, 1376/1997. Kia, Chad. “Jāmi, iii. Jāmi and Persian art.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, 469‒82. Leach, Linda York. Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library. London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995. Matthews, David. “Dakanī Language and Literature, 1500–1700 A.D.” Unpublished diss., University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1976. Milstein, Rachel, Karin Rührdanz and Barbara Schmitz. Stories of the Prophets: Illustrated Manuscripts of Qisas al-anbiyā’. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1999. Minissale, Gregory. Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India 1550–1750. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. Moreen, Vera Basch. In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Robinson, B.W. Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library, a Descriptive Catalogue. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1980. Scarce, Jennifer M. “Yusuf and Zulaikha Tilework Images of Passion.” In Islamic Art in the Ashmolean Museum, edited by James Allan, part 2, 63‒84. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art X. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Schmitz, Barbara. Islamic Manuscripts in the New York Public Library. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Schmitz, Barbara. “Later Indian Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts in Two New York Libraries.” In After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, edited by Barbara Schmitz, 134‒49. Mumbai: Marg, 2002. Schmitz, Barbara and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai. Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2006.

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Seyller, John. Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Walters Art Museum Khamsa of Amīr Khusraw of Delhi. Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2001. Shackle, Christopher. “Between Scripture and Romance: The Yūsuf-Zulaikhā Story in Panjabi,” South Asia Research 15/2 (1995): 153‒88. Sharma, Sunil. “The Production of Mughal Shāhnāmas: Imperial, Sub-Imperial, and Provincial Manuscripts.” In Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma: Millennial Perspectives, edited by Olga M. Davidson and Marianna Shreve Simpson, 86‒107. Boston: Ilex; distributed by Harvard University Press, 2013. Simpson, Marianna Shreve. Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Titley, Norah M. Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts: A Catalogue and Subject Index of Paintings from Persia, India, and Turkey in the British Library and the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1977. Wright, Elaine. Muraqqa: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Alexandria: Art Services International, 2008.

chapter 3

Jāmī and the Ottomans Hamid Algar 1

Herat and Istanbul: Bilād al-ʿAjam and Bilād al-Rūm

Despite the vastly different fortunes that awaited each city, early Ottoman Istanbul and late Timurid Herat had in common a Perso-Turkish culture that, formed and sustained by patterns of travel and migration, had long been in the making.1 For many decades before the conquest of Istanbul, scholars from Bilād al-ʿAjam, the Persian-speaking lands, had already been making their way to Bilād al-Rūm, the lands ruled by the Ottomans. Persian in origin were, for example, not only the Ḥurūfī propagandist active at the future conqueror’s court in Edirne, but also Mollā Fakhreddīn ʿAjamī, the şeyhüislām who encompassed his disgrace and immolation.2 As for the numerous Sufis who migrated westwards, suffice it to mention by name two whose trajectories began in Bukhara and ended in Bursa and Istanbul respectively: Emīr Sulṭān (d. 833/1429?), a Kubravī, and Emīr Aḥmed Bukhārī (d. 922/1516), a Naqshbandī.3 Somewhat diffuse, by contrast, is the category of the “Horasan erleri,” saintly figures who joined their efforts to those of the “Rūm abdalları” in propagating Islam.4 Conversely, Timurid Khorasan and Transoxiana attracted several scholars from the Ottoman lands, most notably Qāḍīzāde Rūmī (d. 844/1440) of Bursa, a polymath renowned chiefly as astronomer and mathematician; aspirants to the Sufi orders originating there, especially the Naqshbandiyya; and, as we shall soon see, a considerable number of poets. In light of these interchanges, it has been suggested that the culture of the Ottomans be designated as Turco-Persian, with Turkish predominating over 1  See Giv Nassiri, “Turco-Persian Civilization and the Role of Scholars’ Travel and Migration in its Elaboration and Continuity” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002). 2  Hamid Algar, “Ḥorufism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 12:487. 3  Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq fī Tekmiletiʾş-şaqāʾiq, facsimile edition prepared by Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989), 61‒62; Mustafa Kara, “Emir Buhârî,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 11:126. 4  Fuad Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatında Ilk Mutasavvıflar (Ankara: Diyanet Işleri Başkanlığı Yayınevi, 1966), 41‒44; Ömer Lutfî Barkan, “Osmanlı Imparatorluğunda bir iskan ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak vakıflar ve temlikler: I, Istilâ devirlerinin kolonizatör Türk dervişleri ve zaviyeler,” Vakıflar Dergisi 3 (1942): 279‒386.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_005

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Persian, and that of Khorasan and Transoxiana as Perso-Turkish, with Turkish (i.e., Turki/Chaghatay) subordinate to Persian.5 The symmetry this formula suggests is misleading, for the prestige enjoyed by Persian and those who had mastered it among the Ottomans surpassed by far the standing of Turki in Herat.6 The extraordinary reverence paid to Persian by Ottoman literati, into the tenth/ sixteenth century if not beyond, is expressed most strikingly in a brief treatise of Kemālpāşāzāde (d. 969/1534), Mazīyat al-Lisān al-Fārisī ʿalā Sāʾir al-Alsina mā khalā al-ʿArabiyya (“The Superiority of Persian to All Other Languages Except Arabic”).7 The case he presents rests not on linguistic evidence, but on spurious hadith—such as one to the effect that Arabic and Persian will be the only languages spoken in Paradise—and the purported glories of pre-Islamic Iran. There is no evidence that this extremely slender treatise was widely read, but it expressed, albeit in hyperbolic form, a Persophone inclination that long dominated Ottoman culture.8 By contrast, ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī’s much better known Muḥākamat al-Lughatayn (“The Adjudication of the Two Languages”) may have helped to consolidate the viability of Chaghatay Turkish as a literary medium, but its claim to superiority over Persian—made in a language replete with Persian loanwords—found barely an echo. Quite apart from anything else, Persian literature had attained a richness and maturity with which Chaghatay Turkish was in no position to compete. Poets went from Anatolia to Khorasan to improve their Persian; there is no record of Khorasanian poets travelling to Istanbul in order to improve their Turkish (although several of them did master it after their arrival there). Most Turcophone poets, whether Ottoman or Chaghatay, tried their hands at composing in Persian; few were the Persophone poets who felt the need to master either Chaghatay or Ottoman Turkish. It was Persian that served as the lingua franca linking the Bilād al-Rūm with Bilād al-ʿAjam. And there can be no question that Jāmī was the dominant figure of this entire Perso-Turkish realm. 5  Hanna Sohrweide, “Dichter und Gelehrte aus dem Osten im osmanischen Reich (1453–1600): ein Beitrag zur türkisch-persischen Kulturgeschichte,” Der Islam 46, no. 3 (1970): 263. 6  Zeki Velidi Togan greatly exaggerates when he describes Timurid Herat as a “Turkish city” where the dominant language was Chaghatay Turkish, so that Persian-speakers, Jāmī included, found themselves obliged to learn it (“Herat,” Islam Ansiklopedisi, 5, 1:440). Jāmī’s limited interest in Turki was motivated primarily if not exclusively by his friendship with ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī and a desire to understand and evaluate the poetry he wrote in that language; see the excerpt from Navāʾī’s Sadd-i Iskandarī cited by Ye. E. Bertel’s, Navoi i Džami (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1965), 120. 7  Ed. Ḥusayn ʿAlī Maḥfūẓ (Tehran: Anjuman-i Īrānvīj, 1332/1953). 8  For a detailed examination of the treatise and the political and cultural context in which it was conceived, see Robert Brunschvig, “Kemâl Pâshâzâde et le persan,” in Mélanges d’Orientalisme offerts à Henri Massé (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Ṭihrān, 1963), 48‒64.

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Migration took place in two directions, east to Herat or west to Istanbul: encouraged by the availability of patronage in both cities, aspiring poets sought their fortunes in one or other of the two capitals, as well as waystations in between, especially Amasya, seat of the Ottoman heir-apparent. Many, it would seem, possessed little talent, and earned the condemnation of their superiors. Thus Jāmī lamented the disappearance of true poets, men free of all greed, and their replacement by “versifiers of lowly ambition and vile disposition … day and night, they run back and forth from one place to the next/like dogs whose paws have been burnt.”9 Qabūlī (d. 883/1478), a poet from somewhere in Bilād al-ʿAjam who sought his fortune first in Amasya and then in Istanbul, composed for Fātiḥ a lengthy qaṣīda with laʿl (“ruby”) as its radīf. One of its lines conveys the essence of what was involved, for him and for many other poets: a straightforward exchange of poetic gems for mineral gems (or their cash equivalent): “Merchants of verse have come from ʿAjam to Rūm/but none bears a load of rubies, like this servant of yours.”10 Rivalry among merchants of all stripes being a matter of course, the unique excellence of Qabūlī’s offerings was inevitably disputed by another migrant poet at the court of Fātiḥ, Ḥāmidī Iṣfahānī (d. after 881/1476).11 Three of the earliest Ottoman poets with reported links to Jāmī were twice migrants: first from their respective home towns in Anatolia to Herat, and then from Herat to Istanbul. The ethical qualities of all three were somewhat questionable, albeit in quite different ways. One was Melīḥī, renowned as a versatile scholar as well as a poet and, fatally, an alcoholic. Born in either Tokat, Sinop, or Kastamonu, he studied the rational sciences somewhere in Bilād alRūm before travelling to Herat to learn Persian and the arts of rhetoric. He must have been quite young at the time, for it was as a classmate (hemsebāq) of Jāmī that he made his acquaintance, some time before the latter left for a period of study in Samarkand, in roughly 840/1436. Melīḥī arrived in Istanbul soon after the conquest, whether directly from Herat or after periods of residence at intermediate locations is unknown. Companion for a while to Bursalı 9  Jāmī, Silsilat al-Dhahab, in Mathnavī-yi Haft Awrang, eds. Jābulqā Dādʿalīshāh, Aṣghar Jānfidā, Ṭāhir Aḥrārī, and Ḥusayn Aḥmad (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999), 1:125. 10  Kabûlî (=Qabūlī), Dîvân, facsimile of poet’s autograph, ed. with introduction by Ismail Hikmet Ertaylan (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1948), 99‒101 (this distich is on p. 101). Yaḥyā Khānmuḥammadī Ādharī gives his printed edition of Qabūlī’s dīvān the title, Dīvān-i Qabūlī-yi Hiravī (Tehran: Bunyād-i Mawqūfāt-i Duktur Maḥmūd Afshār, 1386/2007), even though in a lengthy biographical introduction he fails to make the case for a Herātī origin. Certainly nothing in the dīvān points in that direction, and there is no indication Qabūlī had any association with Jāmī. 11  Ertaylan’s introduction to Kabûlî (=Qabūlī), Dîvân, 20. He succinctly characterizes Qabūlī as “panégyriste” and “arriviste,” a pair of attributes that apply to many poets of the same ilk.

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Aḥmed Pāşā, he soon joined the entourage of Fātiḥ Sultan Meḥmed, gaining his favor to such a degree that the sovereign took no pleasure in gatherings from which Melīḥī was absent. Before long, however, his habit of drinking wine to excess—acquired, perhaps, during his stay in Herat, where the wine always flowed freely—estranged him from Fātiḥ. He settled in Galata, where he earned a meagre income by teaching logic to the children of Jewish physicians, only to squander it forthwith in the neighborhood taverns. Dede Ömer Rūşenī (d. 892/1487), a Khalvetī shaykh and an acquaintance from their days of study together, tried to have him trade the cup of wine for the goblet of divine love; this, he promised, would enable him to experience true ecstasy. Fātiḥ joined in these efforts at Melīḥī’s redemption, and had him swear an oath to desist and repent. Deprived of wine, he sought solace in hashish and opium before quickly reverting to his habitual tipsiness. He went into hiding in Tahtakale, but was detected and brought before Fātiḥ, who commanded that he be drowned, a fate from which he was able to save himself with an impromptu witticism. When Jāmī sent him some of his writings on Sufism, he was still plunged in his cups, and shamefacedly proclaiming himself unworthy of the gift, he asked of Jāmī that he forgive him and pray for his redemption. But Melīḥī’s addiction proved incurable, and toothless and decrepit, he died early in the reign of Bāyezīd II.12 Equally curious in its own way is the case of a native of Tokat, Leʾālī, a qalandar poet specialising in chronograms and facetiae. A lengthy association with Jāmī and other notables in Herat enabled him to acquire a command of Persian that permitted him to pass himself off as a native speaker; as the anthologist Laṭīfī phrases it, “Persianized, he posed as a Persian” (muta’accim iken ʿacem geçinüp).13 Sehī, another anthologist, provides the rationale for this stratagem: “Since Persians (ṭāʾife-i aʿcām) were much favored at the time, he presented himself as a Persian and was greatly respected and honored.”14 Foremost among those impressed by Leʾālī’s Persophone credentials was Fātiḥ Sulṭan Meḥmed himself; he granted him a stipend and installed him in the Qılıçbaba Tekkesi, a former church in the Yedikule district. The envious discovered Leʾālī’s ruse 12  Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, facsimile edition prepared by Abdülkadir Özcan (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989), 232‒34; Sehī Bey, Heşt Bihişt: Sehī Beg Teẕkiresi, ed. Günay Kut (Harvard: Doğu Dilleri ve Edebiyatlarının Kaynakları, 1978), 188‒90; Latîfî (=Laṭīfī), Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, ed. Rıdvan Canım (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi Başkanlığı, 2000), 473‒75; Kınalızade Hasan Çelebi, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, ed. Ibrahim Kutluk (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1981), 2:923‒24; ʿÂşık Çelebi, MeşâʿirüʾşŞuʿarâ, facsimile edition prepared by G.M. Meredith-Owens (London: Luzac, 1971), fol. 126b–127a; Sohrweide, “Dichter und Gelehrte aus dem Osten im osmanischen Reich,” 288; Sabahettin Küçük, “Melîhî”, Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 29:50. 13  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 473. 14  Sehī Bey, Heşt Bihişt, 208.

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and denounced him to Fātiḥ, whereupon he was stripped of his living. He attempted to justify the deceit by claiming that one had to be a Persian or an Arab to win patronage, an exaggeration, no doubt, but one that reflects the prestige accorded to Persian language and letters and those proficient in them. Undeterred by the scandal, he went on to complete two dīvāns, one in Persian and the other in Turkish.15 Distinguished only by the mediocrity of his verse was Qandī of Bursa (d. 962/1555), a sugar merchant by trade as his makhlaṣ suggests. Travelling to Herat in his youth, he frequented the circle of Jāmī and Navāʾī and strove mightily to excel in the genre of qaṣīda, but to no avail; his poetry earned him no admirers when he returned to Bilād al-Rūm, one critic going so far as to say: “His name means sugar merchant, but his verse is pure poison.” In addition to which, he was “envious, arrogant, evil minded, and hateful.” All that could be said in his defense was that he composed some skillful chronograms.16 A fully sober, veracious and accomplished witness to the genius of Jāmī was the astronomer-mathematician Mollā ʿAlī Quşçī, onetime director of Ulug Beg’s observatory in Samarkand. It was there that Jāmī, while yet a student, had already gained a reputation for combative erudition, causing Qāḍīzāde Rūmī, Qūşçī’s predecessor at the observatory, to remark, “as long as Samarkand has been standing, none has ever crossed the Oxus to come here as gifted and perspicacious as this young man.”17 Jāmī engaged too in learned debate, triumphantly proclaiming at the end of one confrontation, “Mawlānā ʿAlī, don’t you have anything better concealed in your chamta [a broad sash worn around the waist]?”18 Whether Jāmī indeed defeated Quşçī is, of course, unknown, but the 15  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 473‒74. See too Amīn Muḥammad Riyāḥī, Zabān va Adabiyyāt-i Fārsī dar Qalamruv-i ʿUthmānī (Tehran: Pāzhang, 1369/1990), 150; Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 472; and Hanna Sohrweide, “Dichter und Gelehrte aus dem Osten im osmanischen Reich,” 287‒88, who suggests that Fātiḥ was displeased, not so much by the discovery that Leʾālī was an Anatolian, instead of a Persian, as by the deceit in which he had engaged. This runs counter to Sehī’s observation that at the time Persians had indeed come to possess a uniquely privileged standing among the Ottomans (Heşt Bihişt, 208). 16  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 450‒51. Kınalızâde’s estimate of his poetry is milder, although by no means enthusiastic (Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ, 2:801‒3). 17  Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīnīān (Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūrīān, 1977), 1:236. 18  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt, 1:236. Presumably basing himself on Kāshifī’s account— the only one available—A. Suheyl Ünver excises from it Jāmī’s arrogant taunt; he writes simply: “Wearing the Turkish garb he affected at all times, ʿAlī Quşçī went to Herat where he met Jāmī, the learned poet and scholar” (Türk Pozitif ilimler tarihinden bir bahis: Ali Kuṣçi, Hayatı ve eserleri [Istanbul: Kenan Matbaası, 1948], 16).

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incident must at least have left him with a vivid memory of his rival. After the death of Ulug Beg in 853/1449, Quşçī left Transoxiana on the pretext of making the Hajj and attached himself to the court of Ūzūn Ḥasan the Aqqoyunlu in Tabriz. This new patron dispatched him to Istanbul to seek peace with Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed, who promptly obtained from him a promise to settle in Istanbul after completing his mission.19 2

Jāmī and Fātiḥ

Not long after Quşçī’s defection to the Ottomans, Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed set out on a campaign against none other than Ūzūn Ḥasan, having refused his offers of peace. He was in the final stages of this campaign at around the same time Jāmī was returning from the Hajj by way of Syria in 878/1473, and thus chanced to be in his approximate vicinity (taqrīb-i qurb). Influenced perhaps by Quşçī, who happened to be in his entourage, Fātiḥ judged it opportune to send Jāmī an invitation to honor Rūm with his presence “for a few days.” The request was to be conveyed by a trusted amir together with Khwāja ʿAṭāʾullāh Kirmānī, a longstanding acquaintance of Jāmī who had migrated to Rūm.20 They had 5000 ashrafīs on hand to offer him, together with the promise of 100,000 more if he were to accept the invitation. However, by the time the Ottoman delegation reached Damascus, Jāmī had already left for Aleppo, his final waystation in Syria, thus escaping the need to meet with them and respond to Fātiḥ’s invitation. ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Bākharzī attributes this timely departure not to conscious decision, but to “a fortunate turn of events” (ittifāqāt-i ḥasana) and “heavenly inspiration” (ilhām-i āsmānī). Not finding Jāmī in Damascus, the emissaries turned back, “cloaked in despair and deprivation.” When Jāmī learned of this, he gave thanks to God, explaining that “if, God forbid, I had been compelled to meet with that party, they would certainly have insisted on their erroneous plan (andīsha-yi nā-ṣavāb). A decision to travel to Rūm would have been extremely difficult and irksome for faqīrān such as myself, being based solely on greed, something I am always at pains to eschew.”21 19  Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, 180‒84. 20  The Khwāja in question may be identical with the Khwāja ʿAṭāʾullāh al-ʿAjamī mentioned by Taşköprizāde (al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya fī ʿUlamāʾ al-Dawlat al-ʿUthmānīya, [Beirut, Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1395/1975], 135); see too Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, 236. He migrated to Rūm in the time of Fātiḥ and died in 905/1499, in the reign of Bāyezīd II. Another of the polymaths characteristic of the age, he was renowned principally for his mastery of mathematics and astronomy. 21  ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, ed. Najīb Māyil Hiravī (Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1371/1992), 183. Little is known of Bākharzī’s biography, but it is possible that he

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The episode is recounted somewhat differently by another biographer, Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī. He strikes a similar note by attributing Jāmī’s success in eluding the Ottomans to “a fortunate turn of events” and “heavenly inspiration”; the identical wording suggests that Kāshifī drew on Bākharzī as one of his sources. He makes plain, however, that Jāmī did learn while in Aleppo that Fātiḥ’s emissaries had reached Damascus, so “he immediately left Aleppo on the road to Tabriz, lest those emissaries should come from Damascus to Aleppo, and insistently and importunately demand [that he accept the invitation].”22 Jāmī’s moralizing explanation of his reluctance to go to Istanbul does not ring entirely true, for according precisely to Bākharzī, Jāmī had willingly received numerous precious gifts (tuḥaf va hadāyā) while in Aleppo, and, according to Kāshifī, he encountered the same good fortune in Tabriz, thanks to none other than Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed’s nemesis, Ūzūn Ḥasan.23 More generally, in Rashḥ-i Bāl, his autobiographical qaṣīda, he confesses to having enjoyed the favor of a whole series of potentates; or better to say, he boasts of it.24 It may simply be that at this point, after a fourteen-month absence, Jāmī was anxious to return to his beloved Herat, for he also rebuffed an invitation from Ūzūn Ḥasan to tarry in Tabriz; that a journey to Istanbul would have required too lengthy a detour from his chosen route home; or that he feared, once he arrived in Istanbul, he would be unable ever to free himself from the imperial embrace of the Ottoman sultan.25 It may finally be remarked that the whole episode is entirely unmentioned in Ottoman sources, perhaps because of its inconclusive outcome. It was presumably some time after this narrow escape from Fātiḥ’s emissaries that Jāmī, unwilling to forfeit his favor, sent him some of his verse, together with a panegyric mathnavī composed for the occasion. He instructs the north wind to set out from Khorasan for “the capital of Rūm” (dār-i mulk-i Rūm), and accompanied Jāmī on the Hajj. Babinger is in error when he writes that the purpose of Fātiḥ’s intended gift to Jāmī was to defray the expenses he had incurred while on the Hajj (Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, 472). Such gifts were, however, customarily bestowed on various dignitaries by several later sultans; see n. 46 below. 22  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt, 1:262. 23  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 183; Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt, 1:263. Here again, Kāshifī uses precisely the same wording as Bākharzī—tuḥaf va hadāyā. 24  Jāmī, Dīvān, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999), 2:37. 25  Yet another possibility is that “he viewed the emerging Ottoman state as a backwater compared to his own region;” see John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 81, n. 3. Jāmī was similarly steadfast in declining the repeated invitations to the Deccan, another distant and unfamiliar destination, that were sent him by Maḥmūd Gāvān, minister to the Bahmanshāhs. See Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 215‒16.

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having arrived, first to rub its brow on the ground and then address Fātiḥ, the mujāhid and ghāzī, in the most fulsome of terms. All of his ancestors, the wind was to proclaim, had sat on thrones and worn crowns. Few, however, were the rulers comparable in learning: Fātiḥ was acquainted with both the Peripatetics and the Illuminationists, and gifted equally in the realms of “natural wisdom” (ḥikmat-i ṭabīʿī) and “divine wisdom” (ḥikmat-i ilāhī), a pair of terms by which Jāmī intended the rational and the religious sciences respectively. Then, too, he had bestowed new force on the sharīʿa by turning the “abode of unbelief, the temple of idols” into a qubbat al-islām—“dome of Islam,” an epithet often bestowed on major Islamic cities including Herat, but serving here, perhaps, as an allusion to the transformation of Aya Sofya—a magnificently domed structure—into a mosque.26 There follows an enumeration of Fātiḥ’s moral qualities, with emphasis on his chastity, courage and generosity, the last of these putting the boundless ocean and the jewel-rich mountain to shame. After a prayer for the indefinite prolongation of his rule, the wind is instructed to deliver the gift—“a few leaves of ingenious verse (naẓmhā-yi gharīb),/suited to the mind of the intelligent and the perspicacious”—while apologetically explaining: “the ant has sent, from pure affection,/half a locust’s leg to Solomon. This is the best it could manage;/gifts are according to the capacity of the giver.” The reference here is, of course, to the story expanding on Quran 27:18, that ants paid tribute to Solomon by presenting him with a locust’s leg—a humble gift, but all they could manage. Not only does Jāmī rhetorically lower himself to the level of an ant; he also estimates his gift as worth not even a whole leg of locust. This is, of course, a flagrant example of false modesty, what in presentday Persian is called shikasta-nafsī. The identity of the work presented to Fātiḥ is unknown.27

26  Something of a parallel to the case of Istanbul is provided by Delhi, where Quṭb al-Dīn Aybak (r. 602/1206–607/1210) destroyed a Hindu temple and incorporating some of the debris built on its site a mosque known as Qubbat al-Islām, even though it lacked a dome. The name of the mosque was later changed to Quwwat al-Islām, while Qubbat al-Islām served for some years as a title for the whole city. See Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Āthār alṢanādīd (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1966), 64‒67; Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval Hindu-Muslim Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 164‒69; and Y.D. Sharma, Delhi and Its Neighbourhood (New Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1964), 48‒49. It is conceivable that Jāmī was aware of this historic precedent. 27  Jāmī, Nāmahā va Munsha‌ʾāt, eds. ʿIṣām al-Dīn Urunbayev and Asrār Raḥmānov (Tehran: Nashr-i Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/2000), 273‒74; Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:174‒75; Jāmī, Risāla-yi Munsha‌ʾāt, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Nūr Aḥrārī (Turbat-i Jām: Shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām, 1383/2004), 196‒97.

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On presumably a different occasion, but certainly no earlier than 878/1473, Jāmī is said to have sent Fātiḥ, contained in a single volume, an autographed copy of three of his works on Sufism, each written in a mixture of poetry and prose: Lavāʾiḥ (“Flashes”), completed in around 870/1465; Lavāmiʿ (“Gleams”), his commentary on the Khamriyya (wine poem) of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, composed in 875/1470; and Sharḥ-i Rubāʿiyyāt, a commentary on his own quatrains, written in 878/1473.28 If Jāmī attributed to Fātiḥ an interest in both “natural wisdom” and “divine wisdom,” it was not without reason, for it was precisely a comparison between these two types of knowledge that formed the subject of a contest he once organized. Muṣṭafā b. Yūsuf Hocazāde Burūsavī (d. 893/1488) and ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṭūsī (d. 887/1482), were each invited to make a written adjudication (muḥākama) of the issues dividing the philosophers from the theologians; a re-examination of Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”) was to serve as their point of departure. Hocazāde finished his work in four months and called it, somewhat confusingly, al-Tahāfut; like Ghazālī, he condemned the philosophers for their errors, including some that his predecessor had failed to detect. Ṭūsī also found in favor of the theologians in al-Dhakhīra, the book he completed in two additional months. Both scholars were rewarded with 10,000 dirhams, but Hocazāde’s book was preferred, and he received an additional gift of “a fine robe.” Tūsī took umbrage at this outcome and left for Bilād al-ʿAjam, the land of the Persians, which like so many other scholars and poets he had quit earlier in life in search of Ottoman patronage.29 28  See Kemal Edip Ünsel (Kürkçüoğlu), “Câmî’nin Fatih Sultan Mehmet II.e gönderdiği üç kitap,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi 3/1 (November‒ December, 1944): 113‒14. Ünsel bases his assertion that the manuscript is verifiably an autograph copy sent to Fātiḥ on a note written inside the book, but in a hand other than Jāmī’s: … bi khaṭṭ muṣannif al-kitāb … juʿila tuḥfatan li-ḥaḍrat al-khāqāniyya li qaṣd altabarruk. The item in question is to be found in the library of the same faculty of Ankara University (yazmalar 47057). It is, perhaps, one of the manuscripts Franz Babinger had in mind when he wrote that “certain treasures, such as the books sent to Mehmed by the Persian poet Jami, found their way to Ankara” (Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, 501). 29  Kātib Çelebī, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, eds. Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Rifat Belge (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1971), 1, column 513. See, too, Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, 479. On Hocazāde and Ṭūsī, see Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, 158 and 118‒20 respectively. The outcome of this contest had an indirect connection to Jāmī. One of Ṭūsī’s students in Istanbul, Mollā ʿAbdullāh Ilāhī of Simav, loyally followed him when he left for Persia, catching up with him in Kirman. While there he conceived an interest in the Naqshbandī path, and travelling to Transoxiana he became a murīd of Khwāja ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār. After a lengthy residence in Bukhara and Samarkand, he set out on a homeward journey to Anatolia that took him through Herat where he made the

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A number of years later, Fātiḥ decided to broaden the scope of the muḥākama by commissioning a work that would compare the partially conflicting views not only of the theologians and the philosophers, but also of the Sufis; its scope was, moreover, to be general, not focused on a single author or his work. Informed of his sovereign’s intent, Mollā ʿAlī Fenārī, qāḍī ʿasker at the time, told him that none other than Jāmī was capable of fulfilling the task. An envoy bearing “precious gifts” was accordingly dispatched to Herat, and Jāmī set to work forthwith.30 The result was al-Durrat al-Fākhira fī Taḥqīq Madhāhib al-Ṣūfiyya wa-l-Mutakallimīn wa-l-Ḥukamāʾ al-Mutaqaddimīn.31 Jāmī duly examined the views of the three groups on the six key topics that had been specified in Fātiḥ’s request, but he noted, with customary brusqueness, that unless he were to examine five more, his efforts would have been “a waste of time.”32 By the time he had completed his work and dispatched it to Istanbul, Fātiḥ had died, and it was ʿAlī Fenārī who took initial delivery of it before turning it over to his son, Mollā Muḥyiddīn Fenārī. What became of this original manuscript is unclear; it may have passed into the possession of Bāyezīd II when he assumed the throne.33 Certain only is that, with or without encouragement from Istanbul, Jāmī did proceed to examine the five additional topics he had in mind, with the result that al-Durrat al-Fākhira now exists in two recensions, one short and one long.34 acquaintance of Jāmī. See Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehât el-Üns Tercemesi, reprint with introduction by Süleyman Uludağ (Istanbul: Marifet Yayınları, 1980), 461. 30  Taşköprizāde, al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, 159. 31  Eds. Nicholas Heer and ʿAlī Mūsavī Bihbahānī (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Ṭihrān, 1358/1980). 32  It has been suggested that Jāmī’s apparent reluctance to complete the work arose from a suspicion that Fātiḥ had a marked preference for rational over mystical thought (Ertuğrul Ökten, “Jâmî (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat” [PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007], 195‒96). It was, however, in Europe, not in Bilād al-ʿAjam, that Fātiḥ was commonly thought to be a devotee of Greek philosophy. See Anna Akasoy, “Mehmed II as a Patron of Greek Philosophy: Latin and Byzantine Perspectives,” in The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, eds. Anna Contadini and Claire Norton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 245‒56. 33  Ṭaşköprizāde is uncertain whether Muḥyiddīn Fenārī told him he was still in possession of the manuscript (al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, 159). In his expanded and occasionally inaccurate translation of al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī writes that after al-Durrat al-Fākhira was brought to Istanbul, “it became hidden in the corner of oblivion,” and that Muḥyiddīn Fenārī was unsure if he had it somewhere or it was still with his father (Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, 278); this argues for a remarkable degree of neglect on the part of the Fenārīs. None of the manuscripts used by Heer and Mūsavī Bihbahānī for their edition appear to be of Ottoman provenance. 34  For a listing of the six original and the five additional topics, see Heer’s introduction to al-Durrat al-Fākhira, 7. Ökten takes the paucity of copies of the work in the Topkapı

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Jāmī and Bāyezīd

Like Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed, Bāyezīd II is also said to have invited Jāmī to Istanbul, enticing him as was customary with “precious gifts.” He responded positively, assembled all he needed for the journey, and set out from Khorasan. On reaching Hamadan, he learned, however, that the plague was raging in Anatolia, so sending his apologies to Bāyezīd, he turned round and went back to Herat.35 There is no mention of this episode in any of the biographical accounts written by Jāmī’s associates, and it is intrinsically unlikely that at this advanced point in life he would have deemed it beneficial to trade the familiar comforts of Herat for the demands of life in a new city.36 The record of verifiable correspondence between Jāmī and Bāyezīd is, by contrast, substantial, and even if allowances are made for the usual hyperbolic flourishes, it suggests that the two were linked by a lasting and genuine affection and affinity. For Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed, Jāmī had been primarily the supreme scholar of the age, one whose presence in Istanbul would have brought library as a sign that it never gained widespread popularity (Jâmî (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat, 199). 35  Ṭaşköprizāde, al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, 159. Ṭaşköprizāde’s entry on Jāmī contains a manifest error: that he was a full-fledged murīd of ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār (intasaba ilayhi atamm al-intisāb). The relationship between the two men was rather one of equals; as Bākharzī phrased it, they were engaged in “guiding and seeking guidance from each other” (irshād va istirshād; Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 115). Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī repeats this error, and adds to it one of his own: that in his youth, Jāmī had studied at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Baghdad. Questionable is his attribution to Jāmī’s poetry of throughgoing originality; his verse is comparable, in its freshness and purity, to “the untouched maidens of Paradise.” On the other hand, Mecdī is incontestably correct in observing, in the context of his notice on Jāmī, that “fine gifts lead to affection” (al-hadāyā al-ṭayyiba yūrith al-maḥabba) (Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq, 275‒81). Francis Richard also writes that Bāyezīd twice invited Jāmī to Istanbul, but gives no precise source for this contention. The qaṣīda that he describes as Jāmī’s response to the invitation makes no mention, even implicitly, of a summons to Istanbul (“Un cas de succès littéraire: la diffusuion des oeuvres poétiques de Djâmî de Hérât,” in his Le Livre Persan [Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2003], 65). 36  The first plague to ravage Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest subsided in roughly 1476, some five years before Bāyezīd succeded to the throne and would have been in a position to invite Jāmī. The next outbreak began in 1491, a year or so before Jāmī’s death (see Nükhet Varlık, “Disease and Empire: A History of Plague Epidemics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire” [PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008], 52‒56). If, despite all this, the story of Bāyezīd’s invitation happens somehow to be true, Jāmī’s refusal to proceed beyond Hamadan would have been fully comprehensible, given the plague that had claimed thousands of lives in Herat in 838/1435, when he was twenty-one years of age (Najīb Māyil Hiravī, Jāmī [Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1377/1998], 16). It is certain that on one occasion Jāmī did indeed change route because of an outbreak of the plague: when travelling to Samarkand to meet ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār in 866/1462 (Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 115).

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lustre to his city; Bāyezīd, by contrast, saw in Jāmī a fellow poet and Sufi, one whose esteem he greatly valued and reciprocated. As the anthologist es-Seyyid Rıḍā expressed it in these two lines of verse: Understand, o heart, how precious it is to be a king, one praised and lauded by Mollā Jāmī! One who treats with affection the people of gnosis (ahl-i ʿirfān)— never will his name be forgotten in this world, till the Day of Resurrection!37 Bāyezīd can be presumed to have learned of Jāmī as the foremost Persian poet of the day while still serving in Amasya as heir apparent to the Ottoman throne, for that city often served as a stopping place for Persian poets making their way westwards, the Qabūlī mentioned above being one example among others. It was, there, too that Bāyezīd began composing poetry himself, in both Persian and Turkish, using the penname ʿAdlī.38 It was, however, in the capacity of sultan that he wrote to Jāmī on at least two occasions, or better, had his chancery scribes write to him, in the bafflingly ornate and verbose style favored at the time. Neither of the letters in question is dated, although circumstantial evidence permits us to date one of them. It is possible that more letters were exchanged between Bāyezīd and Jāmī than are to be found in the printed sources, foremost among them being Ferīdūn Bey’s precious compendium, the Münşeʾātüʾs-Selāṭīn. The first letter included by Ferīdūn Bey appears, indeed, to be in response to a message from Jāmī, for conveyance back to Herat by the emissary he had sent to Istanbul. Fully two-thirds of Bāyezīd’s letter consists of extravagant praise of Jāmī and prayers for his well-being. Skillful allusions are made to his Naqshbandī affiliation; he is thus described as “the dweller in solitude in the society of writing” (khalvat-nishīn-i anjuman-i taḥrīr), and “the one vigilantly aware in each of the breaths that he takes” (hūshyār-i ṣāḥib-dam), and “the one firm-footed in all of his deeds” (kārguzār-i thābit-qadam), these being 37  Cited in es-Seyyid Rıḍā, Tedhkire-i Rıḍā (Istanbul: Iqdām Maṭbaʿası, 1316/1898), 6. 38  Bāyezīd’s Dîvân is available in a facsimile edition prepared by Yavuz Bayram: Amasya’ya Vali Osmanlı’ya Padişah bir Şair, Adlî, Sultan Ikinci Bayezid: Hayatı, Şahsiyeti, Şairliği: Dîvânı’nın Tenkitli ve Orijinal Metni (Amasya: Amasya Valiliği, 2009). A diligent examination of the Dîvân might uncover poems composed in imitation of Jāmī. Of Bāyezīd’s successor, Selīm I, it is said that thanks to his poetic gifts and superb knowledge of Persian, he was able to render into Turkish Jāmī’s mulammaʿ beginning: “Your tresses dark like the night have veiled your cheek like the moon;/glory to the All-Powerful Who has made the night as a garment [Quran 25:48]” (see Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:191; and Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 146).

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references to the principles of “solitude within society” (khalvat dar anjuman), “awareness in each breath taken” (hūsh dar dam), and “awareness of where one places his feet” (naẓar bar qadam) respectively. It would appear that Jāmī’s envoy had brought with him certain of his works touching on theoretical Sufism, for the letter concludes with what is effectively a plea for greater clarity and accessibility of meaning, perhaps for Bāyezīd’s own sake: “Although the perception of these hidden and occult matters (ghuyūb-i maknūnāt) is plain for that exemplar of the accomplished [i.e., Jāmī himself], the open display of those same matters was the custom of our forebears (salaf: i.e., the first three generations of Islam, the Companions, the Followers, and the Followers of the Followers), and the unveiling of matters concealed in obscurity (mastūrāt-i makāmin-i khafā) has been customary since the age of ‘I wished to be known’ [a reference to the hadith of the Hidden Treasure; i.e., since pre-eternity].” Finally, Bāyezīd expresses anew his devotion to Jāmī (mujaddadan tajdīd-i iẓhār-i iʿtiqād), making it plain thereby that this exchange was not the first that had taken place between them.39 Jāmī’s response begins with a series of titles no less impressive than those Bāyezīd had lavished on him: he is the pious king, the just ruler, the sultan of the ghāzīs, the killer of obstinate rebels, and so forth. Of greater interest is the fact that Bāyezīd had a group of itinerant dervishes from Bilād al-Rūm accompany Jāmī’s envoy back to Herat. Described by Jāmī as “bright yellow in color and pleasing to the eye,” like the cow the people of Moses were commanded to sacrifice (Quran 2:69), these dervishes were of European origin ( farangī-aṣl), but once delivered by Bāyezīd from the hands of the kuffār, they had devoted themselves to travel in the lands of Islam. They gave Jāmī the good news that Bāyezīd showed favor to the Sufis and “had accepted their path” (qabūl-i ṭarīqat-i īshān). If by qabūl-i ṭarīqat is meant formal affiliation to a Sufi order, Bāyezīd’s Khalvatī connections, dating back to his days in Amasya, must have been intended.40 Jāmī was additionally gladdened for the usual tangible reasons, although it seems that on this occasion the amount received fell

39  Ferīdūn Bey, Münşʾeâtüʾs-Selāṭīn (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-i ʿĀmire, 1274/1857), 1:361‒62; Jāmī, Nāmahā va Munsha‌ʾāt, 307‒9; Jāmī, Risāla-yi Munsha‌ʾāt, 267; ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt-i Tārīkhī-yi Īrān az Tīmūr tā Shāh Ismāʿīl (Tehran: Bungāh-i Nashr va Tarjuma-yi Kitāb, 2536/1977), 433‒34. It can, of course, be argued, contra Bāyezīd, that the open proclamation to all and sundry of recondite and esoteric matters was certainly not the custom of the salaf-i ṣāliḥ. 40  See on this topic Hasan Karataş, “The City as a Historical Actor: The Urbanization and Ottomanization of the Halvetiye Sufi Order by the City of Amasya in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011).

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regrettably short of the customary one thousand dinars.41 He concludes his missive with the prayer that the palm of the sultan might continue to scatter gold on the pates of all men.42 Bāyezīd’s second letter to Jāmī begins with the assertion that the stability and continuity of his realm have always been dependent on the favorable attention paid to it by “the people of unveiling and mystical states” (aṣḥāb-i vajd va ḥālāt), “men whom neither commerce nor selling distract from the remembrance of God” (Quran 24:37).43 It is they who have enabled Bāyezīd to engage in conquests without limit and to swathe himself in the cloak of the caliphate. And reciprocally, with complete sincerity, he has devoted himself to these “unblemished beings,” unique in their possession of praiseworthy characteristics, foremost among them being ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī. Receipt is then acknowledged of a manuscript of his kulliyyāt sent from Herat, flawless in every respect and replete with precious pearls of meaning, the result of inspiration from the world of the unseen.44 Bāyezīd assures Jāmī that he has already embarked on the study of the tome and taken to heart all the counsel it contains. As a token 41  This seems to be the sense of the eighth and ninth lines of verse with which Jāmī concludes his response to Bāyezīd: “Although the gifts of the monarch are beyond all reckoning,/only a complete accounting will yield the requisite measure.” A skilfully delicate expression of avarice! According to Latīfī, an error on part of the Ottoman treasury had led to a mere four hundred and eighty-four dinars being sent, not the full one thousand (Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 142‒43). According to E.J.W. Gibb (A History of Ottoman Poetry [London: Luzac, 1965], 2:26), it was Fātiḥ who instituted the practice of sending Jāmī 1000 ducats a year; if this be the case, Bāyezīd was simply following in his footsteps. 42  Ferīdūn Bey, Münşeʾātüʾs-Selāṭīn, 1:362; Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt, 435‒436. On this occasion as on others noted below, Bāyezīd is given the honorific, “Yıldırım.” See Jāmī, Risāla-yi Munsha‌ʾāt, 177. 43  What is intended here is that Jāmī and others like him who, thanks to royal patronage, can dispense with actively earning a living, are best situated to engage in the uninterrupted remembrance of God. The plain meaning of the verse is, however, the exact opposite: that there are men who while practising commerce (and by extension, other lawful trades and professions) remain vividly aware of their Creator. 44  What exactly is meant here by kullīyāt—obviously not the totality of Jāmī’s oeuvre—is unclear. Riyāḥī understands it to mean Jāmī’s three-part Dīvān, which would mean that the letter was written in 896/1491 (Zabān va Adabiyyāt-i Fārsī dar Qalamruv-i ʿUthmānī, 164). Alternatively, the kullīyāt might be the Haft Awrang, completed in roughly 890/1485, which would serve to give an approximate date to Bāyezīd’s letter and Jāmī’s response. Jāmī is in fact reputed to have sent Bāyezīd a copy of his Haft Awrang, but the prefatory annotation to the manuscript in question bears the date of 907/1501, thus excluding him from consideration as the donor. A kulliyāt of Jāmī dated 898/1492—i.e., the year of his death—and written for Bāyezīd is preserved at the Süleymaniye Library (MS Fatih 4045); see Hellmut Ritter, “Câmî,” Islam Ansiklopedisi, 3:20.

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of appreciation, and in the hope that Jāmī might continue to pray for the welfare of the Ottoman state, a command has gone forth for the dispatch of the requisite one thousand florins.45 On this occasion, the money was no doubt carefully counted before shipping, for there is no record of a complaint by Jāmī. Jāmī responded with a grandiose invocation of angelic blessings on Bāyezīd and the assurance that from his obscure and modest abode, he would continue praying for Bāyezīd’s success in all matters, those pertaining to this world and to the next. He proclaimed himself much gladdened by the receipt of the sultan’s “limitless beneficence” (iḥsān-i bī-karān), before warning himself against the greed it was liable to engender; the terms he uses are reminiscent of his reaction to the invitation from Fātiḥ: What concern has Jāmī with gifts from the Sultan of Rūm? They are a favor from the world of the unseen, sent him by way of mankind (? az rāh-i ʿumūm). Although his heart always shunned even the purest of coins the purse filled with the gold of the monarch’s affections has now softened it like wax. … So wealthy have these gold coins now made him that love for money will, I fear, mount an assault on his heart. Jāmī entrusted his missive to a party of dervishes, headed by Muḥammad Badakhshī, that was setting out from Herat for the Hajj. He requested that Bāyezīd receive them at court as they passed through Istanbul, for Jāmī had no doubt that the Sultan would bestow his favor on so indigent a group (ān jamʿ-i parīshān-ḥāl).46 Muḥammad Badakhshī was a principal murīd of Muḥammad 45  Ferīdūn Bey, Münşeʾātüʾs-Selāṭīn, 1:362‒63; Jāmī, Risāla-yi Munsha‌ʾāt, 268‒69; Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt, 437‒38. In Jāmī, Nāmahā va Munsha‌ʾāt, 310, the selfsame letter is dated Shaʿbān 875/January‒February 1471, which would place it in the reign of Fātiḥ, not Bāyezīd; and it is headed qayṣar-i Rūm ba Jāmī nivishta, without identifying the qayṣar in question. In their introduction to this collection of Jāmī’s correspondence (p. 73), Urunbayev and Raḥmānov clarify, however, that it was indeed Bāyezīd who sent the letter. The date, copied from one or possibly two manuscripts preserved in Tashkent, must therefore be discarded. Decisive, too, is the profession in the letter of devotion to the Sufis, a characteristic of Bāyezīd rather than Fātiḥ. 46  Ferīdūn Bey, Münşeâtüʾs-Selâtîn, 1:363‒64; Jāmī, Risāla-yi Munsha‌ʾāt, 270; Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt, 439‒40. The provision of funds and supplies to Central Asian pilgrims passing through Istanbul became an Ottoman tradition that lasted into the late nineteenth century; see Hamid Algar, “Tarîqat and Tarîq: Central Asian Naqshbandîs on the Roads to the Haramayn,” in Central Asian Pilgrims: Hajj Routes and Pious Visits between

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ʿAbdullāh Utrārī, known to Jāmī as the founder of the Naqshbandī tekke in Damascus he had visited while returning from the Hajj in 878/1473.47 Once Badakhshī had completed his pilgrimage, he too settled in Damascus in order to be with Utrārī, ultimately succeeding him as director of his tekke. Badakhshī was visited there by Sultan Selīm not long after the Ottoman conquest of Syria, but ascetically shunned his patronage.48 In addition to the letters he addressed to Bāyezīd, Jāmī thrice paid him tribute in his poetic works. First came a laudation in the third daftar of the diffuse mathnavī, Silsilat al-Dhahab, completed in 890/1486. It is devoted in its entirety to the theme of rulers, past and present, and the duty of ensuring justice that is incumbent on them. Jāmī accordingly lavishes hyperbolic praise on Bāyezīd at the very outset, even declaring him superior to Nūshīrvān, the pre-Islamic archetype of all monarchical virtue: Would that Nūshīrvān were now living, that he might see his justice enacted more fully than ever before! Ashamed to have claimed for himself the quality of justice, he would become slave to the ruler of Rūm [Bāyezīd]. He would take pride in such servitude to a monarch who is mujāhid and ghāzī.49 Sundry campaigns undertaken by Bāyezīd certainly justified the award of these two proud attributes; at least in general terms, his martial achievements were presumably known to Jāmī. Surprising at first sight is the poet’s description of Bāyezīd II as Yıldırım (“Lightning-Bolt”): “Exemplar of glory and exaltedness,/ Yıldırım Bāyezīd, the lord of the age!” This honorific is commonly bestowed on Bāyezīd I (r. 791/1389–804/1402); it is rather as “Velī” that Bāyezīd II is typically designated in Ottoman historiography, because of his inclination to keep the company of dervishes. One is tempted therefore to charge Jāmī with confusing the two Bāyezīds. However, at least one Ottoman text dating from the reign of

Central Asia and the Hijaz, eds. Alexandre Papas, Thomas Welsford and Thierry Zarcone (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2012), 39‒41, 75‒77, 95‒96, 100. 47  Algar, “Tarîqat and Tarîq,” 46. 48  Hamid Algar, “Bedahşî, Muhammed,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi 5:293. 49  Jāmī routinely invokes Nūshīrvān as an exemplar of just rule in a whole series of qaṣīdas addressed to contemporary monarchs. At the beginning of the second chapter of the Bahāristān he goes so far as to cite the hadith in which the Prophet supposedly declares “with pride” (tafākhur-kunān), “I was born in the time of the just king.” This earned him a fully merited reproach from one or more Ottoman scholars. See below, pp. 111‒113.

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Bāyezīd II, the Quṭb-Nāme of Firdevsī-i Rūmī, does speak of him as Yıldırım, a usage which presumably became known to Jāmī in Herat.50 Remarkable, too, is Jāmī’s declaration that Bāyezīd has turned “the land of Iran (khāk-i Īrān)” into “a bed of roses (gulshan).” One is tempted to deduce from it an encouragement of Bāyezīd to expand the Ottoman realm eastwards, perhaps at the expense of the Aqqoyunlus in Azerbaijan. The expression “land of Iran” is, however, geographically and—at this point in history—politically imprecise, and it may be that Jāmī employs it for purely poetic reasons, in order to echo his mention of Nūshīrvān six lines earlier. For in the same line, Jāmī also credits Bāyezīd with “enlightening the spirit of the Greeks,” and here the reference is definitely to antiquity. For Bāyezīd has “loosened the knots of the Greeks (ʿuqdahā-yi yūnānī)” i.e., resolved the problems posed by the Hellenic philosophers, while at the same time explaining “subtle matters of faith” (nuktahā-yi īmānī).51 He is, in other words, a paragon of comprehensive learning, comparable to his erudite predecessor, Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed; such, for example, is his command of the sciences of the Arabic language that by comparison the celebrated grammarian Sībawayh resembles a “blind goat” capable only of wagging its beard. And when Bāyezīd turns his attention from scholarship to warfare, proclaims Jāmī, “his sword is a resplendent sun,/rising to the apogee of faith. The darkness of misguidance is banished/and the world is illumined by the rays of true guidance.” A related consequence is the prevalence of perfect justice and harmony, so that “the lion pleads for peace with the cow” and “when a rabbit lays down its head in sweet slumber, a dog will enfold it in loving embrace.” Somewhat closer to literal truth is Jāmī’s praise of Bāyezīd’s munificence: “I wish now to speak of his generosity,/like his hand, to scatter pearls and jewels.” He thereupon calls into service all the conventional metaphors—the vastness of the ocean, the jewel-rich mine, the pearl hidden in the depths of the 50  Firdevsî-i Rumî, Kutb-Nâme, eds. Ibrahim Olgun and Ismet Parmaksızoğlu (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1980), 39, 46, 95, 130, 131, 142, 268. (Reference owed to Cornell Fleischer). When the same Firdevsī presented Bāyezīd with another of his mathnavīs, the SüleymānNāme, the Sultan found it tediously prolix and told him so. He is said to have reacted by satirizing Bāyezīd in the most unflattering terms and fleeing to Khorasan. See Kınalızâde, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 2:745, This story may be apocryphal, designed to create a parallel to Sultan Maḥmūd Ghaznavī’s failure to appreciate the Shāhnāma of Firdawsī and the poet’s angry response. If true, however, it also bears comparison with the refuge sought in Herat by another poet fearful of Bāyezīd’s wrath, Bihiştī, concerning whom see below, p. 84. 51  Jāmī frequently has recourse to this usefully rhyming pair of terms, yūnānī and īmānī, to refer to the two sources of wisdom, always with a clear preference for the second. They correspond to the ḥikmat-i ṭabīʿī and the ḥikmat-i ilāhī evoked in the poem he addressed to Fātiḥ; see above, p. 70.

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sea—but infuses them with new life by recourse to ḥusn-i taʿlīl: the restless surging of the ocean expresses its inability to compete with Bāyezīd’s largesse; the mine hides itself beneath a mountain from shame at its relative indigence; and pearls conceal themselves because of the certainty that were they to surface, Bāyezīd would forthwith distribute them. Finally, Jāmī upbraids himself for his temerity in praising the Ottoman sultan, and concludes with a lengthy prayer for his welfare and the indefinite continuation of his reign: properly understood, the “dum, dum” beating of his drums is nothing other than the imperative of the Arabic verb, dāma, “to continue.”52 The other two poems Jāmī addressed to Bāyezīd are to be found in Khātimat al-Ḥayāt; the last and the briefest segment of his tripartite Dīvān, it contains poems written between 894/1489 and 896/1491. The first of the two is a lengthy panegyric qaṣīda intended as a “response” (javāb) to a poem of the same type composed by Anvarī (d. 583/1187) in honor of Sultan Sanjar.53 Every tongue in the world, proclaims Jāmī, is engaged in praising Bāyezīd, whom he once again identifies as Yıldırım; although others, too, may wear crowns, they are reduced to dust at his threshold. His pearl-scattering generosity is the envy of the ocean, and far from determining his fate, the firmament itself is subordinate to him. Predictably and inevitably, Nūshīrvān is then invoked as his forerunner in securing universal justice and good order. The heavens are passively at his command, like a ball at the mercy of the polo bat. And thus the qaṣīda continues, with nothing specific to Bāyezīd and his reign, except perhaps the evocation of his battles with “enemies of religion” (ʿadūv-i dīn): unlike other monarchs who go to war only for worldly benefit, his concern is with saving faith from the evil of unbelief, and the seed of faith that is planted in his heart will blossom into one of the gardens of Paradise. Despite all this, concludes Jāmī, his purpose has not been to act as a panegyrist, with the hope of reward; rather to ensure that his Dīvān will be adorned with the name, “Bāyezīd.” For he has reached an age when all worldly gain is sheer loss, and although his lips will henceforth be sealed, he will still be engaged in the purest of prayers for the Sultan’s well-being.54 52   Silsilat al-Dhahab in Haft Awrang, 1:330‒32. 53  “Response” in this context means a poem written in the same metre and using the same rhyme as an existing composition; the purpose is to invite favorable comparison with the work of one’s predecessor. For the poem to which Jāmī was “responding,” see Awḥad al-Dīn Anvarī, Dīvān, ed. Muḥammad Taqī Mudarris Raḍavī (Tehran: Bungāh-i Nashr va Tarjuma-yi Kitāb, 1340/1961), 1:135‒37. 54  Jāmī, Dīvān, 2:444‒46. This is not Jāmī’s only versified expression of an intent to abandon versifying; a year or two before his death, he relates that “a thousand times I repented of this affair (poetry)/but could not escape it, unlike other affairs” (Dīvān, 2:37).

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Notwithstanding this vow of silence, Jāmī follows this qaṣīda immediately with another, still lengthier one, written in answer to “a letter from the Sultan of Rūm.” The letter in question is presumably different from both those discussed above, together with Jāmī’s answers, unless it be that he responded twice to one or other of the letters, first briefly in prose and then at greater length in verse. For, he confesses in this qaṣīda, so finely structured and eloquent is Bāyezīd’s letter that for a while he found it difficult to pen a proper response: Eagerly I resolved to write my reply, but then cautiously held back. I was trapped between boldly proceeding and timid restraint, until wisdom, seeing me distraught Said, ‘O Jāmī, your command of artistic prose does not permit you to answer the letter in kind. So abandon all thought of prose, this is my fatvā; turn rather to poetry, for “there is permitted to the poet [what is not permitted to others]”55 Obeying the fatvā, he composed an extremely skilful qaṣīda, replete with features such as repeated homophony; with the exception of two lines, the rhyme is established with Arabic words on the fāʿil paradigm (dāʾir, ṭāʾir, qāhir, and so forth). First Jāmī recalls the delivery of Bāyezīd’s message at daybreak: the light of the sun had finally overwhelmed the glow of the stars, animals had awoken from their slumber, birds had taken flight from their nests, and Jāmī was tranquilly seated in his retreat (khalvat). Suddenly one of his servants came to the door, announcing the arrival of a messenger from “the court of splendor and majesty.” Jāmī rushed out barefooted to greet him, and found him to be a merchant.56 He brought forth Bāyezīd’s letter from the sleeve of his cloak, whereupon Jāmī kissed it reverentially before carefully opening it and reading it three or four times, from beginning to end. Once he had decided on a versified response, a thousand modes of praising Bāyezīd came to his mind. Comparable in justice to ʿUmar, the Sultan ensures the prosperity of the world; he decapitates the unbeliever with his sword; he dissuades the sinner by enforcing the sharīʿa; and he combines in his person all the attributes of 55  This Arabic expression refers to the license granted poets to ignore certain technicalities of grammar, such as the use of tanwīn, if necessitated by metre. Jāmī, however, uses it in a different sense: that in poetry he is free to celebrate the virtues of Bāyezīd more expansively, not to say hyperbolically, than would have been possible in prose. 56  It is interesting to note that on this occasion a merchant was entrusted with conveying Bāyezīd’s message—an indication, among other things, that there was commercial as well as cultural traffic between Istanbul and Herat.

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perfection. So lofty is his palace that it is like a tenth heaven, above the other nine, and such is his justice that past, present, and future are united in his praise. What need does he have of reflection and thought, for the mysteries of all things are plain to him thanks to light from the unseen? And thus the encomium continues for a total of fifty-four lines. Jāmī finds it necessary to affirm in conclusion that in praising Bāyezīd he has been motivated not by greed, but by the need to give thanks for “past generosity” (navāl-i gudhashta), referring perhaps not only to a gift brought by the merchant from Istanbul but also to earlier instances of Bāyezīd’s munificence. Yet again, we find Jāmī treading a fine line between the acceptance of gifts and an ascetic horror of greed, between showing gratitude for gifts received and the desire for more it might be taken to imply.57 Ottoman largesse did in fact arouse not only greed, but also rivalry of the type endemic among scholars at all times and in all places. In 895/1490, Bāyezīd sent a mission to Persia bearing one thousand ducats for Jāmī in Herat, but only half that amount for Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 908/1502) in Shiraz. The leading theologian of the time, Davānī had dedicated to Bāyezīd his treatise on “Arguments in Proof of the Necessary Existent” (Risāla dar Bayān-i Barāhīn-i Ithbāt-i Vājib al-Vujūd), but was rewarded for his pains with a paltry five hundred ducats.58 He was grossly offended, and was heard to complain that Jāmī regularly received from Istanbul far more than this amount, simply because of Bāyezīd’s innate preference for poets over scholars.59 This perception prompted Davānī to seek revenge on Jāmī by composing a mathnavī that, although considerably shorter, is plainly intended as a combative response to Jāmī’s qaṣīda: “Once I saw the king [Bāyezīd] to be more inclined to verse,/I decided to assume the role of a poet.”60 57  Jāmī, Dīvān, 2:446‒51. 58  The letter accompanying the gift is, of course, replete with the requisite courtesies, beginning with the assurance that supporting scholars such as Davānī is the primary means for fulfilling the Prophetic injunction to “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.” Davānī is reciprocally courteous in expressing his disappointment. By citing Quran 6:160 (“he who performs a single good deed, it shall be counted for him as ten”), he intimates that meagre though Bāyezīd’s gift may have been, it will earn him abundant, even a hundred thousandfold, reward in the Hereafter. And as if the fault lay with Davānī himself, which there is no reason to think he truly believed, he promises to send Bāyezīd a better piece of work in the future. For the text of Bāyezīd’s letter and Davānī’s reply, see Ferīdūn Bey, Münşeʾātüʾs-Selāṭīn, 1:364, and Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt, 449‒451. Davānī also dedicated to Bāyezīd a commentary on various quatrains of Sufi content: Sharḥ-i Rubāʿiyyāt, ed. Zuhuruddin Ahmed, Quarterly Research Journal (Lahore: University of the Punjab) 12 (1990): 89‒116. This was, perhaps, “the better work” he had promised. 59  Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:82. 60  Technically speaking, Davānī’s mathnavī cannot count as a “response” to Jāmī’s qaṣīda, but the thematic elements found in both poems justify the description. Like Jāmī, Davānī

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Davānī’s outrage may have been due in part to the utter contempt in which Jāmī held him and his work, always supposing word of it had somehow reached him. While passing through Baghdad on his way to the Hajj, Jāmī had been alerted to a treatise by Davānī that, he opined, “exuded the odor of extreme self-satisfaction.” Although Davānī had never been able to advance beyond the Shifāʾ of Ibn Sīnā, he was more convinced of his own worth than any other scholar or philosopher; this, Jāmī diagnosed as a symptom of melancholia, an excess of the black bile leading to delusions of grandeur.61 The friendly albeit long-distance relations between Jāmī and Bāyezīd proved beneficial for at least two poets, one most probably Khorasanian and the other definitely Ottoman. The origins of Baṣīrī—a bilingual poet nicknamed Alaca (“mottled”) because of his disfigurement by leprosy—are a matter of dispute among the anthologists. Laṭīfī reports that he was born somewhere “near the frontier with ʿAjam,” an extremely vague expression.62 Sehī contents himself with the observation that he was Persian (ʿacem).63 According to ʿAhdī, he originated in ʿAjam, not on its borders, but came to maturity (neşv ü nemâ bulmuştur) in Diyār-i Rūm, in which case he must have migrated westwards at a fairly early point in his life.64 ʿĀşıq Çelebī assigns Baṣīrī unambiguously to Khorasan, as does Qınalızāde; this seems quite likely, given the occurrence of Chaghatay verb forms and vocabulary in the Turkish verse he composed, even after he settled in Istanbul.65 After a spell in the service of the Aqqoyunlus, begins his poem with an extended description of daybreak before recounting the arrival of the merchant delivering the cash. Just as, with false modesty, Jāmī professes himself deficient in the arts of inshāʾ, Davānī declares himself incompetent as a poet; and both poems conclude with prayers for the permanence of Bāyezīd’s reign. It is worth noting that Davānī, like Jāmī on two separate occasions although not in this qaṣīda (see above), identifies Bāyezīd II as Yıldırım. For the text of Davānī’s poem, see Navāʾī, ed., Asnād va Mukātabāt, 452‒55. It is the prefatory note to the poem in the Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript used by Navāʾī that permits us to date to 895/1490 Bāyezīd’s gifts and the responses they elicited. It would be interesting to know how Davānī came to learn of the discrepancy in gifts: was it perhaps through indiscretion on the part of the merchant, always supposing it was the same individual who made the deliveries in Herat and Shiraz? 61  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 69. The vehemence of Jāmī’s condemnation is difficult to explain, for none other than ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, his close friend and confidant, evaluated Davānī quite favorably (Majālis al-Nafāʾis, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Ḥikmat [Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Bānk-i Millī, 1323/1945], 309‒10). 62  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 189. 63  Sehī Bey, Heşt Bihişt, 279. 64  Süleyman Solmaz, Ahdî ve Gülşen-i Şuʿarâsı (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 2005), 233‒34. 65  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 55a‒b; Kınalizâde, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:214. See too Ahmet Kartal, Basîrî ve Türkçe Şiirleri (Ankara: Akçağ, 2006) and Sohrweide, “Dichter und Gelehrte aus dem Osten,” 282‒83. For his part, Mehmet Çavuşoğlu claims to discern traces of Azerbaijani Turkish in Baṣīrī’s verse, thus situating him, in agreement with Laṭīfī, on

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he came to Herat in roughly 892/1487, associating there with both Jāmī and Navāʾī. After a preliminary visit to Istanbul in 897/1491, he joined the entourage of Gövde Aḥmed Bey in Tabriz, but when four years later this Aqqoyunlu ruler sent him on a mission to Bāyezīd, he took advantage of the opportunity to settle permanently in Istanbul and enjoy the patronage of the Ottoman Sultan.66 As proof of his poetic credentials, he brought with him some of the works of Jāmī—perhaps provided him by the poet himself—as well as those of Navāʾī, previously unknown, it is said, to the Ottomans. Famed primarily for the gentle mockery of those he encountered, both the high and the low, he excelled also in the art of the chronogram, one example being the two concise lines in Persian in which he lamented the passing of Jāmī.67 He died in 941/1534.68 Bihiştī (d. 917/1511), known in his capacity of historian as Sinān Çelebī, is famed as a poet primarily for his khamsa, a pentad of narrative mathnavīs including two closely modelled on the work of Jāmī. He entered the service of Bāyezīd early in life; precisely when is not known. At some point, he engaged in “a form of unseemly behaviour” (bir vaḍʿ-ı nāşāyeste) at the court that, although left delicately unspecified by Laṭīfī, was serious enough to have him fear the wrath of the Sultan and flee to vilāyet-i ʿAcem, to Timurid Herat. There Jāmī and Navāʾī took him under their wing, affording him not only protection but also training in the arts of poetry. Bihiştī nonetheless desired to return to Istanbul, so Jāmī and Navāʾī jointly wrote a letter to Bāyezīd requesting that he be forgiven, citing the Quranic praise of “those who restrain their anger and pardon their fellows” (3:134). Their petition had the desired effect, and Bihiştī was able to return safely to Istanbul and resume his duties.69 The dates and duration of his sojourn in Herat are unknown.70 the eastern fringes of Anatolia (“Basîrî,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 5:105‒6). Baṣīrī’s Persian poetry is the subject of a master’s thesis presented by Fikret Sarısoy to Kırıkkale University in 2001: “Basîrî’nin Farsça Divanı.” 66  Kınalızade (Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:214‒7) makes no mention of any association with the Aqqoyunlus. Çavuşoğlu also directs the reader to the entry on Baṣīrī in Ḥakīmzāda Muḥammad Qazvīnī’s supplement to his Persian translation of Navāʾī’s Majālis an-Nafāʾis, where he is described as a “well-known poet who, content with a meagre livelihood, did not frequent the doors of the wealthy” (Majālis al-Nafāʾis, 382‒83). Either the Baṣīrī known to Qazvīnī was someone quite distinct from the migrant to Istanbul, or the assiduous search for patronage in which he engaged after moving there wrought a fundamental change in his character. 67  Cited by Kartal in Basîrî ve Türkçe Şiirleri, 26. 68  Cemal Kurnaz, Anadolu’da Orta Asyalı Şairler (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı, 1997), 73‒80. 69  Sehī, Heşt Bihişt, 244; Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 194‒95; ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 58a; Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:225‒26. 70  Brigitte Moser, the editor and translator of Bihiştī’s history, suggests as possible termini ad quem the years between 1481 and 1485 or 1485 and 1487; the latter pair of dates seems more likely (Moser, Die Chronik des Ahmed Sinân Çelebi genannt Bihişti: eine Quelle zur

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The same applies to another Ottoman poet, originally from Kastamonu, who not only visited Jāmī in Herat but also used his name as makhlaṣ, perhaps in order to hint at a special relationship with him; it is said indeed that he became a murīd of Jāmī (irādet getirip onlardan el almıştır), but this is far from certain. In any event, his self-identification with Jāmī was so complete that he became known as Cāmī-i Rūmī and his original name was forgotten. After returning to Rūm, he spent most of his time piously secluded in mosques, shunning all human company; it goes without saying that unlike the other poets we have discussed, he had no connection to the court. He was rarely heard to say anything, although a few lines of verse have been attributed to him. Qınalızāde remarks of his poetry that it lacks “sweetness and subtlety,” citing a singularly uninspired line by way of proving his case.71 Jāmī’s primary dynastic loyalty was manifestly to the Timurid rulers of Khorasan; he has been appropriately described as the third member of a Herat triumvirate, together with Mīrzā Ḥusayn Bayqarā and ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī. The poems he dedicated to the Timurids were far more numerous than those he addressed to Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed and Bāyezīd, and his correspondence with them was infinitely more copious. In addition, he addressed encomia not only to the Aqqoyunlus but also to the rival Qaraqoyunlu dynasty, extolling both for the generosity they lavished on him, and he sent poetic compliments to benefactors as far away as India. The annual shipment of one thousand florins from Istanbul was not the sole monetary token of esteem he was accustomed to receiving; as he himself proclaimed, he was favored by virtually all the dynasties with which he was contemporary.72 It was, however, only the Ottomans that survived. Jāmī’s influence on the culture that flourished under their auspices was similarly long-lasting. 4

Jāmī and the “Classical Epoch” of Ottoman Literature

The fifty years that elapsed between the conquest of Istanbul and the death of Jāmī constitute, together with the following century, what has been called the Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches unter Sultan Bâyezid II. [Munich: Dr. Dr. Rudolf Trofenik, 1980], 11). 71  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 208‒209; Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:245. 72  “Talk of me has made its way to every clime, so it is my words that dominate all speech./ Sometimes the emperor of Rūm sends his salutations, at other times the ruler of India submits his message./From the lord of Iraq and Tabriz constantly come fine sentiments and exquisite gifts./What to say of Khorasan and its generous men? Their hands drown me in the sea of munificence” (Dīvān, 2:37).

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Second Period or “classical epoch” of Ottoman Turkish literature.73 Prominent among the features that served to define it was a heightened awareness of Persian literary models, due in large part to the value accorded to Persian culture in general and to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in particular by the courts of Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed and Bāyezīd II. Such was his prestige that if certain Ottoman poets of the period refused in their arrogance to “bow before Jāmī and Niẓāmī,” this was to be taken as a sign of deficient talent, not of excellence or originality.74 This attentiveness to Persian literary works went together with an effort to emulate them, a seemingly uncreative tendency that nonetheless served as a prelude to the further maturation of Ottoman poetry and its attainment, if not of complete independence from Persian, at least of a degree of autonomy.75 The paradox is, however, only apparent, for several Ottoman poets drew a clear distinction between mere translation—sometimes dismissed as a lowly pursuit—and creative emulation (tatabbuʿ). Such emulation was precisely what underlay a goodly portion of Jāmī’s work, and insofar as Ottoman littérateurs sought in turn to emulate him, they were—inevitably and by definition— reaching back also to his predecessors in Persian literary tradition, including Niẓāmī, ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī, Khusraw Dihlavī, and Ḥāfiẓ. So although Jāmī was without doubt their principal focus of attention, as the most recent, prolific, and versatile representative of that tradition, they by no means neglected the achievements of those who had preceded him. Thus Raḥmī Çelebī of Bursa (d. ca. 974/1566) clearly acknowledged that “in the festival of fine speech know that Jāmī is the supreme criterion (keyfiyet-i ʿālem),” but then claimed “it is only Kamāl (Kamāl Khujandī, d. 807/1404 ) who might grasp the imaginative words of Raḥmī.”76

73  Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der osmanischen Dichtkunst (Pesth: C.A. Hartleben, 1836), 1:135‒36; E.J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, 1:5‒22; Alessio Bombaci, Histoire de la Littérature Turque (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1968), 267‒307. 74  Thus Laṭīfī in the introduction to his Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 96. He similarly bemoans in the conclusion of his anthology the absence of poets who might measure up not only to Jāmī or Niẓāmī, but also to Saʿdī or Khujandī (580). Niẓāmī is mentioned in tandem with Jāmī in a wide variety of contexts not only because the former was the predecessor of the latter in the art of the narrative mathnavī, but also because the two names fortuitously rhyme. 75  As Fuad Köprülü put it in somewhat nationalistic terms, at first the works of poets who did not learn their art from the works of Jāmī (and Niẓāmī) could not expect to have their works counted as literature, but then the “cultural influence” of Istanbul and Ottoman civilization overcame this Persocentric attitude (Edebiyat Araştırmaları [Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1966], 197, 201, 289. 76  Solmaz, Ahdî ve Gülşen-i Şuʿarâsı, 311‒12. See too Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:400‒4.

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Both these factors—the inferior standing of translation and the continuing awareness of the poets before Jāmī—are present in the career of Aḥmed Pāşā (d. 902/1497), frequently celebrated as the foremost poet in the time of Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmed. Many of his contemporaries described him as a mere translator from the Persian, and given the cultural traffic underway between Istanbul and Herat, he may be presumed to have had acquaintance with the poetry of Jāmī, although to what extent is unclear.77 Given the combined bulk of Jāmī’s three dīvāns and the conventionality of most of the themes in his ghazals, it would require much time and labor to identify poems written by Aḥmed Pāşā by way of translating his verse; certain only is that he is not among the numerous Persian poets—Ḥāfiẓ prominent among them—he mentions by name in his attempts to translate or emulate their poems.78 Conversely, there is some evidence that Jāmī may have been aware of his work. Although he is not recorded to have corresponded with Jāmī, one line of his verse supposedly reached Herat and won Jāmī’s enthusiastic approval. Navāʾī was attempting to persuade a gathering of friends, including Jāmī, that the poets of Khorasan were without peer, but Jāmī was unconvinced and proclaimed the poets of Rūm to be fully their equal. At precisely this point, a visiting dervish from Rūm put in an appearance, and when asked if the poets of his homeland had recently produced anything worthy of mention, he recited this bayt of Aḥmed Pāşā: Çin-i zülfün müşke benzetdim haṭāsın bilmedim/Key perişān söyledim bu yüz karasın bilmedim (“To musk did I liken the twist of your locks—I knew not my error/Carelessly did I speak, I knew not that I had blackened my face”). Thereupon Jāmī rose and danced in spontaneous ecstasy, proclaiming himself vindicated.79 The anecdote may well be apocryphal, simply a sign of the high esteem in which Jāmī, and by extension other Persian poets, were held by the Ottomans.80 77  Gibb contents himself with remarking that “as the most prominent among the Ottoman poets of his time, he can hardly fail to have been acquainted with some at least among Jâmî’s writings” (A History of Ottoman Poetry, 2:40). 78  For a complete listing, see Harun Tolasa, Ahmet Paşa’nın Şiir Dünyası (Ankara: Atatürk Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1973), 69. 79  Cited by Ali Nihad Tarlan from the Riyāḍuʾş-Şuʿarā of Riyāḍī (d. 1054/1644) in the introduction to his edition of Aḥmed Pāşā’s Dīvān (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1966), xi‒ xii; the poem of which this is the maṭlaʿ is to be found on pp. 245‒47 of the Dīvān. The excellence of the line presumably resides in its īhām (willed ambiguity): both the locks of the beloved and musk are indeed black, but the simile drawn by the poet is woefully inadequate and “blackens his face,” i.e., disgraces him according to a Turkish idiom derived from the Persian. 80  On the other hand, it is known that wandering dervishes from Rūm did occasionally make their way to Herat; see above. According to some accounts, it was not so much Jāmī as

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Of greater interest, perhaps, is the tadhkira writer Laṭīfī’s citation, in justification of Aḥmed Pāşā’s dependence on Persian models, of a line of verse from an unnamed poet who happens to be none other than Jāmī: “Fine meaning is a beauteous youth (shāhid) pure of body/clothed from time to time in a new garment.”81 If for Jāmī this had meant the artful reworking of familiar themes, the practice of Aḥmed Pāşā was “clothing that same beauteous youth in Turkish words (elfāẓ-ı rūmīden libās ilbās eyleyüp).” Laṭīfī took this change of apparel to be identical with translating from Persian into Turkish, a practice wholly acceptable in the view of some of the learned. But, he admitted, it is condemned by many possessors of fine taste (ẓürefā), and the consensus is that if Aḥmed Pāşā had not been accused of being a translator (mütercimlik töhmeti) he would have been accounted the foremost of all poets.82 Lāmiʿī Çelebī of Bursa (d. 940/1533) stands out from other poets of the age by his self-designation as “the Jāmī of Rūm.” The tadhkira writers generally acquiesced in his claim, although one of them, Laṭīfī, took it to imply “an abundance of writings” comparable in volume and variety to the oeuvre of Jāmī, not a close similarity to his spiritual persona.83 But it was indeed to a more intimate and privileged affinity with Jāmī that Lāmiʿī had laid claim: “I am the Jāmī of Rūm, the murīd of the shaykh of Jām;/Would that I could now circumambulate the lands of Khorasan!”84 By “the shaykh of Jām,” Lāmiʿī alNavāʾī to whom Aḥmed Pāşā’s verse owed what excellence it could claim; his poetry began to improve after he studied thirty-three ghazals of Navāʾī, newly arrived in Istanbul (Ali Nihad Tarlan, introduction to Ahmed Paşa, Dîvân, xi). Navāʾī served as source of inspiration for many Ottoman poets, and insofar as he had been deeply influenced by Jāmī, both personally and poetically, he effectively served as a channel conveying Jāmī’s literary legacy to the Ottomans. Baṣīrī is said to have been the first to bring Navāʾī’s dīvāns to Istanbul (Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, 2:48, n. 2). 81  Jāmī, Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, eds. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad Jān ʿUmarov, and Abū Bakr Ẓuhūr al-Dīn (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1379/2000), 146. With this line, Jāmī was seeking to justify the dependence of Salmān Sāvajī (d. 777/1375) on Kamāl Ismāʿīl Iṣfahānī (d. 635/1237), but it also describes much of his own poetic production. 82  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 155‒59. Bombaci repeats the criticism by claiming that “his fame rested mainly on his plagiarizing the Persians” (Histoire de la Littérature Turque, 276). Kınalızade insists, however, that Aḥmed Pāşā’s detractors were motivated by pure jealousy (Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:135). 83  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, 109b; Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 2:830; Latîfî, TezkiretüʾşŞuʿarâ ve Tabsıratü-n-Nuzamâ, 477. On the life and work of Lāmiʿī, see Günay Kut, “Lâmiʿî Çelebi,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 27:96‒97. 84  Cited by Hamit Bilen Burmaoğlu in his introduction to Bursalı Lamiʿî Çelebi Divanı’ndan Seçmeler (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1989), 7. To be noted here is, once again, the geographic division of the Persianate realm into Rūm and ʿAjam (or as here, Khorasan). Sehī Beg endorses Lāmiʿī’s claim by observing that the rank Jāmī enjoyed in Diyār-i ʿAjam accrued in Diyār-i Rūm to Lāmiʿī (Heşt Bihişt, 166).

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ludes to a shaykh earlier than Jāmī, namely Shaykh Aḥmad Zhanda-Pīl Nāmiqī (d. 536/1141), whom Jāmī himself had invoked when explaining his makhlaṣ; and if the word jām be taken to mean “goblet,” then Lāmiʿī—again like Jāmī— is suggesting that he is devoted to the goblet of the heart into which the wine of divine love is poured.85 In short, by means of these parallels with the lines of Jāmī, Lāmiʿī goes some way to proving himself the “Jāmī of Rūm.” One element of the affinity was a Naqshbandī affiliation: Lāmiʿī was a murīd of Emīr Aḥmed Bukhārī, who had in turn been initiated by Mollā ʿAbdullāh Ilāhī, both men having met Jāmī in Herat while travelling from Samarkand to Anatolia. More important, however, was the literary dimension of Lāmiʿī’s fidelity to Jāmī: he rendered several of his works, both poetry and prose, into Turkish, and it is this that caused the tadhkira writers to give credence to his pretensions. At least one, however, thought his claims excessive and judged the quality of his verse inferior to its quantity, apart from which he rendered into Turkish the works of several Persian poets besides Jāmī.86 To identify poems in Lāmiʿī’s Dīvān written as naẓīras to the compositions of Jāmī would be a challenging task. The Dīvān has not yet been published in its totality, and even if it were, a comparison of its contents with the massive bulk of Jāmī’s poetry would demand much labor and time. In view of the line cited above, it is probable that Lāmiʿī did compose numerous naẓīras to Jāmī. It has also been suggested, questionably, that Lāmiʿī’s prologue to his Turkish rendering of ʿUnṣurī’s Vāmiq u ʿAdhrā, an analysis of the basmala in terms of letter symbolism, owes much to Jāmī’s brief mathnavī on the same subject.87 By contrast, the lengthy preface that Lāmiʿī wrote to his Dīvān leaves his debt 85  This is the corresponding line from Jāmī: “My place of birth is Jām, and the distillations of my pen are but a drop from the goblet (jām) of the Shaykh al-Islām [Shaykh Aḥmad Zhanda-Pīl]./Hence in my registry of poetry my penname is Jāmī for two reasons” (Dīvān, 1:40). 86  ʿUnṣurī and Fakhr al-Dīn Jurjānī were among the other authors whose poetry he put into Turkish. Somewhat similar is the case of Yaʿqūb Ṣarfī (“the grammarian”) of Kashmir (d. 1003/1595), nicknamed “Jāmī the Second” by one of his teachers, Mullā Muḥammad Ānī Khuttalānī, who is said to have been acquainted with Jāmī the First. His ghazals are said to exhibit similarities to the verse of Jāmī, and his Ravāyiḥ is clearly modelled on his predecessor’s Lavāyiḥ. But his pentad of mathnavīs shows no trace of such imitation; it happens instead to include a reworking of ʿUnṣurī’s Vāmiq va ʿAdhrā, the same romance that Lāmiʿī, the Jāmī of Rūm, had rendered into Turkish. It was perhaps in recognition of Ṣarfī’s versatility as poet, scholar and Sufi, that Khuttalānī proclaimed him “Jāmī the Second.” See Raḥmān ʿAlī Ṣāḥib, Tadhkira-yi ʿUlamā-yi Hind (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore, 1914), 255, and Girdhari Tikku, Pārsī-sarāyān-i Kashmīr (Tehran: Anjuman-i Īrān va Hind, 1342/1963), 8‒24. 87  Ahmet Sevgi, “Molla Câmî’nin Besmele Şerhi ve Türk Edebiyatına Tesirleri,” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi (Konya) 5 (1999): 20‒25. The evidence is not strong: the verbal and

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to Jāmī in no doubt, for it is replete with citations from his predecessor and discusses many of the themes repeatedly evoked by him, above all the religious legitimacy of poetry, a legitimacy in no wise diminished by the Quranic dismissal of notions that the Prophet was a poet.88 Among Jāmī’s seven mathnavīs, it was only Salāmān va Absāl, an allegorical tale of progression by means of purgation from phenomenal to supernal beauty, that Lāmiʿī chose to imitate; to facilitate comprehension of its philosophical content, he inserted numerous didactic verses of his own. He was the sole Ottoman poet to emulate this work of Jāmī.89 Destined for wider circulation and more permanent renown were the versions he produced of two of Jāmī’s prose works. The first was Shawāhid al-Nubuwwa li Taqwiyyat Yaqīn Ahl al-Futuwwa, a digest of miraculous occurrences and signs accompanying the lives of the Prophet, his Companions, the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt, the Followers (i.e., the generation after the Companions), the Followers of the Followers, and the early Sufis.90 Adding to the material Jāmī had collected reports he “found in reputable books with authentic chains of transmission,” Lāmiʿī completed his work in 915/1509.91 The second, concluded a decade later, was a translation and thematic similarities between Jāmī’s poem (see Dīvān, 1:177‒78) and the lines from Lāmiʿī are few and unremarkable. 88  For the transliterated text of the preface and a rendering in Modern Turkish, see Tahir Üzgür, Türkçe Dîvân Dîbâceleri (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1990), 128‒255. The spelling of many of the Persian and Arabic quotations in this book is incorrect, as are their translations into Turkish. 89  Still unpublished, Lāmiʿī’s version of Salāmân va Absāl is the subject of a doctoral dissertation presented in 1997 to the Atatürk University, Erzurum: Erdoğan Uludağ, “Vak’aya Dayalı Bir Eser Olarak Lâmiʿî Çelebi’nin Salâmân u Absâl Mesnevisi: IncelemeKarşılaṣtırmalı Metin-Sadeleştirme.” See too Sabiha Gürkan, “Lâmiʿî Çelebinin Ebsâl ü Salâmân [sic] mesnevisi ile Mollâ Câmî’nin Salâmân Mesnevisinin Karşılaştırılması,” thesis presented to the Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University, 1954. 90  Published in 1904 by Nawal Kishore of Lucknow, and in 1995 by Hakikat Kitabevi of Istanbul. 91  It is said to have been printed repeatedly in late Ottoman times. By 2009, the transcribed version published by Hakikat Kitabevi in Istanbul (Şevâhid-ün Nübüvve: Peygamberlik Müjdeleri) had gone through no less than twenty-six printings. Another translation of the Shawāhid al-Nubuwwa was reportedly made by Akhīzāde Ḥalīmī Çelebī (d. 1013/1604), a pupil of Ebūʾs-Suʿūd Efendī, the celebrated şeyhülislām; it never attained the fame of Lāmiʿī’s version (see Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri [Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-ı ʿĀmire, 1333/1915], 1:228). Kātib Çelebī regarded it nonetheless as superior to Lāmiʿī’s rendering in wording and clarity of expression (Kashf al-Ẓunūn, 2:col. 1067). What is effectively a third translation was made by Thenāʾī Meḥmed Efendī of Manisa and dedicated by him to Qānūnī Süleymān; supposedly it was Farīd ad-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, glimpsed in a dream, who inspired him to undertake the task. Thenāʾī presents his version as an original work rather than a translation, but the claim this implies is dishonest, for he deviates from

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expansion of Jāmī’s great hagiographical compendium, the Nafaḥāt al-Uns. He entitled it Fütūḥuʾl-Mücāhidīn li Tervīḥ Qulūbi’l-Müşāhidīn by way of celebrating the Ottoman conquest of Belgrade in the same year; more commonly and conveniently, it was known simply as Nefeḥātüʾl-Üns Tercemesī.92 Lāmiʿī has also been credited with the Leṭāʾif-Nāme, a collection of witticisms relating to various classes of men that is occasionally reminiscent of Jāmī’s Bahāristān; it lacks, however, the predominantly didactic tone of the Bahāristān and exceeds it in the vulgarity of certain anecdotes.93 In any event, it was not Lāmiʿī himself but his son, Lāmiʿīzāde ʿAbdullāh Çelebī, with the penname Lemʿī, who compiled the work; the role of the father was restricted to assembling the material and passing it on to his son to refine and complete.94 He cautioned him that in so doing he should avoid the inclusion of “empty jokes inclining men to evil thoughts.”95 Lāmiʿīzāde often disregarded this admonition: thus of the five anecdotes he relates concerning Jāmī, one is grossly offensive (Jāmī mocks the scrawny sons of a fellow poet, Dihakī); another has him ridiculing the poetic efforts of the same Dihakī; and two more are straightforwardly obscene.96 After Lāmiʿī, no Ottoman poet or scholar laid claim to being a privileged heir of Jāmī, a comprehensive imitator of his work.97 The translation and emulation of his works nonetheless continued throughout the tenth/sixteenth Jāmī’s text only in a few insignificant ways. See Vladimir Minorsky, The Chester Beatty Library: A Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts and Miniatures (Dublin: Hodges & Figgis, 1958), 15‒16. 92  See below, pp. 117–118. 93  Günay Kut (Alpay), “Lāmiʿī Chelebi and His Works,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Chicago) 35/2 (April, 1975): 82. 94   Ahdî ve Gülşen-i Şuaʿrâsı, 503‒4. 95  Lâmiʿî-zâde Abdullah Çelebi, Latîfeler, rendered into Modern Turkish by Yaşar Çalışkan (Ankara: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1994), 17. This edition represents a selection of 223 anecdotes from the 327 of the original. An earlier edition published by Çalışkan includes only 145: Latifeler (Istanbul: Tercüman Gazetesi, 1978). 96  Lâmiʿî-zâde Abdullah Çelebi, Latîfeler, 56‒60. Lāmiʿīzāde could, it is true, have chosen more edifying anecdotes, but Jāmī was by no means averse to the acerbic mockery of his contemporaries and a casual recourse to vulgarity. See, for example, the stories concerning him related by one of his contemporaries, Mawlānā Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī, in his Laṭāʾif al-Ṭavāʾif, ed. Aḥmad Gulchīn-i Maʿānī (Tehran: Iqbāl, 1336/1957), 231‒39. This Persian work may, in fact, have served as a source for several chapters of the Leṭāʾif-Nāme. 97  It was, however, hyperbolically claimed on behalf of a certain Cāmī Çelebī of Istanbul that because of the quality of his verse, he deserved to be known in Rūm as “the second Jāmī” (Cāmī-i Thānī); see Solmaz, Ahdī ve Gülşen-i Şuʿarâsı, 43. As for the remark of the humorist Amīrak, “I’m Jāmī’s brother,” this was simply his flippant response to charges of excessive recourse to Persianisms in his verse (ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 49a–49b).

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century and beyond in the realm of the ghazal. One instance among many others is a poem by Fuḍūlī (d. 988/1556) that describes in lascivious detail a handsome young man observed in the hammam; it is modelled unmistakably, in wording and imagery, on a similar poem by Jāmī. Fuḍūlī’s ghazal begins: “Proudly did that cypress full of seductive charm make his way to the hammam; the bright candle of his cheek lit up the whole of the hammam./His body could be glimpsed through his open collar, and when he disrobed, a new moon was born.” And these are the first two lines of Jāmī’s poem: “When at daybreak he left home making his way to the hammam, a thousand of the heart-bereft became like dust beneath his feet with each step that he took./The whole chamber lit up when he laid bare his body—the brilliance of his form was like a new dawn.”98 In several of his ghazals, Jāmī laments—or feigns to lament—the unseemly persistence into old age of his attraction to handsome young men.99 This is the opening line of one such poem: “How to describe my frailty in separation from you? Like a lawn starved of water—that’s how I am!” But the closing line has a quite different tone, one of defiance: “Say not ‘abandon love, o Jāmī, now that you’re old’;/for by loving you I’m back to youth in my old age!”100 Several Ottoman poets shared Jāmī’s predicament. Among them was a certain Dervīş (d. 980/1572), who became enamored in his dotage of a beauteous young man in Damascus. A friend mockingly put himself in his place and composed the 98   Fuzûlî Divanı: Gazel, Musammat, Mukattaʿ ve Rubaʿî Kısmı, ed. Ali Nihad Tarlan (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1950), 121‒22; Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:501‒2. For a complete French translation of both poems, see Bombaci, Histoire de la Littérature Turque, 206‒8; his rendering of Jāmī’s poem is based on the Italian version by Alessandro Bausani (Storia della Letteratura Persiana [Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1960], 475‒76). Precisely the fact that Fuḍūlī’s poem follows Jāmī so closely makes it unlikely that it be the record of a real occurrence. 99  One example is the ghazal beginning, “O youth in whose lasso my heart is entrapped, have pity, for I am old, I am weak, I am broken.” (Dīvān, 2:285‒86). Like several other themes recurring throughout Jāmī’s ghazals, this might be dismissed as a trope, a mere poetic exercise. There is, however, evidence beyond his poetry that the addiction was real and obstinate. When a visitor from Bilād al-Rūm asked Jāmī whether he would ever abandon his perverse preferences, he retorted with a question of his own, “Will you ever forswear bread and water?” (ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Khamsat al-Mutaḥayyirīn, MS Fatih 4056, fol. 691). On the cult of ephebe adoration in Persian poetry, see Sīrūs Shamīsā, Shāhidbāzī dar Adabiyāt-i Fārsī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Firdaws, 1381/2002), 196‒98 discuss the case of Jāmī. Relevant, too, is the following general observation of E.J.W. Gibb on Ottoman—and, by extension, Persian—homoerotic poetry: “… it would be as great a mistake to imagine on the one hand that all those who professed this (homoerotic) preference were dissolute reprobates as to fancy on the other that they were all Platonic sentimentalists” (History of Ottoman Poetry, 3:124). 100  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:605.

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following distich on his behalf: “Draining the goblet of love and lunacy, I became afflicted with the love of a beauteous youth.” By way of riposte, Dervīş contented himself with citing Jāmī’s assertion of rejuvenation through love.101 A more pious note was struck by another poet of the tenth/sixteenth century, Medḥī of Ladik. As he prepared to set out on the Hajj, he composed a ghazal with the opening line: “O Lord, as I set out on the road to Baṭḥā (= Mecca)/ joyously to circumambulate the exalted Kaʿba …”102 This is clearly recognizable as a naẓīra to the ghazal Jāmī wrote as he was making his way to the Haramayn: “When, o Lord, I set my face to Yathrib (= Medina) and Baṭḥā/to sojourn first in Mecca and then in Medina.”103 The same ghazal of Jāmī was invoked on at least three other occasions when Ottoman poets or officials were about to depart for the Hijaz. When Revānī, custodian of monies destined for the Haramayn (ṣürre emīni) in the time of Sultan Selīm, sought to decide whether the time was right for him to go on the Hajj, he supposedly sought an omen in the Dīvān of Jāmī and found it forthwith in this ghazal.104 When Ghazālī, nicknamed Delī Birāder on account of his recurrent hedonist impulses, decided to relocate to Medina in the hope of moral redemption, he sought permission to do so from Sultan Süleymān by composing a takhmīs on this same ghazal of Jāmī.105 Mollā Muṣṭafā b. Aḥmed (d. 971/1563), a member of the learned hierarchy in the time of the same monarch, prefaced a petition to be appointed qadi of Medina with the opening line of the ghazal, and his request was immediately granted.106 By the turn of the eleventh/seventeenth century, Ottoman poets were beginning to assert a degree of independence in the realms of the qaṣīda and the ghazal or even claim outright superiority therein. The maturation this implied is associated above all with Bāqī (d. 1008/1600), a poet contemporary with Fuḍūlī but markedly different from him in temperament and taste. The love celebrated in his ghazals is entirely profane, divorced from the allusive language and subtleties of Sufism; it is a celebration of straightforward worldly pleasures that predominates throughout. Particularly remarkable is the absence from Bāqī’s verse of even a naʿt, the praise of the Prophet that conventionally forms part of the prefatory material in a dīvān—this, although Bāqī once served as the qadi of Mecca and aspired to become the şeyhülislām. The language of his poetry is said to have been close to the spoken Turkish of 101  Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:371. 102  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuʿamâ, 496. 103   Dīvān, 1:630‒31. A diligent examination of other poets’ ghazals would assuredly uncover many similar instances of emulation and citation. 104  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 240b. 105  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 296a. 106  Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq, 42.

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Istanbul, and thereby to have distanced itself somewhat from the influence of Persian.107 Despite all this, Bāqī claimed boastfully to be “the Jāmī of the age:” “The goblet of verse, like the poetry of Bāqī, circles the world; so now the Jāmī of the age at this feast are we, o beloved.”108 Thanks to its radīf, cānā (“o soul/ beloved”), the ghazal of which this is the concluding line comes fortuitously at the very beginning of his Dīvān. It is to be read not as the acknowledgement of a debt to Jāmī, but as a claim to have equalled or even superseded him.109 Bāqī was not the last poet to declare himself—or be declared by others— “Jāmī of the Age,” but the claim appears to have become a matter of threadbare convention, hardly to be taken seriously. Such was the case with a certain Aḥmed (d. 1122/1710), who deliberately refrained from choosing a makhlaṣ because of what he regarded as the distinctive and unrivalled excellence of his verse. During the many years he spent in Diyār-i ʿAjam studying ʿirfān, he did indeed acquire an excellent command of Persian which helped him earn the designation “Jāmī of the Age,” as well as the favor of Köprilizāde Fāẓıl Aḥmed Pāşā leading to an appointment at a madrasa in Bursa. By way of further encomium, he was also known as “the Suyūṭī of his time,” thanks to his mastery of Arabic lexicography.110 Insofar as Persian models continued creatively to influence the Ottoman ghazal and qaṣīda, it was largely a question of the so-called “Indian style.” 107  On the poetry of Bāqī, see Jan Rypka, Báqí als Ghazeldichter (Prague: Philosophical Faculty of the Carolingian University, 1926). For all the labor he invested in his work, Rypka shows little appreciation of Bāqī’s oeuvre, instead deploring, in a manner typical of orientalist attitudes at the time, his constant recourse to complex figures of speech, tropes and abstractions. 108  Bāqī, Dîwân: Ghazalijjât, ed. Rudolf Dvořák (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1908), 1. While fully aware that Bāqī is referring to Jāmī, Rypka suggests that the word, jāmī/cāmī, read as a common noun, has the sense “Glaser” (glazier), not a meaning that it bears in either Persian or Turkish. He then remarks that, by contrast, Jāmī chose his makhlaṣ with exclusive reference to his place of birth (Báqí als Ghazeldichter, 147). As noted above, however, Jāmī cites at least one additional reason for his choice; it was repeated by Lāmiʿī in his selfdesignation as the Jāmī of Rūm. 109  There was indeed more than one salient difference between the two poets: Bāqī died of a heart attack while savagely beating a servant girl; Jāmī, despite an oft expressed misanthropy, was by all accounts compassionate to his underlings. 110  Sâlim Efendi, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ, ed. Adnan Ince (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 2005), 198‒202. A number of other Ottoman poets, some of them quite late, did use “Cāmī” as makhlaṣ, not only the Cāmī-i Rūmī mentioned above (p. 85), but also Meḥmed Cāmī (d. 911/1505), and ʿAbdülbāqī Çelebī (d. 1019/1610) of Istanbul, a müderris who composed mystical poetry (see es-Seyyid Rıḍā, Tedhkire-i Rıḍā, 25). Five more are catalogued in Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Ansiklopedisi: Devirler, Isimler, Eserler, Terimler, 2:13‒14. Why any of them became known as Cāmī is unclear; in general, no particular claim to excellence seems to have been involved.

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Marked by a heavy reliance on rhetorical devices and on verbal subtleties barely distinguishable from riddles, the fashion was exemplified above all by ʿUrfī (d. 999/1590), Fayḍī (d. 1004/1595) and Ṣāʾib (1081/1673), and espoused by numerous Ottoman poets of the eleventh/seventeenth century and beyond.111 But this tendency, generally observable throughout the Persianate world, does not mean that the Ottomans forgot Jāmī’s qaṣīdas and ghazals. Thus Yūsuf Nābī (d. 1124/1712) of Urfa, a poet renowned for the homiletic nature of much of his verse and cited as a practitioner of the Indian style, wrote poems in the genre of takhmīs not only on ghazals by those three foremost exemplars of the style, but also on four by Jāmī.112 Naḥīfī (d. 1151/1738), another didactic poet beholden to the “Indian style,” composed a takhmīs on three lines of naʿt by Jāmī, each taken from a different poem. One was the same poem beginning, “When, o Lord, I set my face to Yathrib (= Medina) and Baṭḥā (Mecca)/to sojourn first in Mecca and then in Medina…,” that was invoked by four other prominent Ottomans as they were about to leave for the Haramayn.113 This may also have been the case with Naḥīfī, for he went on the Hajj in 1094/1683.114 And echoing Laṭīfī two hundred and fifty years earlier, a poet as late as Sünbülzāde Vehbī (d. 1224/1809) condemns the poetasters of his time for their ignorance of masters such as Niẓāmī and Jāmī.115

111  Bombaci, Histoire de la Littérature Turque, 312‒21. For an exhaustive treatment of the subject, see Israfil Babacan, Klasik Türk Şiirinin Son Baharı: Sebk-i Hindî (Hint Üslubu) (Ankara: Akçağ Yayınları, 2010). On the “Indian style” in general, see Ye. E. Bertel’s, “K voprosi ob ‘indiiskom stile’ v persidskoi poezii,” in Charisteria Orientalia (Prague, 1956), 56‒59; Alessandro Bausani, “Contributo a una definizione dello ‘stilo indiano’ della la poesia persiana,” Annali dell’ Istituto Universitario di Napoli 7 (1958): 167‒78; and Wilhelm Heinz, Der indische Stil in der persischen Dichtung (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1973). 112  Nābī, Dīvān (Bulāq: Dār al-Ṭibāʿa, 1257/1841), 16‒19. See Mine Mengi, Divan Şiirinde Hikemî Tarzın Büyük Temsilcisi Nâbî (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 1991). The various components of this edition, Nābī’s poems in Persian constituting the sixth, are each paginated separately. Takhmīs: a form in which five lines of an earlier poem (qaṣīda or ghazal) are turned into stanzas by being supplied with three additional hemistichs; the rhyme of the third of these hemistichs, maintained at the end of each stanza, is established by the opening line of the original poem. 113  See above, p. 93. 114  Sâlim Efendi, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ, 653‒56. One of the other two lines from Jāmī opens ghazal no. 936 (“I have an Arab, Medinan, Qurayshi beloved/painful longing for him is nothing but joy and delight” [Dīvān, 1:791]). The other is not to be found anywhere in this, the critical edition of his Dīvān. 115  Sünbülzāde Vehbī, Dīvān (Bulaq: al-Maṭbaʿat al-Amīriyya, 1253/1837), 29.

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Jāmī and the Ottoman Mathnavī

This gradual and partial emancipation of Ottoman poets from Jāmī did not extend from the ghazal to the mathnavī. The contrasting situation of the two genres—ghazal and mathnavī—from the eleventh/seventeenth century onward was elegantly summarized as follows by Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī (d. 1045/1635), himself the author of a pentad of mathnavīs: “In panegyric and ghazal, the pen of Rūm has defeated the magicians of ʿAjam/Just like the sword of the Ottomans, dripping with blood, the triumph of the Turkish-tongued is now manifest./But as for the genre of the mathnavī, it is here that the grasp of the ʿAjam remains strong.”116 But even in the sphere of the mathnavī, Jāmī was not always the sole focus of emulative attention, for the numerous Ottoman poets who devoted themselves to the genre made a point of acknowledging their indebtedness to all their Persian predecessors. Thus mention is commonly made of Niẓāmī and Khusraw Dihlavī—especially the former—together with Jāmī even when the mathnavī emulated had been treated by only one of the three.117 This was more than a courteous formality, for they legitimately incorporated in their own works narrative or didactic elements selected from the various Persian versions available, not simply the most recent. At the same time, they were expressing a desire to be included in a chain of creative imitation that was substantially unaffected by the switch from one language to another. This is well illustrated by Laylī va Majnūn, the mathnavī of the Persian tradition most frequently selected for emulation by Ottoman poets.118 Here, a slight digression is in order. Among the versions at their disposal were not only those of Niẓāmī, Khusraw Dihlavī, and Jāmī, but also that of Jāmī’s nephew and protégé, ʿAbdullāh Hātifī (d. 927/1521). Before embarking on his version of Laylī va Majnūn, Hātifī supposedly beheld a jewel-box replete with hidden pearls that bore the name neither of Niẓāmī nor of Khusraw and was accompanied with a page addressed exclusively to him: “It thus became certain that this [narrating the tale of Laylī and Majnūn] is my task, not that of another.”119 Hātifī thus fulfills the obligation of mentioning his two predecessors, skillfully denying all indebtedness to them at the same time. He also exalts Jāmī over Niẓāmī—“Monarch supreme of the realm of verse, Jāmī!/two hundred 116  Cited by Turgut Karacan in the introduction to his edition of Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī’s Heft-Hvan Mesnevisi (Ankara: Atatürk Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1974), x. 117  See, for example, ʿAṭāʾī, Heft-Hvan Mesnevisi, 345. 118  The Persian spelling “Laylī” as opposed to the more common “Laylā” is mandated by lines in Jāmī’s telling of the tale where the name rhymes with words ending in –lī. 119  ʿAbdullāh Hātifī, Laylī va Majnūn, ed. Sa’dullo Asadulloyev (Dushanbe: Universiteti Davlatii Tojikiston, 1962), 15, lines 265–68.

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Niẓāmīs wait at his door”120—but in a general sense, not on account of a version of the tale by Jāmī. This suggests that Hātifī finished his Laylī va Majnūn some time before 889/1484, the year in which Jāmī completed his rendering, for Hātifī would hardly have dared to compete with his uncle by attempting to narrate the same tale, dependent on him as he was for guidance and promotion in all matters poetic. Jāmī had indeed a share in Hātifī’s Laylī va Majnūn, for before his nephew embarked on the pentad of which it was to be a part, he had tested his abilities before authorizing him to proceed. At Hātifī’s request, he even contributed the opening line of the work, wishing him success in his endeavour: “This book the pen has now founded/May the signet of acceptance be allotted to it!”121 Jāmī’s prayer did not go unanswered, for several Ottoman poets narrating the story seem to have preferred Hātifī’s version of it to Jāmī’s.122 The earliest Turkish rendition reflecting Jāmī’s influence is owed to Bihiştī, the first Ottoman poet to compile a pentad of mathnavīs. It will be recalled that, fleeing the wrath of Bāyezīd, he once took refuge with Jāmī in Herat,123 and it was precisely during this period of exile that he completed his Leylā ve Mecnūn. At the very outset, he acknowledges Niẓāmī, Khusraw Dihlavī, and 120  Hātifī, Laylī va Majnūn, 16, line 284. 121  Sām Mīrzā Ṣafavī, Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī, ed. Iqbāl Ḥusayn (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1973), 20‒21. In thus assisting Hātifī, Jāmī plainly allowed avuncular sentiment to prevail over sectarian repugnance, for his nephew was a Shiʿi; this is evident from the absence of the customary laudation of the Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidīn from the prefatory section of Laylī va Majnūn and an invocation of the virtues of Imam ʿAlī in its place (13‒14, lines 207–37). Hātifī repaid this favor in a fairly significant way, for it was he who first suggested that Jāmī was the “Seal of the Poets,” an honorific that has clung to him for many centuries: “Today, in the epoch of Jāmī, I am fully the equal of Khusraw and Niẓāmī/Supreme among all men of eloquence in this world, he is the seal of the religion of eloquence (dar dīn-i sukhanvarīst khātam)/In poetry there have been three prophets, all are agreed on this—/ Firdawsī, Anvarī and Saʿdī. Although [the Prophet has said] ‘there is no prophet after me’ (lā nabiya baʿdī)/he [Jāmī] is the seal of those three, for he is unique in this age./I know that none will dispute this, he stands in no need of description by me” (Laylī va Majnūn, 102, lines 2042–48). The first miṣraʿ of the first of these lines (imrūz manam ba-dawr-i Jāmī) has been translated by Agah Sırrı Levend to read: “Bu kadehin döndüğü devrin Câmîsi benim” (I am the Jāmī of this age in which the cup passes round) [Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1959), 83]. Although ba-dawr-i Jāmī may be intended to hint at the meaning Levend ascribes to it, Hātifī is certainly not claiming to be the equal of Jāmī; he is, on the contrary, attributing whatever excellence he may possess to the favour of his uncle. 122  Examples are Aḥmed Rıḍvān “Tütünsüz,” Larendeli Ḥamdī, and Celālzāde Ṣāliḥ; see Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 190, 284, 289. Latîfî even praised Hātifī’s rendering as superior not only to that of his uncle but even to that of Niẓāmī (Tezkiretüʾṣ-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 135). 123  See above, p. 84.

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Jāmī, “three unique ones” (üç yegāne), as his predecessors, and confessing his inferiority to them, decides to “rub my face in their footsteps” (Hempā olmadığumı gördüm/pes izlerine yüzümi sürdüm).124 Among the motifs Bihiştī selects from Jāmī’s telling of the tale are the staging of an encounter between Majnūn and Laylā in the house of Karīma; Laylā’s wearing of anklets; and the death of Majnūn while clasping a gazelle in his embrace.125 Ḥamdullāh Ḥamdī (d. 909/1503) was one of the twelve sons of Āqşemseddīn (d. 854/1459), the celebrated Sufi who was at the side of Fātiḥ Sultan Meḥmed during the conquest of Istanbul. This availed him little, however, in his efforts to win fame and favour as a scholar and poet, so he withdrew to Göynük in northwest Anatolia, where he continued to compose verse and maintained a correspondence with Jāmī.126 Despite the admiration for Jāmī’s oeuvre this implies, Ḥamdī’s own version of Leylā ve Mecnūn, completed in 905/1499, contains but one element drawn from Jāmī: Majnūn’s joining the queue of the indigent as they waited for Laylā to feed them.127 In the preface to his Leylā ve Mecnūn, Celīlī (d. post 977/1569) acknowledges Niẓāmī as the first narrator of the tale and then presents himself as his fourth successor, coming after Khusraw Dihlavī, Jāmī, and Hātifī; this makes him analagous, he suggests, to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, the fourth of the Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidīn, and his pen, to Dhū-l-Fiqār, ʿAlī’s spine-sundering sword.128 Most narrative elements in Celīlī’s version are taken from Niẓāmī and Hātifī; the only significant theme derived from Jāmī is, again, Majnūn waiting in line with the needy in order to catch a glimpse of Laylā.129 The popularity of this episode is further proven by its occurrence in versions of the tale written by Ḥaqīrī Tebrīzī, Sevdāʾī (fl. 10th/16th century) and ʿÖrfī (d. post 1186/1772).130 More definingly associated with Jāmī than the tale of Majnūn and Laylā is that of Joseph and Zulaykhā; in narrating it, he had fewer predecessors and he alone inspired his imitators, in both Persian and Turkish. According to the estimate of E.J.W. Gibb, Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā “came to be regarded throughout the Second Period (i.e., 1450–1600) of Ottoman poetry as being beyond all 124  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 149‒50. 125  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 159. 126  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 89b. 127  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 173. 128  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 200. 129  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 208. Celīlī, the son of Ḥāmidī, a migrant poet from Isfahan who did well for himself in Istanbul, is said also to have composed a mathnavī on the tale of Joseph and Zulaykhā; apart from a copy reportedly owned by Levend but never published, none other is known to exist (Hasan Aksoy, “Celîlî, Hâmidîzâde,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 7:270). 130  Levend, Arap, Fars ve Türk Edebiyatlarında Leylâ ve Mecnûn Hikayesi, 208, 235, 332.

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other works the standard alike of literary taste and style and of the altitude of the poet-mind.”131 It is certainly true that the story aroused in Jāmī greater enthusiasm than any other component of his heptad, to the extent that he rose up in spontaneous dance while engaged in the work. His Laylī va Majnūn may count indeed as a sequel to Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, for the sweetness he had imbibed in narrating the first tale flowed over naturally into the second.132 It is again Bihiştī and Ḥamdī, the two poets acquainted with Jāmī, the one directly and the other via correspondence, that are the first to compose mathnavīs on the theme of Joseph and Zulaykhā inspired by his work. Bihiştī’s version not having survived the ravages of history, we may turn forthwith to that of Ḥamdī. Earlier poets had told the story of Joseph and Zulaykhā in several Turkic languages, he recalls at the outset, but finding none of them satisfactory he set to work himself.133 Initially he relied on the Persian version misattributed by him and many subsequent generations of poets and literary historians to Firdawsī, but then turned wholeheartedly to that of Jāmī.134 Thinking himself too “deficient and dumb” (qāṣır u lāl) to accomplish the work successfully, Ḥamdī had been seeking omens on whether to proceed with it when “suddenly encouragement arrived from Jāmī” (Cāmī’den irdi nāgehān cürʾa). Given the ties of affection that linked Ḥamdī to Jāmī, the “encouragement” might have been an expression of support for the project, but more probably it was the unexpected arrival in Göynük of a copy of Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. For thereafter he relied almost exclusively on Jāmī, by way either of translation or of imitation (tanẓīr). (That Ḥamdī clearly distinguished the two methods and regarded both as legitimate is worth noting). The transition from pseudo-Firdawsī to Jāmī comes with the introduction of Zulaykhā into the narrative, although elements reminiscent of the former recur once Yūsuf ascends the throne of Egypt. Entirely original are the ghazals with which Ḥamdī occasionally intersperses the narrative, a feature lacking in both the models on which he drew. According to Qınalızāde, it is primarily to this incorporation of

131  Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, 2:9. 132  Jāmī, Laylī va Majnūn in Haft Awrang, 2:235. 133   Ḥamduʾllāh Ḥamdī’s Mesnevī Yūsuf ve Zeliḫā, ed. Zehra Öztürk (Harvard: Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Turkish Sources XLII, 2001), 13, line 338. On versions of the tale in Khwarazmian and Crimean Turkish, see Alessio Bombaci, Histoire de la Littérature Turque, 92, 95, 100. It should be noted that for whatever reason the vocalization of Zulaykhā’s name changes in Turkish to Zelīkhā. 134  The Yūsuf va Zulaykhā for long thought to have been written by Firdawsī is now known to be the work of a certain Shamsī or Amānī, a poet of the Saljuq period; see Dhabīḥullāh Ṣafā, Tārīkh-i Adabiyyāt dar Īrān (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Ibn-i Sīnā, 1342/1963), 1:489‒92.

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additional material that Ḥamdī’s rendering of the tale owes its high standing.135 In any event, Ḥamdī’s rendition of the story, largely dependent on Jāmī, is said to have been influential in consolidating his reputation among the Ottomans as an unparalleled master of verse worthy of study and imitation.136 Kemālpāşāzāde, the şeyhülislām who lauded Persian as superior to all other languages except Arabic,137 gave proof of his own proficiency in that tongue by composing, some time between 897/1492 and 918/1512, a Yūsuf ve Zelīkhā that was heavily indebted to Jāmī. It was perhaps in order to elevate his own version that, dissenting from most critical opinion, he criticized Ḥamdī’s rendering as “dry and lacking in charm.”138 Unlike his competitor, he pays no attention at all to pseudo-Firdawsī; employs the same metre as Jāmī; begins his work with a precise translation of Jāmī’s opening munājāt;139 and reproduces, in Persian, most of the headings used by Jāmī for the sections of his work. Such is the case, for example, with the twelfth section, devoted to the excellence and virtuous aspects of poetry. Here, however, he identifies Niẓāmī, the fountainhead of tradition for the romantic mathnavī, as his ultimate source of inspiration. True, Jāmī “opened a fresh season of spring, adorned the pasture anew/made manifest a variety of instructive tales (ʿibretler) for the world to behold.” But “although I am a unique shaykh [(şeykh-i ferīdim): an allusion both to his own standing in the Ottoman learned hierarchy and to Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, the author of several celebrated mathnavīs] on my own path (ṭarīqumda), with all my soul I am the murīd of Niẓāmī./It is with a mention of him that I lay my foundation of speech, may God grant bliss to his spirit!”140 Since Niẓāmī never wrote a mathnavī on the theme of Joseph and Zulaykhā, Kemālpāşāzāde’s purpose in declaring himself his murīd appears to be obscuring or balancing his indebtedness to Jāmī; by reaching back to the source of the tradition both poets had inherited, he becomes effectively his full equal. Kāmī Meḥmed of Karaman (d. 952/1545), described as “a learned poet,” produced a translation of Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, adding to it certain material of his own. No copy of the work has survived, but Laṭīfī praised it for

135  Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:309. Bāyezīd to whom Ḥamdī dedicated his work, failed, however, to appreciate it (Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 237). 136  Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, 2:9, 146. 137  See above, p. 64. 138  Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 1:309. 139  Kemāl Pāşā-zāde, Yūsuf u Zelīḫā, ed. Mustafa Demirel (Harvard: Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures, Turkish Sources LIV, 2004), 3, lines 1–14. 140  Kemāl Pāşā-zāde, Yūsuf u Zelīḫā, 35, lines 959–61, 964–66.

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unsurpassable beauty and delicacy and judged it superior to Ḥamdī’s rendering.141 Another Turkish telling of the Josephian tale drawing on Jāmī’s work was that of ʿAbdurraḥmān Ghubārī (d. 974/1566), a Naqshbandī shaykh who after a period of disfavor in the reign of Qānūnī Süleymān was appointed qadi of Mecca and the director of a newly established Naqshbandī tekke in the Holy City.142 Despite a manifest lack of talent, he liked to claim equality with both Jāmī and Niẓāmī: “I adorn poetry, in the footsteps of Niẓāmī; I quaff the same fine wine as Jāmī.”143 Çākirī Sinān Bey, a poet contemporary with Bāyezīd, also produced a version of Yūsuf va Zulaykhā which remains unpublished; the degree to which it draws on Jāmī cannot presently be determined.144 Yaḥyā Bey (d. 990/1582), a janissary of Albanian origin whose official career was marked by the usual alternation of favor and disfavor, is said to have perfectly commanded Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and to have composed poetry in all three.145 His khamsa includes a Yūsuf ve Zelīkhā, inspired by thoughts of Joseph as he passed through Egypt on his way to the Hajj. While implicitly conceding that the narrative is essentially—and inevitably—the same as that told by his predecessors, he denies that his work might be a mere translation from the Persian of Jāmī or pseudo-Firdawsī: “This fine book, this pearl of meaning, is, for the most part of my own imagining./Translation would not befit this story; I place not a dead man’s helva in my mouth.”146 An equally disdainful attitude to translation was professed by Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, a poetically gifted scholar somewhat comparable to Kemālpāşāzāde; after completing his madrasa studies, he held a number of positions as qadi at various locations in Rumelia before returning to Istanbul and dying there some time after 1044/1635. One fine day, he would have us believe, he was seated in a meadow with a group of admiring friends. One of them brought out a copy of Jāmī’s Subḥat al-Abrār (“The Rosary of the Pious”), the fourth component of his heptad, completed in 887/1482, and began reading from it; they liked what they heard but some of them, ignorant of Persian, could not understand 141  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾş-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 457‒78; Kınalızâde, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 2:815. 142  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:348; Ali Alparslan, “Gubârî, Abdurrahman,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 14:167‒69. 143  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 287a–288a. 144  Sehī, Heşt Bihişt, 141. The same applies to the renderings by Zihnī (d. 1033/1623) and his contemporary, Ömer Khalvetī of Manisa (see Kātib Çelebī, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, 2:col. 2055). 145  Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 2:1077‒81; Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:497‒98. It was, however, precisely a versified translation of Jāmī’s work that was made by Meḥmed ʿIzzet Pāshā (d. 1330/1912); it remains unpublished, so its quality cannot be ascertained (Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:342‒44. 146  Gibb, History of Ottoman Poetry, 3:120.

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it, and requested of ʿAṭāʾī that he translate the work into Turkish. He protested that translation was a lowly task, unworthy of true poets: “I said: translations are not favored; who will accept being a translator? … Translation is shameful, a form of borrowing, but “none can claim as possession the endowment of meaning (vaqf-ı maʿnā)”—an important distinction.147 One in the group suggested that he produce a work similar to the Subḥat al-Abrār; he had, after all, already engaged in tatabbuʿ of Niẓāmī’s Makhzan al-Asrār. He modestly demurred, but like so many allegedly reluctant authors in the Perso-Turkish tradition, consented when his friends insisted. The result was Ṣoḥbetüʾl-Ebkār (the first half of which title is a metathesis of Subḥat al-Abrār).148 ʿAṭāʾī’s refusal to translate by no means implied disrespect of Jāmī; on the contrary, he manages in one skillful line to pay homage both to him and to his own father, Nevʿī: “‘Tis that gnostic (Nevʿī) I acknowledge as my guide;/he was the Jāmī of the age, and I, its Hātifī.”149 He echoes the forty pearl-strings (ʿiqd) of Jāmī’s work with forty discourses (ṣoḥbet), but most of them offer ethical and practical advice rather than the Sufi material presented by Jāmī. Each section is followed by a story (dāstān) illustrating the point it intends to make, not, however, by a munājāt as is the case in the Subḥat al-Abrār. Local and topical themes are not wanting, examples being a discussion between a Christian physician and the şeyhülislām, and an increase in the bribery prevailing among Ottoman officials.150 The thirteenth ṣoḥbet is devoted to physiognomy (firāset), a discipline taken very seriously by many Ottoman scholars, and an anecdote of the humorist Naṣrettīn Hoca forms the dāstān appended to the twentyeighth ṣoḥbet.151 Two topics are shared by the two works: the justice of kings (ṣoḥbet 12 and ʿiqd 35), and the necessity for patience and forebearance (ṣabr: ṣoḥbet 24 and ʿiqd 13).152 The poetic value of ʿAṭāʾī’s work is distinctly inferior to 147  The description of maʿnā as a waqf—a public endowment from which the duly qualified may legitimately benefit—is reminiscent of the statement of a certain shaykh recorded by al-Jāhiẓ: “Meanings are there for the taking, by the side of the road (maṭrūḥa fīʾl-ṭarīq); they are known to the non-Arab and the Arab, to the Beduin and the city dweller; what is important is the selection of meter, the choice of wording (al-lafẓ), and ease of pronunciation …” (ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn, Tahdhīb Kitāb al-Ḥayawān [Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1403/1983], 75). Reference owed to Muhammad Siddiq. 148  Nevîzâde Atâyî, Sohbetüʾl-Ebkâr, ed. Muhammet Yelten (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1998), 30‒32. 149  In another of his works, the Sāqīnāme; see Yelten’s introduction to Sohbetüʾl-Ebkâr, ix. On Nevʿī, prominent as both scholar and poet, see Kınalızâde, Tezkiretüʾş-ṣuarâ, 2:1008. 150   Sohbetüʾl-Ebkâr, 51‒54, 97‒100. 151   Sohbetüʾl-Ebkâr, 110‒14, 191‒93. 152   Sohbetüʾl-Ebkâr, 104‒10, 169‒73. Compare Jāmī, Subḥat al-Abrār in Haft Awrang, 1:678‒80, 610‒13.

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that of Jāmī, and it is rather for his biographical dictionary, Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq fī Tekmiletiʾş-Şaqāʾiq, that he is primarily remembered. Nonetheless, ṢoḥbetüʾlEbkār is an excellent example of a naẓīra that involves transition from one language to another.153 6 Jāmī’s Chihil Ḥadīth (Arbaʿīn) and its Ottoman Emulators Forming a category of its own is Jāmī’s commentary in Persian verse on forty hadith, a work known either as Chihil Ḥadīth or as Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī, completed in 886/1481.154 Inspired by the tradition according to which the Prophet promises resurrection as a scholar to all who memorize—or preserve—forty hadith, numerous traditionists had already made a selection for this purpose. The hadith they chose related sometimes to a particular topic such as jihad, or—more commonly—to fundamental matters of ethics and faith, traditions that were both easy to memorize and straightforwardly beneficial for the common believer.155 The genre was, then, already well-established, in Persian as well as Arabic, but Jāmī’s came to overshadow many of its predecessors. He states his goal clearly at the outset: “This versifying translator hopes to fulfill the condition of ‘whoever memorizes and preserves for my community forty hadith beneficial to them’ and thereby to attain the felicitous reward of ‘God will resurrect him on the Day of Judgement as a jurist and scholar.’” But while aspiring to this glorious outcome for himself, Jāmī also wished, by means of 153  Not enough has survived of Ḥilyetüʾl-Efkār, another of ʿAṭāʾī’s mathnavīs, to suggest that it, too, may have been a naẓīra to another of Jāmī’s works with a title ending in –ār: Tuḥfat alAhrār. Agâh Sırrı Levend suggests that it may have been written in emulation of Niẓāmī’s Khusraw va Shīrīn (Atâyî’nin Hilye-tü-Efkârʾı [Ankara: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1948], 27). This has been disputed by Turgut Karacan (introduction to ʿAṭāʾī’s Heft-Hvan Mesnevisi, 15). In any event, commentaries were written on both the Tuḥfat al-Aḥrār and the Subḥat al-Abrār by Muṣṭafā b. Meḥmed Şemʿī of Prizren (d. 1000/1591); see Kınalızade, Tezkiretüʾsşuarâ, 1:524‒26, and Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:258. 154  Edited by ʿUmarov as Chihil Ḥadīth in Jāmī, Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 309‒23, and as Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī by Kāẓim Mudīr-Shānachī (Mashhad: Intishārāt-i Āstān-i Quds-i Raḍavī, 1363/1984). 155  See Abdülkadir Karahan, Islâm-Türk edebiyatında Kırk Hadîs: toplama, tercüme ve şerhleri (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1954); M. Yaşar Kandemir and Abdülkadir Karahan, “Kırk Hadis,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 35:467‒75; and Kāẓim Mudīr-Shānachī, introduction to his edition of Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī, 3‒15. There are numerous variant wordings of the tradition itself, as explained by Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Dīn al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) at the beginning of his commentary on forty hadith, the most celebrated of all works in this genre: Sharḥ al-Arbaʿīn al-Nawawiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1403/1983), 2.

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his translation, to facilitate the general understanding of the forty hadith he selected.156 He chose for the purpose hadith that would be easy for the reader to memorize; some of them, indeed, having the air of conveniently rhyming proverbs rather than traditions of the Prophet.157 He must be judged successful in this respect; each hadith is paraphrased, somewhat expansively but for the most part accurately, in an easily comprehensible Persian qiṭʿa of two hemistichs. Issue may be taken, however, with Jāmī’s rendering of the twenty-sixth hadith, uṭlubū l-khayr ʿinda ḥisān al-wujūh (“seek good from those of goodly appearance”): “Station yourself at the door of the beauteous when you go forth for the fulfilment of need/for you will enjoy the sight of him even before he has met your need.”158 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jāmī’s notorious addiction to the contemplation of beauteous youths has caused him to substitute physical beauty for the virtuous mien intended by the hadith.159 Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn found much favour among the Ottomans, including members of the ruling house; to Bāyezīd, one of the sons of Qānūnī Süleyman, is owed a finely calligraphed copy now preserved at the Dār al-Kutub in Cairo.160 Manuscripts of the work abound in Turkish libraries, with several hundred preserved in Istanbul alone.161 It also inspired a dozen renderings in Turkish of varying quality that have been surveyed by three scholars: Necīb ʿĀṣım,

156   Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī, ed. Mudīr-Shānachī, 21; Chihil Ḥadīth, ed. Muḥammad Jān ʿUmarov, 313. 157  The twenty-seventh dictum chosen by Jāmī, zur ghibban, tazdad ḥubban (“Visit but rarely; then you’ll be loved more dearly”), is indisputably a proverb; see Aḥmad al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ al-Amthāl (Cairo: al-Maktabat al-Tijāriyyat al-Kubrā, 1379/1959), 1:322‒23. Whether Jāmī was the first to elevate this proverb to the status of hadith is unknown. Sometimes the opposite occurred: a hadith acquired currency as a proverb; for an example, see al-Maydānī, Majmaʿ al-Amthāl, 2:107. 158   Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī, ed. Mudīr-Shānachī, 27; Chihil Ḥadīth, ed. ʿUmarov, 319. 159  Abdülkadir Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 4/4 (May 1952): 349‒50; idem, Islam-Türk Edebiyatında Kırk Hadis (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayımları, 1954), 104. 160  Naṣrullāh Mubashshir al-Ṭarāzī, Fihris al-Makhṭūṭāt al-Fārisiyyah (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub, 1966), 1:118. He completed it in 965/1559, roughly a year before the two-day battle he fought near Konya in a vain attempt to wrest the succession from his brother, Selīm II (see Şerafettin Turan, Kânûnî’nin oğlu şehzade Bayezîd vakʿası [Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1961]). Aḥmad Munzavī is in manifest error when, citing the Cairo catalogue, he describes the Bāyezīd in question as “son of Qānūnī Selīm” (Fihrist-i Nuskhahā-yi Khaṭṭī-yi Fārsī ([Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī-yi Manṭiqa‌ʾī, 1349/1970], 2:1595). Minus the designation of Selīm as “Qānūnī”, the same mistake is to be found in Mudīr-Shānachī’s introduction to Arbaʿīn-i Jāmī (16). 161  Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 345, n. 1.

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Abdülkadir Karahan, and, most recently and comprehensively, Ahmed Sevgi.162 All three describe these Turkish versions as “translations.” In some cases, however, they are better viewed as naẓīras, “parallels,” poems with the same form, metre and theme as Jāmī’s original, but permissibly differing from it in wording and—in most cases—in rhyme. The poets in question seem, moreover, to have been aware of their predecessors, the result being a chain of emulation with Jāmī as its first link. The numbering and arrangement of the forty hadith are not identical in all the Turkish renderings, presumably because of divergences among the various manuscripts of Jāmī’s text at their disposal.163 The first translation was that composed in Chaghatay Turkish by ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī; fired with enthusiasm for the task once Jāmī had shown him the finished product, he completed it in a mere two days.164 The earliest version in a more westerly form of Turkish was Fuḍūlī’s Qırq Ḥadīth; the exact date of its composition appears to be unknown. He proclaims in his preface that with his rendering of the forty hadith in Persian verse, Jāmī will indeed have attained the reward he hoped for; Fuḍūlī’s own goal in emulating Jāmī’s commentary is more modest—“benefiting the generality of men” (ʿumūm-i feyḍ).165 He therefore employs a simple and accessible style that remains faithful to Jāmī’s original.166 His rendering of the hadith concerning the ḥisān al-wujūh is, however, subtly different, for he shuns the sensuous tone affected by Jāmī

162  Necīb ʿĀṣım, “Hadīth-i Erbaʿīn Tercümeleri,” Millī Tetebbuʿlar Mecmūası 4 (Istanbul, 1331/1913): 143‒65; Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri;” Ahmet Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri (Konya: n.p., 2000). For each of the forty hadith in question, Sevgi provides first the Arabic text and Jāmī’s poetic paraphrase, and then the nine Turkish renderings he has identified, greatly facilitating the task of comparing them both with each other and with Jāmī’s original. Unlike his predecessors, he also includes the prefaces each poet wrote. I am indebted to Ahmed Zildžić for providing me with a copy of Sevgi’s work. 163  A uniform sequencing of the forty hadith is similarly lacking in two of the printed editions of the Persian original: those prepared by Mudīr-Shānachī and ʿUmarov. Karahan makes use of the 1893 Tashkent edition which also includes Navāʾī’s Chaghatay translation; Sevgi does not refer to any printed edition at all, or to a manuscript. 164  Alişir Nevaî, Divanlar ile Hamse Dışındaki Eserler, ed. Agah Sırrı Levend (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1968), 17‒24; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 4‒6. 165  Fuzûlî, Kırk Hadîs Tercemesi, ed. Kemal Edib Kürkçüoğlu (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1951), 8; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 7‒8. 166  Fuzûlî, Kırk Hadîs Tercemesi, 23. The Izmir manuscript of Fuzûlî’s Kırk Hadis also includes Jāmī’s original (Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 358). It is likely that Fuḍūlī was also acquainted with Navāʾī’s Chaghatay rendering.

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and makes explicit the connection between outward appearance and inward excellence: “a goodly visage is the sign of goodly character” (ḥüsn-i ṣūret delīl-i ḥüsn-i khıṣāl).167 Fuḍūlī was followed by Riḥletī, an otherwise unknown poet whom Karahan and Sevgi place in the sixteenth century.168 His Turkish rendering of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn, extant only in a single manuscript, remained extremely close to the original, even using the same rhyming words as had Jāmī in his paraphrase of the forty hadith.169 This imitative mode caused Riḥletī to use Persian words and expressions not current in the Turkish of his day. A far better known poet than Riḥletī is Nābī; his version of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn, completed in 1085/1674, has been preserved in numerous manuscripts.170 Given the pious inclinations manifest in his poetry, it was fitting that he should produce a rendering of the Arbaʿīn. He precedes it with an introduction, lengthier than that of Jāmī, in which he discusses the difference between meaning (maʿnā) and wording (lafẓ); declares his wish to benefit readers ignorant of Persian and to be well remembered by them after his passing; and modestly excuses himself for the inadequacy of his efforts. In the wording of his Arbaʿīn, Nābī deviates considerably from Jāmī—justifiably, in view of the distinction between maʿnā and lafẓ set forth in the introduction—while remaining scrupulously attentive to the meaning of the hadith.171 Nābī was followed by a certain Müfīd of whom little if anything is known. According to Sevgi, his name was ʿAbdülkerīm; he was a native of Bursa where he came to head a Naqshbandī tekke; and he died in 1139/1726 while returning from the Hajj.172 Unlike the other Ottoman emulators of Jāmī’s work, he em167  Fuzûlî, Kırk Hadîs Tercemesi, 23; Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 358; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 97. All the other translators interpret the hadith in a similar fashion; see Sevgi, 98‒99. 168  Presumably the mecmūʿa (Esʿad Ef., 1850) containing Riḥletī’s Arbaʿīn provides evidence for this dating. 169  Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 360; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 9. Karahan maintains that Riḥletī completely omitted the hadith concerning men of “goodly visage.” This is not the case, however; the text of his translation is to be found in Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 98. 170  It is also to be found on pp. 155‒60 of Necīb ʿĀṣım’s “Hadīth-i Erbaʿīn Tercümeleri.” 171  Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 361‒63. 172  Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 14. As sources, Sevgi cites the tezkire of Sālim and the Güldeste-i Riyāḍ-ı ʿIrfân of Ismāʿīl Belīgh Bursavī, without providing precise references to either work. However, Sālim places the death of Müfīd in 1121/1709, not in 1139/1726, and he does not attribute to him a rendering of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn (Tedhkire-i Sālim [Istanbul: Iqdām Maṭbaʿası, 1315/1899], 623‒24). Adnan Ince’s recent critical edition of the same work neither provides a date for Müfīd’s death nor attributes to

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ployed the form of rubāʿī, not qiṭʿa; and followed the citation of each hadith with a distich in Arabic expounding its content. Müfīd’s version appears to exist in only a single manuscript.173 Better known and more easily identifiable is Muṣṭafā Münīf Efendī (d. 1156/1742), a minor poet who completed his version of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn in 1146/1733. Born in Antakya, he came to Istanbul in 1130/1718 and joined the entourage of Rāşid Efendī; some years later, he accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Ashraf Khān, an Afghan amir who was contesting rule of western Iran with the Ottomans after the downfall of the Safavids. He later served as Ottoman envoy to Nādir Shāh and as secretary to Defterdār ʿĀṭıf Efendī.174 Münīf’s renderings of some of the forty hadith are limpid, easily comprehensible, and close to Jāmī’s original; others are labored, weighed down by tortuous constructions, and not likely to serve the goal of ʿumūm-i feyḍ that Fuḍūlī had proposed for himself. Münīf’s Arbaʿīn was first published in his Dīvān, a slim volume that appeared in 1266/1850 and consists chiefly of uninspired qaṣīdas dedicated to the grandees of the age. The forty hadith he paraphrases are erroneously identified as “words” (kelimāt) transmitted from ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, not as hadith, and no mention is made of Jāmī as the ultimate source of the selection.175 Whether these errors originated with Münīf himself or the anonymous compiler of his Dīvān is unclear.176 They are not repeated by Necīb ʿĀṣım in his edition; he also him a translation of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn (Sâlim Efendi, Teziretüʾş-Şuʿarâ, 625‒26). As for Ismāʿīl Belīgh Bursavī, the only Naqshbandī shaykh of Bursa bearing the name ʿAbdülkerīm whom he mentions died in 1100/1689; he was born not in Bursa but in Manisa; he is not recorded to have used the penname “Müfīd;” and he is not credited with a Turkish translation of Jāmī’s work (Güldeste-i Riyāḍ-ı ʿIrfān [Bursa: Hüdavendigār Vilāyeti Maṭbaʿası, 1302/1885], 165‒67). Şemsettīn Sāmī Bey mentions an ʿAbdülkerīm Müfīd Efendī who was a prominent Naqshbandī in Bursa and died while returning from the Hajj, but he provides yet another date for his demise—1130/1718 (Qāmūsuʾl-Aʿlām, 6:4360). Sevgi’s article, “Müfîd’in Arapça Manzum Kırk Hadîs Şerhi” in Islamî Edebiyat 9 (1999): 9‒12, fails to provide an answer to these various conundrums. 173  Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 14. 174  See the anonymous biographical introduction to Münīf’s Dīvān (Istanbul: n.p., 1260/1850), 2‒16; and Şemsettin Sāmī Bey, Qāmūsuʾl-Aʿlām, 6:4458. 175  Münīf, Dīvān, 13; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 15. 176  The confusion may have arisen from the fact that ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib figures prominently among the narrators of the tradition in which the Prophet encourages the memorization of Forty Hadith; see al-Nawawī, Sharḥ al-Arbaʿīn al-Nawawiyya, 2. It also bears mentioning that Jāmī has been credited with a work entitled Nashr al-La‌ʾālī, the Persian translation of one hundred utterances by ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib; see Hellmut Ritter’s entry “Câmî,” in Islam Ansiklopedisi, 3:19, where neither a specific manuscript nor a printed edition is mentioned. It may, however, be identical with the Risāla-yi Tarjuma-yi Kalimāt-i Qudsiyya (Istanbul Üniversitesi, Farsça Yazmaları 4171, fol. 538a–540b), described by Ömer Okumuş as Jāmī’s

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arranges the forty hadith in an entirely different order from that found in the Dīvān.177 Next in chronological order comes the Terceme-i Hadīth-i Erbaʿīn of ʿOthmānzāde Seyyid Ibrāhīm, a scholar who rose through the ranks of the learned to be appointed şeyhülislām two years before his death in 1197/1783.178 He prefaced his version with an encomium of Sultan ʿAbdülḥamīd I that seems hyperbolic even by the standards of Ottoman officialdom: the ruler, he declares, is not simply “the shadow of God upon earth,” but “the very quintessence of the world of contingent being.” Slightly more credible is his laudation of Jāmī as “supreme among all authors, the proof of all who attain truth.” Uniquely among the Ottoman emulators of Jāmī and in keeping with his training as an ʿālim, Seyyid Ibrāhīm includes in the margins of his work notes on chains of transmission for some of the hadith, drawn from “reputable books” (kütüb-i muʿtebere).179 This emulatory tradition persisted remarkably late, into the early years of the twentieth century. Ṭayyibzāde Meḥmed Zühdī (d. 1332/1914) spent the entirety of his life in his native city of Trabzon, occupying a variety of official positions in addition to teaching Persian in a succession of schools.180 Despite the universal fame still enjoyed by the works of Jāmī among the learned, he was apparently unaware of the Arbaʿīn until he chanced on a copy of the Tashkent edition.181 Since the moral qualities inculcated by the forty traditions corresponded fully to the “native disposition of the Ottoman peoples” (ʿOthmānlı aqvāmına bahşāyış-ı fıṭrat), he judged Jāmī’s work superior to all competing works of similar type, and he decided to put it into Ottoman Turkish in order to help reinforce those pre-existing qualities. In tandem with the Tashkent edition, he precedes his version with the text of each hadith, Jāmī’s original, and Navāʾī’s rendering in Chaghatay. In a sign of the times, he started publishing the result of his efforts piecemeal in a variety of newspapers until the weight of his official duties made it impossible for him to continue. It was only when versified translation of some of the sayings of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (“Câmî, Abdurrahman,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 7:97). 177  Necīb ʿĀṣım, “Hadis-i Arbaʿîn Tercümeleri,” 161‒65. 178  Müstaqīmzāde Süleymān Saʿdeddīn, Devḥetüʾl-Meşāyikh, facsimile reprint (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1978), 108. 179  Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 16‒18. 180  Ibnülemin Mahmut Kemal Inal, Son Asır Türk Şâirleri, reprint (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1988), 4:2107‒9. Such was Zühdī’s attachment to Trabzon that when appointed to a post in Sivas, he decided to go to Istanbul to appeal against his reassignment. But no sooner had the ship on which he was travelling set sail for the capital than it sank in the waters of the Black Sea, with the loss of all on board. 181  He is presumably referring to that published by Litografya Lakhtina in 1893.

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that weight was lifted from him that, encouraged by his friends in traditonal fashion, he was able to complete the project.182 The result was a book, ZīnetüʾlEfʾide (Trabzon: Serāsī Maṭbaʿası, 1324/1906); the style he employs is limpid and generally close to Jāmī’s original. It remains only to note the existence of the anonymous rendering of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn preserved in an undated and apparently unique manuscript in the library of Istanbul University (TY 1624). The author does not mention Jāmī by name, referring to the author of the work simply as “one of the eloquent and erudite men of ʿAjam,” perhaps because the copy available to him made a similar omission; he describes it, indeed, as “full of errors,” and claims, surprisingly, that he had no access to any other manuscript of the Arbaʿīn that would have enabled him to eliminate them. He accordingly confesses—with either genuine or feigned modesty—that his version is “rough and uneven” (şikeste-beste), and invites his learned readers to correct it. Despite all of this, the nameless poet was able to combine closeness to the sense of Jāmī’s original with simplicity and ease of comprehension; one may regret that his version did not acquire wider currency.183 Such is the roster of Turkish renderings of Jāmī’s Arbaʿīn, numerically quite limited, but noteworthy is the persistence of interest in his work over five centuries. Even those Turkish poets who chose different collections of forty, or sometimes one hundred, hadith as subjects for poetic paraphrase, paid tribute to Jāmī by using the same metre and the same form that he had; in some cases they explicitly acknowledged their debt to him.184 He counts, therefore, as the supreme patron of the whole genre of versified commentary in Turkish on selected hadith. 7 The Bahāristān, its Ottoman Commentators and Imitators Devoted as he was to the education of his son, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf, Jāmī was one day instructing him in the Gulistān of Saʿdī when he decided to compose a similar collection of edifying and occasionally amusing anecdotes. The result was the Bahāristān, and despite being much inferior to the Gulistān in both content and style, it proved perennially popular among the Ottomans as a text 182  Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri, 19‒22. Sevgi gives 1371 as the year in which Zühdî resumed work on his version, an obvious impossibility. 183  Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 366‒68; Sevgi, Molla Câmî’nin “Erbaʿîn”i ve Manzûm Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 23‒24. 184  Karahan, “Câmî’nin Arbaʿîni ve Türkçe Tercümeleri,” 369‒70.

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for study, commentary, translation, and imitation. It continued for many centuries to fulfill the pedagogical purposes for which it had been first conceived, hence the abundance of manuscripts of the Bahāristān still found in Turkish libraries. It figures, too, among the earliest and most popular Persian texts to be printed in Istanbul: four separate editions appeared in the years between 1275/1858 and 1311/1893.185 An anthology of selections from the work, published in 1305/1887, is explicitly addressed to neophyte students of Persian.186 The first commentary on the Bahāristān appears to have been that completed in 908/1502 by Khıḍır b. Muṣṭafā Erzincānī.187 He was soon followed by a better known contemporary, Şemʿī of Prizren, who wrote commentaries not only on the Bahāristān but also, as noted above, on the Tuḥfat al-Aḥrār and the Subḥat al-Abrār, as well as works by Niẓāmī, ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī, and Ḥāfiẓ.188 Şemʿī’s commentary was succeeded considerably later by that of Meḥmed Şākir erRūmī/Şākir Efendī, published in 1252/1836 under the title of Hediyyetüʾl-ʿIrfān.189 The first complete Turkish translation of the Bahāristān, that made by Meḥmed Fevzī, appeared relatively late, in 1327/1909. Of particular interest to Ottoman littérateurs was chapter seven of the Bahāristān, devoted to poets. It begins with a summary definition of poetry and a defense of the art against possible detractors before concisely surveying the works of the principal Persian poets, beginning with Rūdakī and ending with his friend and contemporary, Navāʾī.190 Despite its relative brevity, it served as a model for several tadhkira compilers in Ottoman Turkish. Thus at the very outset of his Heşt Bihişt, the first such tadhkira, Sehī (d. 955/1548) praises Jāmī’s accomplishment as follows: “He has arranged and depicted the earlier poets in such wise that hidden behind the veil of this rawḍa are the eight gardens of Paradise and concealed within the rose garden (Gulistān) of his Bahāristān lies

185   Türkiye’de Basılmış Farsça Eserler, Çeviriler ve Iran’la Ilgili Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (Ankara: Milli Kütüphane Yayınları, 1971), 54‒55. 186  Meḥmed Behcet, Guzīda-yi Bahāristān barāyi nawhavasān (Istanbul: A. Māviyān Şirket-i Mürettibiye Maṭbaʿası, 1305/1887). After all, Jāmī had himself a pedagogical purpose in mind when he composed the Bahāristān. 187  Kınalızâde, Tezkiretüʾş-şuarâ, 524‒26; Muḥammad Amīn Rīyāḥī, Zabān va Adab-i Fārsī dar Qalamruv-i ʿUthmānī, 218; Bağdatlı Ismāʿīl Pāşā, Īḍāḥ al-Maknūn fīʾl-Dhayl ʿalā Keşf el-Ẓunūn (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1972), 1:column 198. 188  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:258; Davut Akat, “Şemʿî: Şerh-i Bahâristân, Giriş, Metin” (master’s thesis, Uludağ Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Bursa, 1999). 189  Bursalı Mehmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:266. Such was the demand for the Hediyyetüʾl-ʿIrfān that it was reprinted in 1294/1877. 190  Jāmī, Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 122‒53. See, too, J.T.P. de Bruijn, “Chains of Gold: Jami’s Defence of Poetry,” Journal of Turkish Studies 26/1 (2002): 81‒92.

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the garden of Iram.”191 The mention here of the “eight gardens of Paradise” is, of course, intended to put the reader in mind of Sehī’s own work, and to suggest that its excellence entitles it to favorable comparison with both the Bahāristān and the Gulistān.192 Laṭīfī (d. 992/1584?) goes so far as to attribute the origins of his tadhkira to an almost accidental discovery of the seventh rawḍa of the Bahāristān. At a point early in his life when he had already written a dozen risālas but still felt the need for competent instruction in the literary arts, Laṭīfī relates, he had the good fortune to encounter a learned and eloquent guide. This anonymous preceptor, his memory richly stocked with a vast amount of poetry, always carried with him some book or other. He opened the book he had with him one day and expounded its contents in detail to Laṭīfī. It turned out to be the Bahāristān, and the rawḍa dealing with the Persian poets immediately gained Laṭīfī’s attention. The unnamed friend thereupon prevailed on Laṭīfī to perform a similar service for the poets of Rūm writing in Turkish.193 In the prologue to his Meşāʿirüʾş-Şuʿarā, ʿĀşıq Çelebī (d. 980/1572) also gives proof of acquaintance with the seventh rawḍa of the Bahāristān. He places it first in the pedigree of Ottoman tadhkiras, and cites verbatim the Arabic sentence with which Jāmī concludes his definition of poetry—“How superb is poetry, how great is its rank, how high its degree! Would that I knew what excellence is greater than poetry, what magic more abundant than its magic!”194 By contrast, a critical note was raised with respect to the second chapter of the Bahāristān, which deals with the justice incumbent on all rulers and practised in exemplary fashion, Jāmī declares at the outset, by the Sasanid emperor, 191  Sehī, Heşt Bihişt: Sehī Beg Teẕkiresi, 76‒77 ( fol. 3b–4a). 192  In choosing the title Heşt Bihişt for his work, Sehī must also have had in mind Ḥakīm Shāh Qazvīnī’s Persian translation of Navāʾī’s Majālis al-Nafāʾis, another source of inspiration for early Ottoman tadhkira writers, for it too was divided into “eight gardens.” 193  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾṣ-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 88. He also finds worthy of citation a line from Jāmī’s Subḥat al-Abrār to the effect that the excellence of metrical speech is plain from many verses of the Quran, even though the Book itself is not poetry: “Were metre to be a cause of defect, no metrical speech could be found in the Quran” (text in Mathnavī-yi Haft Awrang, 1:578). 194  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 18b, 30b. Of the Bahāristān, ʿÂşık Çelebi remarks that “compared with it, the vernal garden (bahāristān) of the world is but a patch of thorns (khāristān).” He may be alluding to an actual work entitled Khāristān. Written in 733/1333 by Majd al-Dīn Khwāfī, it consists of fifteen chapters, prose interspersed with verse on the model of the Gulistān, the first dealing with the justice incumbent on kings and the last offering a series of witticisms (printed at Kanpur: Nawal Kishore, 1322/1905). In his introduction (3–5), the author provides no explanation for his self-deprecatory choice of title, perhaps an acknowledgement of gross inferiority to the Gulistān, were anyone to make the comparison.

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Nūshīrvān. He routinely invokes him as a model to be followed in a whole series of qaṣīdas addressed to contemporary monarchs, including Bāyezīd,195 and in this there was nothing unusual: the exalted status of Nūshīrvān was well established in the mirror of princes genre.196 But at the beginning of this rawḍa, Jāmī goes much farther: he cites a blatantly spurious hadith in which the Prophet supposedly declares “with pride” (tafākhur-kunān), “I was born in the time of the just king.” Jāmī then continues in verse: “When in the age of Nūshīrvān the visage of the Prophet became the eye and the lamp of the world/He would continuously say, ‘Innocent am I of all oppression and wrongdoing, because I was born in the age of Nūshīrvān!’” By way of further elevating the status of the pre-Islamic emperors, Jāmī reports that “according to the histories (dar tavārīkh chunān ast …) dominion over the world was entrusted to them for a full five thousand years because of their devotion to just rule, and God even commanded David to prohibit his people from speaking ill of them.”197 This invocation of unnamed “histories” is somewhat disingenuous, for precisely the same statement, in almost identical wording, is to be found in the Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, a mirror for princes questionably attributed to Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī.198 However, Jāmī takes matters a step farther than the author of this work, whoever he was, by having the Prophet declare himself to be indebted to Nūshīrvān for his disposition to justice; for pseudo-Ghazālī says simply that “the Prophet was proud of his (Nūshīrvān’s) age” (payghambar bi rūzgār-i ū 195  See above, p. 78. 196  See for example the numerous references to Nūshīrvān in Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), Siyāsat-Nāma, ed. Muḥammad Qazvīnī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ṭahūrī, 1334/1955). 197  Jāmī, Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 52. The supposed transmission of a just disposition from Nūshīrvān to the Prophet runs exactly counter to the sense of a far more common belief: that on the birth of the Prophet a crack appeared in the Ayvān-i Kasrā, the hall where Nūshīrvān was wont to deliver his rulings, causing fourteen of its parapets to collapse. This is related by none other than Jāmī himself in his Shawāhid al-Nubuwwa liTaqwiyyat Ahl al-Futuwwa (Istanbul: Hakikat Kitabevi, 1995, 34‒35). Lāmiʿī Çelebī—who as noted above translated the Shawāhid al-Nubuwwa into Turkish—also made poetic mention of the occurrence in question: “On the night bright as the sun, when that full moon appeared,/a cleft tore open the arch of the emperor’s palace” (Bursalı Lamiʿî Çelebi Divanı’ndan Seçmeler, 30). On the portents traditionally believed to have heralded or accompanied the birth of the Prophet, see also ʿAlī b. Burhān al-Dīn al-Ḥalabī, al-Sīrat alḤalabiyya (Beirut: al-Maktabat al-Islāmiyya, n.d.), 1:46‒49. Concerning the precedents on which Jāmī was drawing in the idealization of Nūshīrvān, see D.G. Tor, “The Islamisation of Iranian Kingly Ideals in the Persianate Fürstenspiegel,” Iran 49 (2011): 115‒22. 198  Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī (?), Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī (Tehran, Nashr-i Humā: 1367 Sh/1988), 83. On reasons for doubting the attribution to Ghazālī, see Patricia Crone, “Did al-Ghazālī write a Mirror for Princes? On the Authorship of Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987), 167‒91.

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fakhr kard) because of the prevalence of just rule under his auspices, not that the Prophet owed him anything.199 Jāmī’s subordination of the Prophet to Nūshīrvān earned him a reproach from one of his Ottoman counterparts: either Ece Efendī Ḥamīdī (d. 929/1523), a scholar and poet in both Persian and Turkish, or a certain Ḥalebīzāde Dervīs Çelebī. Precisely the same lines of verse have been attributed to both of them, so it is unclear which of them deserves the credit. This dual attribution suggests that this critique of Jāmī may have enjoyed wide circulation and popularity. Whoever he may have been, the poet takes issue not with the plainly inauthentic hadith itself, but with Jāmī’s interpretation of it. If Nūshīrvān was indeed a just ruler, he suggests, it was because he had the good fortune to be a contemporary of the Prophet. The Ottoman poet reproaches himself for taking issue with so eminent a scholar as Jāmī, but “When I am drunk on jealous concern (ghayrat) for the honour [of the Prophet], what do I care about Jāmī or Jam?”200 There is, of course, deliberate ambiguity in the word, jāmī; in addition to being the name of the poet, it has the meaning of “a goblet.” Similarly, “Jam” alludes to the jām-i Jam, the legendary goblet of Jam(shīd), another mythologised ruler of pre-Islamic Iran. One form of tribute paid by Ottoman authors to the Bahāristān consisted of five works composed either in emulation of its model or in an attempt to surpass it. The first was the Nigāristān (“Picture Gallery”), written in Persian by Kemālpāşāzāde—the same who regarded that language as superior to all others except Arabic—and presented by him to Ṣadr-ı Aʿẓam Ibrāhīm Pāşā in 939/1532. At the beginning of his Bahāristān, Jāmī pays tribute to Saʿdī, his illustrious predecessor, with this line of verse: “It [the Gulistān] is not a rosegarden, but one of the gardens of Paradise; its dust and its soil are imbued with amber.”201 Kemālpāşāzāde launches his Nigāristān with two lines that are at first glance similar, but have an entirely different intent: “The Bahāristān is not for us a picture gallery [Nigāristān]; nor does our Nigāristān in any way resemble the Bahāristān/For the rose-garden of our book is replete with the bright hued flowers of meaning.”202 By this he means that the Bahāristān did not count for him as an atelier where he might sharpen his skills, a model to emulate; it was rather the Gulistān of Saʿdī that he sought to equal. To this end, “he reproduced exactly the stories of the Gulistān and slightly changed the 199  Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī (?), Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, 99. 200  Attribution to Ḥamīdī in Peçevī, Tārīkh, reprint with introduction by Fahri Derin and Vahit Çabuk (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1980), 1:50‒51; and to Ḥalebīzāde Dervīş Çelebī in ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 72a. 201  Jāmī, Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 20. 202  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 38a; Kātib Çelebī, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, 2:col. 1976.

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arrangement and themes, but in the best possible way.”203 Kemālpāşāzāde’s declared ambition to surpass the Bahāristān was, of course, oblique testimony to the standing of the work. Sehī refrained from endorsing his claim, but, playing on the two meanings of naẓīr—the technical, “poetic parallel” and the lexical, “like, match”—he proclaims the Nigāristān “peerless” (bī-naẓīr) because of the subtle tales and delicate anecdotes it narrates; the Arabic and Persian verses that adorn it put one in mind of “the picture gallery of China” (nigāristān-i Çīn). Despite these qualities, Sehī concludes, the work is rarely to be found (kem-yāb).204 This may be an indication that the Nigāristān was not well received, although Aḥmed III had şeyhülislām Yaḥyā translate it into Turkish, and a commentary was written on it in Turkish by Meḥmed Vesīm in the time of Maḥmūd II.205 Certain only is that the Nigāristān never attained equal standing with the Bahāristān, let alone superiority to it.206 The second work written in emulation of the Bahāristān—or in competition with it—was the Sunbulistān (“The Garden of Hyacinths”), written by Şücāʿ Gūrānī (d. 964/1556) and dedicated to Qānūnī Süleymān. It was destined for still greater obscurity than the Nigāristān; only three manuscripts of the work are known to exist. Its ten chapters deal with familiar topics, beginning with the comportment of kings and ending with correct manners and conduct.207 Next came the Nihālistān of Nergisī, a Bosnian famed for the quality of his artistic prose who held a variety of judicial positions in the Balkans before falling to his death off an unruly horse in 1044/1635. He had completed the book two years earlier and dedicated it to Murād IV. It consists of six chapters, the first dealing with love and the last with repentance, and appears not to have exerted any lasting appeal.208 Of greater interest is the work of another Bosnian, the Bulbulistān of Fevzī Mostārī (d. 1152/1739), for it appears to be the only prose work written

203  ʿÂşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ, fol. 38b. 204  Sehī, Heşt Bihişt: Sehī Beg Teẕkiresi, 155. The Nigāristān is the subject of a doctoral thesis: Mustafa Çiçekler, “Kemal Paşa-zâde ve Nigâristân’ı” (Istanbul University, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 1994). 205  See Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 1:212, and Mustafa Demirel, introduction to Kemāl Paşa-zāde, Yūsuf u Zelīḫā, xxiii. 206  The extracts published, with Latin translation, in Fundgruben des Orients, ed. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (Vienna: Anton Schmid, 1809), 2:107‒13, and 4:403‒8, are certainly far from impressive. 207   See Fehim Nametak, Katalog Rukopisa Gazi Husrev-Begove Biblioteke (London and Sarajevo: al-Furqan Foundation and Rijaset Islamske Zajednice, 1998), 4:431‒32. 208  Hazim Šabanović, Književnost Muslimana BiH na Orientalnim Jezicima (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1973), 235‒36.

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in Persian by a Bosnian author.209 The concept for the book came to him, he tells us, one day when he was reading with admiration the Bahāristān of Mollā Jāmī, “the foremost master of fine speech and the elect of the gnostics (ustād-i sukhansāzān va guzīda-yi arbāb-i ʿirfān).” It occurred to him that there were in total five works consisting of edifying or amusing anecdotes: the Būstān and Gulistān of Saʿdī; the Bahāristān of Jāmī; the Nigāristān of Kemālpāşāzāde; and the Sunbulistān of Şücāʿ. Given the fact that all six directions ( jihāt-i sitta) are needed to define spatial creation (kawn u makān) and assure its stability, he deemed it necessary to compose a sixth work similar in content and purpose to the existing five in order to complete the pattern they formed.210 More poetically, Fevzī declares that the five books need the Bulbulistān just as a garden needs nightingales to warble praise of its charms: “Never beats the royal drum of the rose/Unless can be heard the nightingale’s melody.”211 Fevzī’s Bulbulistān consists of six sections, two fewer than the Bahāristān. The first, dealing with the wondrous deeds of the awliyāʾ, contains many anecdotes drawn from Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-Uns, and the last focuses on the generosity that characterizes the truly noble. It is, however, only the contents of the fourth section which may claim our interest, for of the eight Ottoman poets writing in Persian whom Fevzī briefly reviews, five are fellow Bosnians.212 The last Ottoman author to undertake a work on the lines of the Bahāristān was Meḥmed Şevket Efendī (d. 1284/1867); he gave it the title Sunbulistān, which suggests he was unaware of the identically named work of Şücāʿ Gūrānī.213 It was apparently in Persian. A commentary was written on it by a certain Meḥmed Efendī. In sum, the combined achievements of the five Ottoman imitators— Kemālpāşāzāde, Şücāʿ Gūrānī, Nergisī, Fevzī Mostārī, and Meḥmet Şevket Efendī—are not particularly impressive; they may be regarded as tributes,

209  On the life of Fevzī see Šabanović, Književnost Muslimana BiH na Orientalnim Jezicima, 449‒52; and the introduction of Džemal Ćehajić to his Bosnian translation of the Bulbulistān, published together with a facsimile of the Persian text: Fevzi Mostarac, Bulbulistan (Sarajevo: Kulturni Centar I.R. Iran u BiH, 2003), 11‒17. A French translation is also available: Milivoj Malić, Bulbulistan du Shaikh Fewzi de Mostar, poète herzégovinien de langue persane (Paris: Librairie L. Rodstein, 1935). 210  It may of course be objected that unlike the other four works Fevzī mentions, the Būstān is entirely in verse, not a fusion of prose and poetry, so the total of predecessors to the Bulbulistān is four, not five. 211  Text, 252; translation, 54‒55 (The pagination is determined by the Bosnian introduction and translation which come first in the book). 212  Text, 184‒174; translation, 128‒38. 213  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:267.

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however oblique, to the lasting excellence and fame of the Bahāristān, while less significant than the commentaries and translations which that work inspired. 8

Jāmī and Ottoman Sufism

No verifiable line of initiatic transmission connects Jāmī to the Naqshbandīs of Ottoman Turkey. He was in general averse to the tasks of preceptorship, citing in self-justification this versified injunction of ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī, an initiatic ancestor of the Naqshbandiyya: “Close the door of shaykhhood, open the door of friendship;/close the door of retreat, open the door of companionship.”214 Only four people are reliably listed as receiving their formal training in the path from Jāmī, none of them from Rūm; it is extremely doubtful that the recluse known as Cāmī-i Rūmī was granted this exceptional privilege.215 Jāmī’s connection to Mollā ʿAbdallāh Ilāhī (d. 896/1491) of Simav, effectively the founding figure of Ottoman Naqshbandī tradition, was brief and incidental, restricted to a meeting in Herat as Ilāhī passed through on his way back from Samarkand to Anatolia.216 Jāmī’s dealings with a certain Ṣunʿallāh Kūzakunānī, more prolonged and significant, did link him, albeit peripherally, to the westward transmission of the Naqshbandiyya. Originally from a village near Tabriz, Kūzakunānī had come to Herat in search of a preceptor and soon attached himself there to the circle of Jāmī, taking up residence in a madrasa he administered and acting as his personal imam. Jāmī declined, however, to act as his preceptor, referring him instead to Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Maktabdār, who like Jāmī himself had been initiated into the Naqshbandiyya by Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī. On his return to Tabriz, a decade or so before the death of Jāmī, Ṣunʿallāh set about propagating the ṭarīqat with considerable success, and despite an interval of precautionary exile in Bitlis occasioned by the rise of Shāh Ismāʿīl, he was able to remain active in the city and its environs until 929/1523. His son, Abū Saʿīd Kūzakunānī, nonetheless thought it prudent to leave Iran for Istanbul in the company of an Ottoman force that had temporarily occupied Azerbaijan. Another line of initiatic descent from Ṣunʿallāh Kūzakunānī established itself in Urmiya, but once that city came definitively under Safavid rule in 1012/1603, the incumbent

214  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt, 1:251‒52. 215  Concerning Cāmī-i Rūmī, see p. 85 above. 216  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 461. See also n. 29 above.

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shaykh decamped to Diyarbekir, only to be executed there some thirty years later by Sultan Murād IV.217 Jāmī’s textual legacy to Ottoman Sufism was far more substantial. Most voluminous of the works in question was his great hagiographical compendium, Nafaḥāt al-Uns min Haḍarāt al-Quds. The foundation both of the genre to which it belonged and of the text itself had been laid by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Sulamī (d. 412/1021) with his Ṭabaqāt al-Ṣūfiyya in Arabic. This book was then rendered by Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī (d.481/1089), using the same title, into the Persian dialect of Herat; he rearranged much of the contents and added material of his own. But, observed Jāmī, the language used by Anṣārī had by his time become incomprehensibly archaic and liable to misinterpretation, apart from which the four centuries that had elapsed since Anṣārī completed his work had witnessed many notable Sufis. Hence the need for Nafaḥāt al-Uns min Haḍarāt al-Quds, an update in terms of both language and content.218 Somewhat similarly, it was in order to render Jāmī’s text linguistically accessible to a Turkish readership that Lāmiʿī Çelebī made his translation. In a lengthy introduction, he presents a familiar narrative—how a group of friends beseeched him to undertake the translation, and how he initially shrank from so momentous a task until the auguries proved favorable.219 And just as Jāmī had memorialized in the Nafaḥāt Sufis of the four centuries that had elapsed since Anṣārī had completed his work, so too did Lāmiʿī include supplementary material pertaining to his own time, albeit on a far more modest scale. He adds to the segment of the book dealing with the Naqshbandiyya first an account of Jāmī himself, stressing his hostility to the Shiʿa, and then of seven figures from the lineage of Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār, culminating in ʿAbdallāh Ilāhī Simāvī and Sayyid Aḥmed Bukhārī, the pair who in tandem had brought the Aḥrārī branch of the Naqshbandiyya to the Ottoman lands.220 Ten Sufis important for the rise of a distinctly Anatolian Sufism qualify for mention at the end of the translation; they include Ḥācı Bāyrām, Aqşemseddīn, Geyiklī Bābā, Yāzıcızāde 217  See Hamid Algar, “Naqshbandīs and Safavids: A Contribution to the Religious History of Iran and Her Neighbors,” in Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors, ed. Michel Mazzaoui (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 13‒21. 218  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-Uns min Ḥaḍarāt al-Quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1370/1991), 2. 219  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 7. Lāmiʿī’s claim to have been cajoled by a group of his friends into translating the Nafaḥāt al-Uns may be no more than an instance of the rhetorical device, frequently encountered in both Persian and Turkish literature, that can be read as an expression either of pride or of modesty on the part of the author. But in this case it also serves to mirror the earnest request made of Jāmī by Navāʾī that he proceed with the daunting task of compiling the Nafaḥāt al-Uns (see p. 2 of the work). 220  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 455‒70.

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Meḥmed Efendī, Yūnus Emre, and Ḥācı Bektāş.221 Women Sufis are segregated by Jāmī at the very end of the Nafaḥāt al-Uns in a section entitled “A Mention of Spiritually Realized Women (al-nisāʾ al-ʿārifāt) Who Have Attained the Degrees of Men;” Lāmiʿī gallantly modifies this to read “The Virtuous Accomplishments of Spiritually Realized Women,”222 and adds to those included in the category Salīma, a slave bought by a great-grandson of Khwāja Aḥrār when she was seven years of age.223 In keeping with his reluctance to assume the tasks of preceptorship, Jāmī wrote very little on the devotional aspects of Sufism. He wrote but one treatise on the distinctive practices of the Naqshbandiyya, the extremely brief Sarrishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān.224 Generally unknown to the Ottomans, it was stealthily embedded by Erzurumlu Ibrāhīm Ḥaqqı (d. 1199/1780) in the discussion of the Naqshbandiyya that occupies ten densely-packed pages of the Maʿrifetnāme, his celebrated compendium of the sciences. He claims to have based this section of his work on no fewer than “two hundred books of the awliyāʾ,” but his debt to Jāmī, and Jāmī alone, is unmistakable: although camouflaged by insertions of mostly extraneous material, his arrangement of the subject matter closely mirrors the Sarrishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān, and wordfor-word borrowings are numerous.225 By way of contrast, the Risāla-yi Naqshbandiyya, a possibly unique manuscript in Persian on the fundamental principles of the order preserved at the Süleymaniye Library (Esʿad Ef., MS 3702, fol. 1a–6b), clearly bears Jāmī’s name as its author, and it gives every appearance of being his work: it is simple but eloquent in style; its contents are close to those of the Sarrishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān; Khwāja Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī is mentioned in terms suggesting he was the author’s preceptor, which was certainly the case with Jāmī; and it concludes with two appropriate lines of verse from Jāmī.226 There is no evidence, however, that this treatise gained wide circulation. 221  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 682‒91. 222  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 692. 223  Lâmiʿî Çelebi, Nefehâtüʾl-Üns Tercemesi, 708. The Arabic translation of the Nafaḥāt alUns made by a certain Muḥarrem Efendī (d. 1000/1591), apparently without the addition of supplementary material, never gained as much fame as Lāmiʿī’s Turkish rendering (Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:21). 224  Jāmī, Sarrishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān, in Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 483‒92. 225  Erzurumlu Ibrāhīm Ḥaqqı, Maʿrifetnāme (Istanbul: Qırımī Yūsuf Ḍiyā, 1330/1912), 443‒53. See, too, Hamid Algar, “The Sufi Affiliations of Erzurumlu Ibrahim Hakkı,” in Ötekilerin Peşinde: Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’a Armağan, eds. Mehmet Öz and Fatih Yeşil (Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2015), 675‒82. 226  The manuscript was copied by Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Sīvāsī in Muḥarram, 909/ June-July 1503, eleven years aftter the death of Jāmī, surely too soon for apocrypha to be

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Well known to the Ottomans was, by contrast, the Rashaḥāt-i ʿAyn al-Ḥayāt of Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī (d. 932/1532), the most important and detailed history of the early Naqshbandiyya and its immediate antecedents; it includes a lengthy account of Jāmī’s spiritual biography. The Rashaḥāt became available to Turkish readers in two separate translations: one made in 977/1569 by Muḥyi Gülşenī (d. 1015/1606), with certain parts summarized and some new material added;227 and the verbose but far better known translation made in 993/1585 by Meḥmed Maʿrūf Efendī “ʿĀrifī” of Trabzon (d. 1002/1594) and dedicated to Sultan Murād III.228 Another source on the life of Jāmī known to the Ottomans was the Takmila-yi Nafaḥāt al-Uns of ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī (d. 912/1506), one of the select few whom Jāmī consented to guide formally on the Naqshbandī path; he gratefully responded by depicting his master in this supplement to the great hagiographical compendium as a near-perfect embodiment of the Naqshbandī ideal.229 More copiously reflected in Jāmī’s textual legacy than his Naqshbandī affiliation is his profound and sustained loyalty to the writings and doctrines of Ibn ʿArabī, including a determination to expound and, if need be, defend them. In the pedagogical role that he frequently assumed, he wrote fairly early in life the Naqd al-Nuṣūṣ fī Sharḥ Naqsh al-Fuṣūṣ, a commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s own digest of the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam; this was essentially an anthology of comments and clarifications made by his predecessors in the study of Ibn ʿArabī. The Zubdetüʾl-Fuḥūṣ fī Naqşiʾl-Fuṣūṣ of Ismāʿīl Anqaravī (alias Rusūkhī Dede, d. 1041/1631) is for the most part a modified Turkish translation of this work of Jāmī.230 Some two years before his death, Jāmī composed his own commentary on the complete text of the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam itself. That both these works were known to the Ottomans is evident from the manuscript copies preserved

attributed to him. The only argument against the authenticity of the treatise is its absence from all the conventional listings of his works. 227  See Necdet Tosun, Bahâeddîn Nakşbend: Hayatı, Görüşleri, Tarikatı (Istanbul: Insan Yayınları, 2002), 157. 228  It was published three times: in Bulaq in 1256/1840; and in Istanbul first in 1277/1860 and then in 1291/1874. The segment concerning Jāmī is to be found on 202‒45 of the 1291/1874 edition. 229  ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī, Takmila-yi Nafaḥāt al-Uns, ed. Bashīr Hiravī (Kabul: Intishārāt-i Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343/1964). Kātib Çelebī refers to this work in passing when remarking on the innate tendency of the prominent—by they kings or scholars—to wage war on each other (Mīzānuʾl-Ḥaqq fī Ikhtiyāriʾl-Aḥaqq [Istanbul: Maṭbaʿa-ı Ebūʾḍ-Ḍiyā, 1306/1889], 112). 230  Istanbul: Metīn Maṭbaʿası, 1328/1910.

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in Turkish libraries;231 less clear is the extent to which they were cited in the controversies surrounding Ibn ʿArabī that occasionally arose among Ottoman scholars.232 Kātib Çelebī did, however, single out Jāmī as the foremost exponent of the Akbarī doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd.233 As for al-Durrat al-Fākhira, Jāmī’s work comparing the views of the Sufis, the theologians, and the philosophers on various key topics, written at the behest of Fātiḥ Sultan Meḥmed but delivered to Istanbul after his death, the degree to which it circulated among Ottoman scholars is similarly unknown.234 The record is clearer with respect to the aesthetically attractive writings in which Jāmī deploys his literary and poetic talents in expounding the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī. Three of them were published together in Istanbul in 1309/1891: the Lavāʾiḥ, a series of thirty-six discrete meditations of varying length, expressed in a blend of rhymed prose and verse; the Sharḥ-i Rubāʿiyyāt, an explanation in prose of quatrains of Jāmī’s own composition; and the Lavāmiʿ, a commentary on the celebrated Qaṣīda-yi Khamriyya of Ibn al-Fāriḍ.235 The Lavāʾiḥ had already appeared in a Turkish translation made by Ismāʿīl Müfīd (d. 1217/1802) and published in Istanbul in 1291/1874.236 In addition to the foregoing, Jāmī’s devotion to Ibn ʿArabī also found more concise expression in a number of ghazals scattered throughout his Dīvān, as well as in segments of the mathnavīs constituting the Haft Awrang; these, too, caught the attention of some Ottoman Sufis. One such ghazal with the maṭlaʿ, “He was the mine of all beauty when there was yet no sign of the world,” expounds the degrees and modes of divine manifestation, using standard Akbarī terminology; it came to the notice of Riyāḍī, the qāḍī of Filibe, and inspired him to write a commentary entitled Kashf al-Ḥaqāʾiq fī Ḥall al-Daqāʾiq.237

231  Osman Yahia, Histoire et Classification de l’Oeuvre d’Ibn ʿArabī (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1964) 1:255‒56; William Chittick, introduction to his edition of Naqd al-Nuṣūṣ fī Sharḥ Naqsh al-Fuṣūṣ (Tehran: Imperial Academy, 1977), xxii. 232  See on this topic Ahmed Zildžić, “Friend and Foe: The early Ottoman Reception of Ibn ʿArabī” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012). 233  Kātib Çelebī, Mīzānuʾl-Ḥaqq fī Ikhtiyāriʾl-Aḥaqq, 67. 234  See above, p. 72. 235   Mecmūʿa-i Mollā Cāmī (Istanbul: Artīn Asadoryān Maṭbaʿası, 1309/1891). The same collection was reprinted in 1360/1981 with an introduction by Īraj Afshār (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Se Risāla dar Taṣavvuf [Tehran: Intishārāt-i Farhang-i Īrān-Zamīn], 1360/1981). 236   Lāyiḥāt-i Mollā Cāmī (Istanbul: Necīb Bābā Efendī Maṭbaʿası, 1291/1874). See too Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 1:243. 237  For the text of the poem, see Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:648‒49. On Riyāḍī and his commentary, see Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾṣ-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 282‒83, and Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:181.

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Likewise, in a single hemistich of his Silsilat al-Dhahab, Jāmī uses a simple pair of rhyming terms, sārī (pervading or permeating) and ʿārī (devoid; here, transcendent) to convey the apparent paradox that is waḥdat al-wujūd, the unicity of being associated with Ibn ʿArabī: the full line reads, “it is a unity with multiplicity made manifest,/it pervades all things and transcends all things.”238 Khalīl Ṣıdqı (d. 1312/1894), a Khalvatī shaykh living at Nevrekop in present-day Bulgaria, composed a brief treatise on this concise statement of Akbarī doctrine; in it, he addresses questions such as the relationship between the divine essence and the divine attributes—whether they are one with each other or distinct—, and emphasizes that they can be answered only in the sphere of ʿirfān (gnosis, esoteric knowledge), not in that of ʿilm (formal or exoteric learning): “ʿilm is always subject to doubt; it is ʿirfān alone that bestows certainty.” And ʿirfān is to be acquired only from a preceptor who is both perfect and capable of guiding others to perfection (kāmil-i mükemmil).239 The Akbarī element in Jāmī’s thought is also manifest in his Naynāma or Risāla-yi Nāʾiyya, an ingenious and detailed commentary on the first two lines of Rūmī’s Mathnavī-yi Maʿnavī, for it reflects a tendency, by no means restricted to Jāmī, to interpret Rūmī in the light of Ibn ʿArabī. He thus sees in the nay, the reedpipe, an allusion to the Perfect Man (al-insān al-kāmil), and in the nayistān, the reedbed from which it has been cut loose, an allusion to the fixed archetypes (al-aʿyān al-thābita).240 A similar interpretation was offered by Ismāʿīl Anqaravī at the beginning of his detailed commentary on the entire Mathnavī; although he does not mention Jāmī as his source, it is possible that he was drawing on his Naynāma, for as we have just seen he was fully acquainted with another of his works.241 238   Silsilat al-Dhahab in Haft Awrang, 1:64. Jāmī employs the same pair of terms—sārī and ʿārī—in Subḥat al-Abrār, another component of the Haft Awrang: “He pervades all things, without the least hint of absorption therein (ḥulūl),/a pervasion that lies beyond the scope of rational understanding. And He transcends all things without suffering defect thereby,/for He moves not from one state to the next” (Haft Awrang, 1:588). 239  Osman Sacid Arı, “Halil Sıdkî el-Halvetî’nin Abdurrahman Câmî’ye Ait Bir Beyit Üzerine Yazdığı Şerh: Şerh-i Beyt-i Heme Sârî Heme Ârî,” Tasavvuf 32 (July‒September 2013): 245‒55. On Khalīl Ṣıdqı, see Osmanzâde Hüseyin Vassaf, Sefîne-i Evliyâ, eds. Mehmed Akkuş and Ali Yılmaz (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları, 2006), 1:91‒93. The hemistich that inspired Khalīl Ṣıdqı was also cited by Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqı Bursevī in one of his works; see Seyyid Mustafa Râsim Efendi, Tasavvuf Sözlüğü - Istılâhât-ı Insân-ı Kâmil, ed. Ihsan Kara (Istanbul: Insan Yayınları, 2013), 614‒15. 240   Risāla-yi Nāʾiyya in Bahāristān va Rasāʾil-i Jāmī, 325‒36. 241  Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar goes so far as to suggest that all commentators interpreting “reed” and “reedbed” in the same way were ultimately drawing on Jāmī, whether they acknowledged it or not (Sharḥ-i Mathnavī-yi Sharīf [Tehran: Intishārāt-i Zavvār, 1371/1982], 1:7‒9).

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That the Naynāma was indeed known to the Ottomans is confirmed by the existence of a translation, combined with a largely superfluous commentary, by Süleymān Neşʾet (d. 1222/1807), an initiate primarily of the Mevlevī order. Such were his command of Persian and his expertise in the Mathnavī that many prominent Mevlevīs of the time, foremost among them Shaykh Ghālib (d. 1193/1799), counted themselves among his pupils. Neşʾet would have the reader believe, in accordance with a convention noted already, that he undertook the work only at the urging of a valued friend, in this case Shaykh Saʿīd Gülşenī, and in order to avoid offending him. He adds to Jāmī’s exposition of the two bayts verses of his own composition; explanations of Sufi terminology; stories of the Prophet’s Companions; traditions concerning the world intermediate between this and the next (ʿālem-i barzakh); and—among other dubious curiosities—the account of a drunken prince mistaking the corpse of an aged Jewish lady awaiting burial for his beautiful bride.242 A link of a different kind between Jāmī and Mevlevī tradition is suggested by a story long popular among antinomian Mevlevīs. Jāmī supposedly visited Konya in the time of Dīvāne Ḥüsām Çelebī, a descendant of Rūmī in the sixth generation, and when it was time for prayer, Dīvāne Ḥüsām recited aloud a line from the Mathnavī at the end of each rakʿat. When asked whether he found this procedure acceptable, Jāmī replied that he certainly did.243 It goes without saying that Jāmī never set foot in Konya, and that he would have been deeply repelled by this antinomian practice. Once again, we see Jāmī being invoked in order to give lustre to a strand of Ottoman tradition. 9

Ottoman Reception of Jāmī’s Technical Treatises on Poetry and Arabic Grammar

The Ottomans also highly valued Jāmī’s several writings on the technical aspects of poetry and on Arabic grammar. He wrote no fewer than four treatises on the art of the poetic riddle (muʿammā), a genre particularly popular in the Timurid period; the first of them was the longest, and the last, written in verse, the shortest. Bihiştī Ramaḍān Efendī (d. 979/1571)—not to be confused with 242  First printed as Tercüme-i Şerh-i Dü Beyt-i Mollā Cāmī (Istanbul: Dārüʾt-Ṭıbāʿatiʾl-ʿĀmire, 1263/1847); put into Modern Turkish together with an introduction by Üzeyr Aslan, under the title Ney’in Feryadı (Istanbul: Sufi Kitap, 2007). Another translation, seemingly unaccompanied by commentary, was that made by Hoca Ḥasan Ḥüsāmeddīn Efendī (d. 1280/1863); see Vassâf, Sefîne-i Evliyâ, 2:207. 243  Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Mevlânâ’dan sonra Mevlevîlik, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Inkılap ve Aka Kitabevleri, 1983), 217‒18.

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the Bihiştī who sought temporary refuge with Jāmī in Herat—wrote a versified commentary on the third of these treatises, the Risāla-yi Ṣaghīr, entitling it Şerḥ-i Manẓūme-i Muʿammā.244 Surūrī of Gelibolu and Eşref ʿAbd al-Raḥmān of Merzifon (d. 1161/1748) also wrote commentaries on one or other of the treatises; it is not known which.245 As for Jāmī’s treatise on prosody, Risāla-yi ʿArūḍ, it was twice translated into Turkish: first by Meḥmed Tevfīq (d. 1274/1857),246 and then, together with a commentary, by Shaykh Aḥmed Ṣāfī Efendī (d. 1290/1873), published under the title Cām-ı Muẓaffer in 1267/1851 in Istanbul.247 More lastingly popular and broadly studied than any of the foregoing has been Jāmī’s al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, a commentary on al-Kāfiya by Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249), one of the most authoritative texts on Arabic grammar.248 Like the Bahāristān, it originated in Jāmī’s desire to instruct his son, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn, in the fundamentals of learning—hence the title. But again like the Bahāristān, its pedagogical reach extended far beyond that one beloved offspring; although many other commentaries were written on al-Kāfiya, by Ottoman and other scholars, it was al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya alone that became part of the curriculum in Ottoman madrasas. This privileged status led, in turn, to the composition of some forty supercommentaries (ḥāshiya) on the work, known generically as Ḥāshiya ʿalā l-Jāmī, ten of which have been published.249 Such was the popularity of al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya, and so fully was the work identified with its author, that his name took the place of its original title; it became known simply as Mollā Cāmī.250 The book is even now used in private circles where traditional modes of study are obstinately favoured, so that with his 244  Mustafa Uzun, “Bihiştî Ramazan Efendi,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 6:145‒46. 245  Latîfî, Tezkiretüʾṣ-Şuʿarâ ve Tabsıratüʾn-Nuzamâ, 301‒2; Sehī, Heşt Bihişt, 161; Sadettin Nüzhet Ergun, Türk Şairleri (Istanbul: Bozkurt Basımevi, 1945), 3:1366. 246  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 1:264. 247  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 1:107. 248  Text contained in Muhimmāt al-Mutūn (Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1369/1949), 381‒429. 249  For a listing, see introduction by Usāma Ṭāhā al-Rifāʿī to his edition of al-Fawāʾid alḌiyāʾiyya (Baghdad: n.p., 1403/1983), 85‒90. Partial hāshiyas were written by, among others, Gharsüddīn Aḥmed (d. 971/1554: Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq, 82); Mollā ʿAlī (d. 979/1571), son of the celebrated Kınalızāde (Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī, Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq, 166); and Seyyid Meḥmed Emīn Efendī (d. 1149/1736; see Fındıklılı ʿIṣmet Efendi, Tekmiletüʾş-şaqāʾiq fī Ḥaqq-ı Ehliʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq [Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989], 107). 250  The term, “Mollā,” it may be noted, designates here and in other comparable occurrences a scholar of exceptional erudition and versatility. In its application to Jāmī, it sometimes appears in the form, “Monlā.” This reflects both an abbreviation and a metathesis of the title, “Mawlānā,” from which it is derived. Later the “nūn” became elided with the “lām,” resulting in the now familiar term, “Mollā.” See Hamid Algar, “Mollâ,” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 30:238‒39.

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other works largely forgotten by all except literary historians, the name “Jāmī” has become essentially synonymous in Turkey with this one tract on Arabic grammar. Given the peripheral status of al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya with respect to Jāmī’s rich and vast corpus of work, this curious outcome must be counted as an irony in the cultural history of Turkey. 10 Conclusion The impact of that corpus on Ottoman culture was, we have demonstrated, comprehensive, diverse and long-lasting. For at least a century after his death, his ghazals and qaṣīdas served as points of reference for Ottoman poets, and his status as a model for emulation in the sphere of the mathnavī continued for considerably longer. Apart from the tribute paid to the whole range of his poetic legacy by means of emulation, translation, and commentary, a simple acquaintance with his work was at all times considered essential for poets who sought to be taken seriously. His commentary on the Forty Hadith inspired numerous other works of similar type, to the degree that he can be considered patron of the whole genre in Ottoman literature. As for the Bahāristān, its seventh chapter, despite its brevity, helped give rise to the Ottoman tadhkira; it also served, down to the very end of the Ottoman epoch, as a text to be mastered by all engaged in the learning of Persian. Jāmī’s writings on Sufism, especially the hagiographical compendium, Nafaḥāt al-Uns, and his briefer works elucidating the mystical philosophy of Ibn ʿArabī, exerted a similarly perennial appeal. The fact that several of his works were printed in the nineteenth century, some four hundred years after his death, in Istanbul and elsewhere, surely speaks for itself. It is worth noting, too, that at a similarly late date—a mere decade or two before the collapse of the Ottoman State—the study of Jāmī’s works was not the exclusive domain of professional poets and scholars residing in the capital. Let us recall the case of Ṭayyibzāde Meḥmed Zühdī (d. 1332/1914), a school teacher and civil servant in Trabzon, who had his translation of the Arbaʿīn published first in a newspaper and then in book form.251 Still more impressive are the achievements of Meḥmed ʿIzzet Pāşā (d. 1330/1912); originally from a village near Kayseri, he became a military engineer who was entrusted with repairing the fortifications of Erzurum and building a series of highways in Eastern Anatolia, and was ultimately appointed chief of the general-staff. But throughout his career, he cultivated a serious interest in Persian and Persian 251  See above, pp. 108‒109.

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literature, for in addition to his translations of Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykha and Saʿdī’s Būstān, he compiled a vast Persian dictionary complete with Arabic and Turkish equivalents which remains regrettably unpublished.252 E.J.W. Gibb insightfully and elegantly described Persian and Persianinfluenced Ottoman poetry as “together forming a single manifestation of the activity of the human mind.”253 The evaluation of Jāmī’s influence on Ottoman literature—and more generally that of Persian models—has been distorted on occasion, however, by modern sentiments of national or ethnic identity. Iranian scholars have generally refrained from patronizingly depicting it as the generous bestowal of cultural excellence on an underdeveloped people, but some of their Turkish counterparts have voiced disquiet at the notion that by emulating Persian poets, the Ottoman Turks were effectively adopting Persian culture.254 But as suggested at the outset of this essay, insofar as a dichotomy or competition existed, it was between Bilād al-Rūm and Bilād al-ʿAjam, two zones of the Persianate world. This was gradually superseded by the OttomanSafavid rivalry, powerfully reinforced by mutual sectarian hostility, with a reduced prominence of Persian in Ottoman culture; and at a much later date, by the rise of national identity, Turkish and Iranian, Persian language and literature becoming entirely peripheral to Turkish culture. Once the break with Ottoman literary culture was consummated by the Language Reform, aptly described as a “catastrophic success,” few were the Turks who felt the need or had the opportunity to study Persian; it became the preserve of a handful of academics.255 In assessing Ottoman indebtedness to the Persian literary tradition, we may draw attention again to the blame attached to poets accused, rightly or wrongly, of being mere translators, and to the insistence of others on shunning 252  Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir, ʿOthmānlı Müellifleri, 2:242‒43. 253   A History of Ottoman Poetry, 2:xxxvi. 254  For examples of each category, see Riyāḥī, Zabān va Adab-i Fārsī dar Qalamruv-i ʿUthmānī; and Ahmed Kartal, Şiraz’dan Istanbul’a: Türk-Fars Kültür Coğrafyası Üzerine Araştırmalar (Istanbul: Kurtuba, 2010). The latter finds it necessary to assert that the Persian poetry of Sultan Selim was fully equal to that of the great Persian masters (404‒5). Users of Kartal’s work should be aware that the index is not a reliable guide to its actual pagination. The attitude of Fuad Köprülü, a scholar of far greater standing, is comparable to that of Kartal. While asserting that the “cultural influence” of Istanbul and Ottoman civilization weakened the Persocentric attitude prevalent in the sixteenth century, he notes with regret that the cultural spirit of that civilization (bu medeniyetin mâneviyeti) always exhibited an “Iranian spirit” and despised the “national culture” (millî hars; Edebiyat Araştırmaları, 201). We might identify Jāmī as a principal culprit for this state of affairs. 255  We borrow this expression from the title of Geoffrey Lewis’s, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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translation in favour of creative emulation. For the translator is inherently dependent on the text he is rendering into his own tongue, and however skillfully he accomplishes his task, his dependence can be taken to imply inferiority. (It could be argued, moreover, that given the saturation of Ottoman Turkish with Persian loanwords, sometimes little more was required of the translator than a certain amount of syntactic rearrangement and the substitution of Turkish compound verbs for their Persian counterparts). By contrast, the emulator may aspire to equality with the author of the work emulated, or even to superiority to him; and thereby to form the most recent link in a chain of emulation, notwithstanding the shift from Persian to Turkish. The trope of the poet encountering a group of friends reading some work or other by Jāmī and yielding to their insistence that he convey its meanings in Turkish also suggests a general conclusion. It is most obviously an occasion for the poet to engage in a display of ostentatious modesty, but it also fullfils two other purposes: to illustrate the broad currency of the works of Jāmī among the simply literate as well as the learned; and to elevate the poet to something approaching his rank. Finally, we may revert to the metaphor of meaning (maʿnā) as opposed to wording (lafẓ) forming a waqf, an endowment or fund established for the benefit of the duly qualified, and broaden its meaning by suggesting that the works of Jāmī in their totality constituted a waqf on which Ottoman poets and scholars legitimately drew, together with their counterparts elsewhere in the Dār al-Islām. Bibliography In addition to the titles listed below, entries on virtually all the Ottoman poets mentioned in this study are to be found in Dānishnāma-yi Adab-i Fārsī, VI: Adab-i Fārsī dar Anātūlī va Balkān, ed. Ḥasan Anūsha (Tehran: Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1375/1996). The articles vary widely in quality, and rely chiefly on Turkish encyclopaedias and other modern sources. By contrast, the otherwise comprehensive seven-volume Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Ansiklopedisi: Devirler, Isimler, Terimler (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1976–1990) fails to provide the reader with bibliographical guidance. Authoritative and exhaustive is the Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2013); a mere fraction of the entries relevant to the theme of this essay are included in the bibliography below. Reference may also be made to “Persian Authors of Asia Minor” in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Iranica.

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Ahmed Paşa. Dîvân. Edited by Ali Nihad Tarlan. Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1966. Akasoy, Anna. “Mehmed II as a Patron of Greek Philosophy: Latin and Byzantine Perspectives.” In The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, edited by Anna Contadini and Claire Norton, 245‒56. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Akat, Davut. “Şemʿî: Şerh-i Bahâristân, Giriş, Metin.” Master’s thesis, Uludağ Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Bursa, 1999. Aksoy, Hasan. “Celîlî, Hâmidîzâde.” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 7:269‒70. Algar, Hamid. “Bedahşî, Muhammed.” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 5:293. Algar, Hamid. “Ḥorufism.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 12:483‒90. Algar, Hamid. “Mollâ.” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 30:238‒39. Algar, Hamid. “Naqshbandīs and Safavids: A Contribution to the Religious History of Iran and Her Neighbors.” In Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors, edited by Michel Mazzaoui, 7‒48. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. Algar, Hamid. “Tarîqat and Tarîq: Central Asian Naqshbandîs on the Roads to the Haramayn.” In Central Asian Pilgrims: Hajj Routes and Pious Visits between Central Asia and the Hijaz, edited by Alexandre Papas, Thomas Welsford and Thierry Zarcone, 21‒135. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2012. Algar, Hamid. “The Sufi Affiliations of Erzurumlu Ibrahim Hakkı.” In Ötekilerin Peşinde: Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’a Armağan, edited by Mehmet Öz and Fatih Yeşil, 665‒90. Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2015. Alparslan, Ali. “Gubârî, Abdurrahman.” Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi, 14:167‒69. Anvarī, Awḥad al-Dīn. Dīvān. Edited by Muḥammad Taqī Mudarris Raḍavī. Tehran: Bungāh-i Nashr va Tarjuma-yi Kitāb, 1340/1961. Arı, Osman Sacid. “Halil Sıdkî el-Halvetî’nin Abdurrahman Câmî’ye Ait Bir Beyit Üzerine Yazdığı Şerh: Şerh-i Beyt-i Heme Sârî Heme Ârî.” Tasavvuf 32 (July-September 2013): 245‒55. ʿĀṣım, Necīb. “Hadīth-i Erbaʿīn Tercümeleri.” Millī Tetebbuʿlar Mecmūʿası 4 (1331/1913): 143‒65. ʿĀşıq/ʿÂşık Çelebi. Meşâʿirüʾş-Şuʿarâ. Facsimile edition prepared by G.M. MeredithOwens. London: Luzac, 1971. Babacan, Israfil. Klasik Türk Şiirinin Son Baharı: Sebk-i Hindi (Hint Üslubu). Ankara: Akçağ Yayınları, 2012. Babinger, Franz. Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Bağdatlı Ismāʿīl Pāşā. Īḍāḥ al-Maknūn fīʾl-Dhayl ʿalā Kashf al-Ẓunūn. Edited by Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat Bilge. 2 vols. Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1972. Bākharzī, ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī. Maqāmāt-i Jāmī. Edited by Najīb Māyil Hiravī. Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1371/1992. Bāqī. Dîwân: Ghazalijjât. Edited by Rudolf Dvořák. 2 vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1908–1911.

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chapter 4

Scholar, Saint, and Poet Jāmī in the Indo-Muslim World Muzaffar Alam During his own lifetime, the great polymath Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492) was a leading player in Indo-Muslim culture. Just as he maintained close relationships with the rulers and scholars of Herat, so too in India he cultivated friendships and correspondences with both the political and intellectual elite. Jāmī’s works were widely read, studied, and commented upon, and his poetry competed in popularity with such undisputed masters as Ḥāfiz and Saʿdī, with his poems recited and sung both in religious circles and in secular gatherings.1 In Indian madrasas, three books by Jāmī were almost universally part of the standard curricula: Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, Bahāristān, and al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, popularly known as Sharḥ-i Jāmī, his commentary in Arabic on the noted grammarian Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249)’s al-Kāfiya.2 It is not an exaggeration to say that almost everyone who knew Persian in India would have been familiar with some of Jāmī’s works. In the following essay, I trace the contours of his popularity across medieval and early modern Indo-Persian literary, religious, and political culture. By analyzing the details of his popularity, I will highlight the important role played by Jāmī’s life, letters, and his legacy in the development of South Asian Muslim culture. 1

Jāmī in the Pre-Mughal Era

1.1 Jāmī and Maḥmūd Gāvān Over a long period, Jāmī was in close correspondence with Maḥmūd Gāvān (d. 886/1481), a vizier to the Bahmani court in the Deccan who was an accomplished and extraordinary scholar in his own right, famous for establishing

1  See Javād Sharīfī, “Jāmī dar shibh-i qārra,” Dānishnāma-yi adab-i fārsī (Tehran: Sāzmān-i Chāp va Intishārāt-i Vizārat-i Fahrang va Irshād-i Islāmī, S 1375), 4.1. 2  On Jāmī’s al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya and its reception in the Ottoman world, see Ökten’s contribution in the present volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_006

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the madrasa in Bīdar. Gāvān invited Jāmī to visit India,3 a fact that became common knowledge among later historians.4 Jāmī was not able to accept the offer because of several difficulties and constraining circumstances (tazāhum-i ʿalāʾiq va tarākum-i ʿavāʾiq), which included his advancing age (kuhansālī), and also because he did not consider it appropriate to leave his aging mother’s side (masliḥat nīst ki sar az qadamash bar-dāram). He did, however, write about his great appreciation for India and his strong desire to visit it. For instance: My heart yearns ever for his land the same way as [any other] human heart yearns for India. It is appropriate that I set out now for India/the land that is envy of Byzantium because of its illuminating beauty. He lives in India, while I, who am ruled by love/have long nursed a passion for India in my grief-nurturing heart.5 Jāmī is reported to have sent Maḥmūd Gāvān his commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam,6 as well as a qaṣīda in his praise, which begins with the following lines: Welcome, O messenger from the kingdom of ideas! Welcome! Come, come—I have offered you my soul and heart!7 3  ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Gāvān, Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ, ed. Shaykh Chānd ibn Ḥusayn (Hyderabad: Sarkār-i ʿĀlī, 1948), 22–23 and 155, letters no. 2 and 38. See also Muhammad Suleman Siddiqi, The Bahmani Sufis (Delhi: Idara-yi Adabiyat-i Dilli, 2009), 182. 4  See Shaykh Rizqullāh Mushtāqī, Vāqiʿāt-i Mushtāqī, ed. Iqtidar Hussain Siddiqui and Waqarul Hasan Siddiqi (Rampur: Rampur Raza Library, 2002), 215. Mushtāqī reports the invitation in the following words: “If you set off [for India], the gold-embroidered carpets would be spread under the feet of your horse from Herat to the Deccan and they would be given over to the beggars [later on].” Compare with the English translation in Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui, Waqiʻat-e-Mushtaqui of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui: A Source of information on the life and Conditions in the Pre-Mughal India, trans. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi (New Delhi: Co-published by Indian Council of Historical Research and Northern Book Centre, 1993), 242. See also: Khwāja Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad, Ṭabaqāt-i akbarī, ed. B. De and Muhammad Hidayat Hosain (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1935), 3:51. 5  ilā arḍihi yasbū fuʾādī dāʾiman/ka-mā kāna yasbū qalbu basharin ilā hind. jā-yi ān dāram ki āram rū ba-hindustān ki shud/rashk-i arḍ-i rūm az ʿaks-i jamāl-i anvārash. mulk-i ū hind ast u man ān bashar-i ʿishq-āʾīn ki bud/ʿumr-hā sawdā-yi hind andar dil-i gham-parvarash. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nāma-hā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, eds. ʿIṣām al-Dīn Ūrūnbāyif and Asrār Raḥmānūf (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1999), 244. 6  Maḥmūd Gāvān, Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ, 156, letter no. 38. 7  marḥabā ay qāṣid-i mulk-i maʿānī marḥabā/al-ṣalā k’az jān u dil nadhr-i tū kardam al-ṣalā. For this qaṣīda, see Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999), 1:126­–32. This verse and another verse from this

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Jāmī also sent him copies of Nafaḥāt al-uns and Risāla dar ḥaqāʾiq-i dīn. In addition, Jāmī corresponded with Gāvān’s son, Khwāja ʿAlī, and with several Indian scholars, including Sayyid ʿAbdallāh Ḥusaynī (d. 978/1570) of Uchh. He is also reported to have sent a treatise, the Risāla-yi savāl u javāb-i Hindūstān, to the Indian ʿulamāʾ. In reply, Gāvān sent Jāmī ʿAyn al-Dīn’s Kitāb al-anwār, requesting his suggestions for comments, corrections, and additions.8 Interestingly, Gāvān also wrote to Jāmī a detailed account of his own political conquests and military activities, which he described as his service to the destruction of the infidels and the spread of Islam.9 In his book Manāẓir al-inshāʾ, Gāvān also occasionally cites Jāmī’s verses to illustrate his discussion of Persian rhetorical devices.10 Jāmī also kept abreast of Persian poetry written in India, and it has been suggested that several of Jāmī’s ghazals were inspired by Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d. 1325). Jāmī writes of Khusraw—the ṭūṭī-yi hind (“parrot of India”)—with far more sweetness of sentiment than Ḥāfiz did when he penned his own famous line about Indian poets’ taste for Persian eloquence. Jāmī writes: jāmī nayam ki khusraw-i vaqtam ba mulk-i ʿishq manshūr-i khusravī ghazal-i ʿāshiqāna-am I am not Jāmī, I am the Khusraw of the time in the kingdom of love My lyrics of love are the royal edicts of Khusraw.11 And: tā kunad nuskha-yi khusraw ki buvad ṭūṭī-yi hind jāmī az rashḥ-i nay-ī kilk-i shakkar mī-sāzad  qaṣīda are also cited in Ṭabaqāt-i akbarī. In addition, Ṭabaqāt-i akbarī also cites the following ghazal which Jāmī sent in appreciation of Gāvān to him, which includes this couplet: hamrah-i qāfila-yi hind ravān kun ki rasad/sharaf-i muhr-i qabūl az malik al-tujjār-ash. Ṭabaqāt-i akbarī, 3:51; for this ghazal, see also Dīvān-i Jāmī, 1:497. 8  See ʿĀrif Nawshāhī, Jāmī, Urdu trans. ʿAlī Asghar Ḥikmat, 2nd ed. (Islamabad: Markaz-i taḥqīqāt-i fārsī-yi Īrān va Pākistān, 2012), 53. See also ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī, Akhbār al-akhyār fī asrār al-abrār, ed. ʿAlīm Ashraf Khān (Tehran: Anjuman-i āthār va mafākhir-i farhangī, 2005), 403. 9  Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ, 170–71, letter no. 40. 10  See for instance: har chand dar ʿayān u nihān nīst ghayr-i ū/fī ḥaddi dhātihī na ʿayān ast u nī nihān. Khwāja ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Gāvān, Manāẓir al-inshāʾ, ed. Maʿṣūma Maʿdankan (Tehran: Farhangistān-i zabān va adab-i fārsī, 1381 Sh/2002), 171. For other illustrations, see ibid., 117–18, 161, and 163. 11  Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 45.

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So that he can also compose [something comparable to] the book of Khusraw, the parrot of India, Jāmī forges a pen of sugar from the drop of a reed. Jāmī wrote approximately 30–36 ghazals that drew their inspiration from Amīr Khusraw, and two of his qaṣīdas, Jilāʾ al-rūh and Lujjat al-asrār, were also composed in direct reply to the works of Khusraw.12 In his Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī, Jāmī openly acknowledged the greatness of Khusraw, citing his remarkable ability to imitate a poet as formidable as Niẓāmī (d. 1209) and excel at doing so.13 Jāmī also had high words of praise to offer for the poetry of Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī (1253–1327), a contemporary of Amīr Khusraw and fellow disciple of the Chishtī Sufi Shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyā (d. 1325), referring to him by his popular title “the Saʿdī of Hindūstān.” He writes: ān dū ṭūṭī ki ba naw-khīzī-shān būd dar hind shakkar-rīzī-shān ʿāqibat sukhra-yi aflāk shudand khāmushān qafas-i khāk shudand14 Those two parrots with their innovations spread sugar across all of India. But in the end, the heavens seized them, silently they entered the cage of dust. Jāmī also expressed his admiration for Khusraw and Ḥasan Sijzī in Nafaḥāt al-uns.15

12   Dīvān-i Jāmī, 1:56–77 for Lujjat al-Asrar, and 592. The Naval Kishor and also Muḥammad Rawshan’s editions mention only Jila al-Rūḥ. See Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi intishārāt-i nigāh, 1389 Sh/2010), 62–72; Kulliyyāt-i Jāmī, (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1890), 31–39. 13   zi vīrāna-yi ganja shud ganj-sanj/rasānīd ganj-i guhar rā ba panj. chū khusraw ba ān panj hampanja shud/va’z ān bāzū-yi fikrat-ash ranja shud. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād and H.A. Tarbiyat (Tehran: Centre for Iranian Studies, 1999), 2:434. 14  ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, ed. Mawlavī Aḥmad ʿAli Ṣāhib, with introduction and notes by Tawfīq H. Subḥānī (Tehran: Anjuman-i āthār va mafākhir-i farhangī, 1379–80 Sh/2000–1), 1:139. 15  Nūr al-Dīn ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Īṭṭilāʿāt, 1375 Sh/1997), 607–9.

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1.2 Jāmī and Jamālī Shaykh Jamālī Dihlavī (d. 942/1536), an Indian Persian poet and the author of the noted Sufi tadhkira titled Siyar al-ʿārifīn, recalled his visit to Herat, where he had the privilege of being a guest of Jāmī. Jamālī describes one of their many conversations in detail. Jāmī and Jamālī disagreed in their evaluations of Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī (d. 688/1289), the author of Lamaʿāt, a text upon which Jāmī also wrote a commentary, Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt.16 This meeting between Jāmī and Jamālī entered the realm of popular memory in Mughal India, and its details were recorded in several biographical dictionaries of Persian poets, often with interesting apocryphal additions that were “intended to provide anecdotal background to some of Jamālī’s verses.”17 For example: The Afsānah-yi Shāhān gives a very interesting anecdote which several later authors reproduced with slight variations. The author says that Jamālī used to travel in the same manner as a qalandar, smeared with ashes and with skin wrapped around his waist. When he visited Jāmī, he sat with the skin between them on the floor. Maulānā Jāmī asked Jamālī the difference was between him and an ass. Jamālī replied the difference between him and an ass was a skin. Jāmī inquired about his home, and Jamālī replied that he came from Delhi. Jāmī asked him to recite any of the celebrated Jamālī’s verses, that is, if he knew them. Jamālī sang: My body is smeared with the dust of Thy street/That too is torn down to the knees. Jāmī said probably he was talking to Jamālī himself. On receiving a reply in the affirmative, Jāmī showed great respect and asked him to explain a number of the verses of the India poets, Amīr Khusrau and Amīr Ḥasan, in which Jāmī did not fully understand some of the Hindī words.18 The remembrance of the circumstances surrounding his composition of alFawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya provides us with a measure of Jāmī’s fame in India. We know that this text is a commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s al-Kāfiya, which Jāmī wrote for his son. Before Jāmī, the noted Indian scholar Qāḍī Shahāb al-Dīn Dawlatābādī had also written a commentary on al-Kāfiya known as Sharḥ 16  Ḥāmid bin Faḍlallah Jamālī Dihlavī, Siyar al-ʿārifīn, Urdu trans. Muḥammad ʿAyyub Qādirī, reprint (Lahore: Silsila-yi maṭbūʿāt 147, Urdu Science Board, 1989), 146–48. 17  S.A.A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987), 1:287. 18  Ibid., citing Afsāna-yi shāhān, MS British Museum, Rieu, I, 243b, fols. 36b–37a.

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al-hindī.19 There is a (probably apocryphal) legend according to which Jāmī’s son visited India in the course of his education, and met a scholar there who inquired about his identity and provenance. Upon discovering who his father was, this scholar responded with unappreciative contempt: “Oh, I see—you are the son of Jāmī, the poet.” When Jāmī heard this, he resolved to compose a commentary on al-Kāfiya in order to prove that poets too excel in the science of grammar. However, this attempt did not please the recalcitrant critic, who, when asked to evaluate Jāmī’s commentary, observed that it was not original, and was largely based on Dawlatābādī’s Sharḥ al-hindī.20 Even in his own lifetime, Jāmī was an active presence in the Indian intellectual scene. After his death, his popularity not only continued to soar, but expanded with every successive generation. For instance: at the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was an important teacher in Lahore who counted amongst his famous pupils one Shaykh Dāʾūd Jahnival, a noted scholar and saint of the time. The teacher’s main claim to fame was that he had been a student of Jāmī.21 Jāmī’s influence became even more pronounced in India after the coming of the Mughals. 2

Jāmī’s Reception in Mughal India

Jāmī’s name figures in many important Mughal Indian writings, from the autobiography of the first Mughal emperor and founder of the Mughal Empire Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (d. 937/1530) to the literary and historical works compiled later during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Jāmī’s works enjoyed unflagging fame for centuries in royal, religious, and literary circles alike throughout the entire Mughal period. 2.1 Jāmī and the Early Mughals In his autobiography, Bābur evaluates Jāmī as follows: In esoteric and exoteric knowledge, there was no one like him [Jāmī] at that time. His fame is such that it is beyond need of description. It occurs 19  Husain Barzgar, “Shahāb al-Dīn-i Dawlatābādī,” in Dānishnāma-yi adab-i fārsī, 4.2. 20  M.G. Zubaid Ahmad, The Contribution of Indo-Pakistan to Arabic Literature, reprint (Lahore: M. Ashraf, 1968), 199–200. 21  Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:21–28. For an assessment of Shaykh Da‌ʾud Jahnival in Mughal history, see also Abū al-Kalām Āzād, Tadhkira, ed. Malik Ram (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1968), 108–9.

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to me, however, that, by way of good omen, at least a mention of him should be made in these miserable pages.22 Bābur mentions several Timurid princes of Herat who followed the teachings of Jāmī, and he also notes the contributions made by Jāmī’s nephew, Hātifī Haravī (d. 1520/1521), who composed mathnavīs modelled on the quintet of Niẓāmī Ganjavī (d. ca. 606/1209): Hātifī’s Haft manẓar is based on Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar, and his Tīmūr-nāma is an imitation of Niẓāmī’s Iskandar-nāma. Bābur notes that Hātifī’s Laylī u Majnūn enjoyed the greatest popularity, although Bābur himself does not appear to regard it very highly.23 Once, when Bābur had taken ill, he decided to versify the Risāla-yi vālidiyya, a treatise written by Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490), the noted Naqshbandī master who was Jāmī’s spiritual preceptor. Just as al-Busīrī, the author of the famous Qaṣīda-yi burda, was cured of his paralysis by writing that poem, Bābur too believed that this act of versification would cure his illness.24 He chose to follow the meter of Jāmī’s Subḥat al-abrār, a work which itself was dedicated to Aḥrār. Humāyūn is reported to have sought a blessing from one of Jāmī’s disciples, Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Kamāngar Bahdānī, who was, like Jāmī, a noted Naqshbandī saint. Humāyūn became acquainted with Bahdānī through Bayrām Khān (d. 968/1561), a very important noble at his court. Bayrām Khān himself had been tutored earlier by Bahdānī as well, and he had acquired a reputation for interrupting lectures on Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā with his own interpretations—a practice he indulged in so often that he finally incurred the wrath of the teacher, who was driven to make this caustic comment: “What, Bayrām—have you written your own Yūsuf u Zulaykhā?” The respect accorded to Bahdānī, as a disciple of Jāmī, by Humāyūn was unusually high. Once, the emperor organized a special fātiḥa for Jāmī with Bahdānī, and Humāyūn himself held the ewer as Bahdānī performed his ritual ablutions, while Bayrām Khān held the basin.25

22  Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur, The Baburnama: memoirs of Babur, Prince and emperor, ed. and trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 221. 23   Baburnama, 224. For Ḥātifī, see E. G. Browne, A literary history of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 4:227–29 and Michele Bernardini, Mémoire et propagande à l’époque timouride (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2008), 127–146. 24   Baburnama, 410. 25  Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 1:311–12.

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In another instance, Badāʾūnī reports that Bayrām Khān had decided to send a substantial offering to Mashhad; in the course of the description, Badāʾūnī is reminded of Jāmī’s verses, the first line of which is as follows: salāmun ʿalá āli ṭāhā wa-yāsīn salāmun ʿalá āli khayr al-nabīyīn26 Peace be upon the family of ṭāhā and yāsīn! Peace be upon the family of the best of the prophets! From this and countless other examples, it is clear that intellectuals and writers of Humāyūn’s time were engrossed in Jāmī’s writings, and memorized countless verses he had composed. In practically any context, they could— and did—recall a couplet by Jāmī that was suitable for the occasion. 2.2 Jāmī and Akbar Badāʾūnī reports that Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–1605) attended discussions of Jāmī’s Chihil ḥadīth led by Mullā ʿAbd al-Nabī.27 Two anecdotes from his account are particularly revealing of Jāmī’s status as a universal standard of excellence in a variety of contexts. Once, Akbar heard that a certain Shaykh Ḍiyā’allāh claimed to be a great scholar and master of Sufi thought; Badāʾūnī also had two encounters with him, where they discussed various matters. The second encounter took place in the presence of the emperor Akbar, where Akbar decided to test his knowledge and asked scholars of his court to question him, testing his own explanations against what Jāmī had said in his Lavāʾiḥ. If his responses approximated Jāmī’s own thoughts on the subject, then he would indeed be deemed a scholar of high standing. Subsequently, Mirzā ʿAlī Āṣif Khān recited the following before him: gar dar dil-i tū gul guzarad gul bāshī v’ar bulbul-i bī-qarār bulbul bāshī tū juzʾ-ī u ḥaqq kull-ast agar rūzī chand andīsha-yi kull pīsha kunī kull bāshī If a rose comes into your heart, become a rose, and if it is a restless nightingale, become a nightingale. You are a part and God is whole; if for a few days you contemplate the whole, you become whole. 26  Ibid., 2:28. Dīvān, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 93. 27  Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:140.

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Shaykh Ḍiyā’allāh was asked how it could be that Jāmī called God kull (“everything” or “whole”) while God is beyond juzʾ (part) and kull (whole). The examination continued with another quatrain from the Lavāʾiḥ in which God is projected as juz’, at which point Badāʾūnī claimed that he himself had cited those very lines. The emperor was very much impressed with Badāʾūnī. 28 īn ʿishq ki hast juzʾ-i lā yanfakk-i mā kāshā ki shavad be ʿaql-i mā mudrak-i mā khush ān ki damad partaw-ī az nūr-i yaqīn mā rā birahānad az ẓulm-i shakk-i mā This passion that is an inevitable part of us, may it enter our minds, may we comprehend it. Blessed is he who is illuminated by a ray of the light of certainty, it frees us from the oppression of our doubt. There is another famous incident from Akbar’s time in which Jāmī was used as the golden standard by which to adjudicate a dispute—this time, a literary one. Two poets, one of noble lineage and another of unremarkable origin, by complete chance happened to have chosen the same nom de plume: “Sulṭān.” When this came to light, the more high-born “Sulṭān” demanded that the humbler “Sulṭān” change his takhalluṣ. The poor man refused, saying that his father had given him that name, and that he had already composed many poems as “Sulṭān” and did not wish to give it up now. The argument escalated to the point that the noble “Sulṭān” threatened to have his name-rival trampled under the feet of an elephant, and the poor man retorted by saying that he would far prefer death to a forced change of name. A noted scholar, Mawlānā ʿAlā al-Dīn Lārī, who happened to be a tutor to noble families, suggested that both men be put to a test: the humble Sulṭān was told that if he were to compose a satisfactory javāb, or response-poem, to a certain poem by Jāmī, then he could keep his pen name. The poem they chose was a famous ghazal that began with the following couplet: dil khaṭṭ-at rā raqam-i ṣunʿ-i ilāhī dānist bar sar-i mushk-i khuṭān ḥujjat-i shāhī dānist29

28  Ibid., 3:82–85. 29   Dīvān-i jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 219.

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My heart considers your khaṭṭ to be divine craft, it recognizes it the definitive proof over Chinese musk. The poor Sulṭān composed the following response spontaneously: har ki dil rā ṣadaf-i sirr-i ilāhī dānist qīmat-i gawhar-i khud rā ba ka-māhīyat dānist He who knows that his heart is the oyster of the divine secret, appreciates the reality of his own pearl. Both the Mawlānā (Lārī) and the noble Sultan were satisfied with this javāb, even if it was not of a very high order, and they decided that the poor poet should be allowed to keep the pen name “Sulṭān.” In addition, the noble Sulṭān awarded him a handsome sum of money, and was himself forced to give up that pen-name.30 The fact that such a decision came down to whether or not a man could understand and measure up to Jāmī poetically shows just how much Jāmī functioned as a universal standard in all kinds of arenas. No other poet enjoyed such broad popularity. Even Akbar, who was illiterate and therefore unable to imitate Jāmī in Persian, nevertheless made an attempt to do just that: Mirzā Asad Beg Qazvīnī (d. 1041/1631–2) reports that while mourning the death of his son, Prince Dāniyāl (d. 1013/1605), Akbar recited the following line: chashmān-i man chū sāvan-u-bhādon shuda pur az ashk gah nām-i gang mī-kunam u gāh narmada31 My eyes overflowed with tears like the monsoon months of Sawan and Bhadon, I call them sometimes Ganga, and some other times Narmada. This is a transplantation of a verse by Jāmī into Indian geographical terms, derived from the ghazal that begins with the following couplet: yā man badā jamāluka fī kulli man badā bādā hazār jān-i muqaddas turā fidā 30  Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:163. 31  Mirzā Asad Beg Qazvīnī, Vaqāʾiʿ-i Asad Beg, MS Rampur Raza Library, 2069, fol. 27a.

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Oh, [Prophet] whose beauty is manifest in everything that appeared! May a thousand sacred souls sacrifice themselves for you!32 2.3 Jāmī and Jahāngīr Among Mughal rulers, Jahāngīr was one of the finest appreciators of music, poetry, and the arts in general. As such, he too did not escape the long shadow cast by Jāmī. It is related in the Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī that one evening, the famous court composer ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khān-i Khānān (964–1036/1556–1627) and other nobles decided to have a mushāʿira. The taraḥ, or metrical template, for the poetic gathering was set by the following hemistich of Jāmī: bahr-i yak gul zaḥmat-i sad khār mī-bāyad kashīd For the sake of a single rose, one must suffer being pierced by a hundred thorns Khān-i Khānān was the first to compose a couplet in this metre, and other nobles followed suit as well. Then Jahāngīr himself composed this verse ex tempore: sāghar-i may bar rukh-i gulzār mī-bāyad kashīd abr bisyār-ast may bisyār mī-bāyad kashīd One must bring a goblet of wine to the cheek of the rose-garden; there are many clouds, so one must drink much wine. Jahāngīr then asked to hear the rest of Jāmī’s ghazal. However, having listened to the rest of the lines, he said that it was not as good as the famous first line. His assessment of the rest of Jāmī’s poem was that it was “simple and conventional” (sāda va hamvār gufta).33 This interesting example demonstrates how, at that time, esteeming a poet for his popularity was not necessarily commensurate with considering him to be a genuinely good poet.

32   Divān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 111; ed. Afsaḥzad, 1:185. For an appreciation of Akbar’s composition and his engagement with this ghazal, the words nālam and gah, gāh in the following verses in the same ghazal are to be particularly noted: mīnālam az judāʾīyi tū dam ba dam chū nay/v’īn ṭurfa-tar ki az tū nayam yak nafas judā. ʿishq-ast u bas ki dar du jahān jalva mī kunad/gah az libās-i shāh, gāh az kisvat-i gadā. 33  Nūr al-Dīn Jahāngīr, Tūzuk-i jahāngīrī, ed. Sayyid Aḥmad, reprint (Aligarh: Sir Sayyid Academy, Aligarh Muslim University, 2006), 233.

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Another example of Jahāngīr’s appreciation of Jāmī occurred at one of Jahāngīr’s majālis, which he used to convene privately every evening during the initial years of his reign for the discussion of poetry, music, and mystical matters. The emperor listened to the musical presentation of the following couplet: nadānam ān gul-i khandān chi rang-ū-bū dārad ki murgh-i har chaman guft-ū-gū-yi ū dārad I do not understand what power that smiling rose possesses, that every garden’s bird is chattering about it. This caused him to remember a ghazal by Jāmī, whose poems were immensely popular with qavvāls at the time (and remain so even to the present day). That ghazal began with “yā man badā …,” which had inspired Akbar to compose his Hindavi couplets.34 Upon hearing this ghazal sung, Jahāngīr was deeply moved and even fell into ecstasy (tavājud). While Jahāngīr in one instance is shown to be critical of Jāmī, on another occasion he specifically asks for one of his poems to be sung, and it is clear from his reaction that he appreciates it very much. Not only does this reveal that Jahāngīr was familiar with a vast amount of Jāmī’s writings, but it also demonstrates his awareness that Jāmī was a poet whose verses could be fitting for many different kinds of occasions. There seems to be no doubt that Jahāngīr considered Jāmī to be a poet of high mystical caliber. However, as the first anecdote demonstrated, this does not necessarily mean that he thought that Jāmī was always of equally high poetic talent. A further illustration of Jāmī’s popularity across all artistic spheres from Jahangīr’s time is the following: Khān-i Khānān asked the artists in his atelier to prepare illustrations of Jāmī’s quinary, which, in John Seyller’s judgement, represented “an entirely new aesthetic in border decoration.”35 Jahangir’s library also contained an extremely precious copy of an illustrated Yūsuf u Zulaykhā manuscript, transcribed by the legendary calligrapher Mīr ʿAlī. This particular

34  Muḥammad Qāsim Lāhūrī, Majālis-i jahāngīrī, ed. ʿĀrif Nawshāhī and Muʿīn Niẓāmī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2006), 179. 35  John W. Seyller, Workshop and patron in Mughal India: the Freer Rāmāyaṇa and other illustrated manuscripts of ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Zürich and Washington, D.C.: Artibus Asiae Publishers; Museum Rietberg in association with the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 283–85, 291n, 293–301.

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manuscript was completed in Ramadan of 930/July 1524 in Herat, and was presented to the emperor by ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khān-i Khānān.36 3

Jāmī and the Writers of Mughal India

3.1 Jāmī in the Writings of Badāʾūnī Jāmī’s popularity was not confined to the court alone—it was all-pervasive. Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī (954–1004/1547–95), the noted Mughal Indian poet, remembers him as follows: Hail to the song of the ornamentor of knowledge, the mystic from Jām, Before whose eyes the spectacle of worlds was effaced.37 From his abandoned pleasantness words mingled with subtleties his spirituality shone forth in a beauteous form. No one after him attained to his universality; Eloquence in prose and verse closed with him. To compare competitors with him would be the tale of the swift steed and the pack bullock.38

36  Jāmī, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, manuscript kept in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna. See ʿAbd al-Muqtadir, Mirʾat al-ʿulūm: fihrist-i dastī-i nuskha-hā-yi khaṭṭī-i makhzūna-yi Khudā Bakhsh Lāʾibrīrī, Paṭna, 2nd ed. (Patna: Khudā Bakhsh Oriyanṭal Pablik Lāʾibrerī, 2006), manuscript no. 196/518. This MS contains a beautiful shamsa (fol. 4b), and several beautiful miniatures of the Herat school (fols. 56b, 60a, 78b, 101b, 158a, for instance). On fol. 1a there is a note which mentions that this particular MS was bought for 1,000 muhr (gold coins). Reference is to Kāmgār Ḥusaynī, Ma‌ʾāsir-i jahāngīrī, julūs-i panjum, ed. Azra Alavi (New York, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1978). It reads as follows: rūz-i dushamba-yi sīvvum-i muḥarram-i sana-yi hazār va nuzdah … dar īn rūz Yūsuf u Zulaykhāʾī ba khaṭṭ-i Mullā Mīr ʿAlī muṣavvar u mudhahhab ki hazār muhr qīmat dāsht va sipah-sālār Khān-i Khānān ba ṭarīq-i pīshkash irsāl dāshta būd, pasand-i khāṭir-i dushvār-guzīn uftād. 37  This is a slight departure from Beveridge’s translation, which reads: “Hail to the inspired songsters of Jām.” 38   khushā navā-yi maʿārif-ṭarāz-i ʿārif-i jām/ki mahv būd ba-chashm-ash nuqūsh-i akvānī. zi bas laṭāfat-i alfāẓ-i nukta-āmīz-ash/buvad maʿānī-yi ṣūrat-numā ba-rakhshānī. ba jāmiʿiyyat-i ū baʿd az ū kas-ī nagudhasht/zi naẓm u nathr bar ū khatm shud sukhan-rānī. ba-ū ḥadīth-i ḥarīfān barābar avurdan/buvad ḥikāyat-i shabdīz u gāv-i pālānī. Abū alFaḍl, The Akbarnama of Abū al-Fazl, trans. H. Beveridge, reprint (New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2002), 456–57; Akbarnāma, ed. Mawlavī ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1881), 2:309.

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Fayḍī was a court poet, and these verses formed part of a long poem that his brother, Abū al-Faḍl, includes in his Akbarnāma, which was commissioned by the emperor Akbar. Fayḍī, however, echoes Jāmī’s general evaluation in Mughal Indian intellectual milieus. Thus, ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī (d. 1024/1615) whose history, Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, is considered to be a ‘corrector’ of Abū al Faḍl’s Akbarnāma, was also among the many writers and intellectuals of the time both impressed and influenced by Jāmī. Badāʾūnī is remembered as a rather dry scholar, so the fact that Jāmī was important to him is of special note. The first incident of the Muslim conquest of India that Badāʾūnī reports in the first volume of his history begins with a quotation from Jāmī, but not from his poetry. In describing Maḥmūd of Ghazna (d. 432/1030), the author refers to his miserly qualities and his legendary lack of appreciation of the poet Abū al-Qāsim Firdawsī (d. 411/1020), to whom he did not pay the promised reward for his completion of the Shāhnāma, which had taken him thirty years to compose. When describing Maḥmūd’s final hours, Badāʾūnī cites Jāmī: gudhasht shaukat-i maḥmūd u dar zamāna namānd juz īn fasāna ki nashinākht qadr-i firdawsī39 Maḥmūd’s splendor has gone, and no trace of it remained, except the story of how he did not recognize the value of Firdawsī. In the third volume of Badāʾūnī’s history, in which he describes poets, scholars, and saints, he invokes the name of Jāmī time after time. When evaluating the poet Qāsim-i Kāhī, he finds him lacking, despite the fact that he was acquainted with and even tutored by people who were from Jāmī’s time.40 Thus, by Badāʾūnī’s time, not just Jāmī but his entire era were judged in light of the poet’s greatness. Indian scholars expected the poets and scholars of this era to maintain a certain high standard. On another occasion, Badāʾūnī mentions the significance (or rather, the insignificance) of ʿilm-i jafr, the art of divination, and even for this purpose he invokes the name of Jāmī to lend legitimacy to his views. Describing the worthlessness and sinfulness of those who indulge in divination, he cites Jāmī’s famous poem, which includes the following lines: Those who claim to know divination are mad and impure, they keep such sentences from books before them 39  Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 1:14. 40  Ibid., 3:122.

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[but are] neither fearful of consequences, nor [do they] care about peace and means of prosperity. 41 In another context, at the end of his account of Muḥammad Nūr al-Dīn Tarkhān, he refers to an incident involving a poetry competition in which one participant cursed the city of Delhi in an acerbic satire (hajv). When Badāʾūnī reproached this poet for his anti-Delhi poem, there too he invoked Jāmī, perhaps (among other reasons) because the poet in question had used one of Jāmī’s famous meters to compose his lowly satire.42 In yet another instance, while recounting a dispute among the ʿulamāʾ regarding the ontological nature of existence (wujūd), Badāʾūnī once again marshals evidence from Jāmī’s works in order to resolve the problem. With characteristic sarcasm, he cites the following line from Tuḥfat al-aḥrār: nūr-i dil az sīna-yi sīnā ma-jūy rawshanī az chashm-i nā-bīnā ma-jūy Do not seek the light of the heart in the bosom of Mount Sinai, do not look for light in an unseeing eye.43 Jāmī as Remembered by Other Writers: Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī, Ḥakīm Humām Gīlānī, Bakhtāvar Khān, Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ, ʿAbd alKarīm Kashmīrī The Iranian intellectual Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī (d. 997/1589), Akbar’s courtier and a major scholar of his time, was specially commissioned by the emperor to keep an eye out for good Persian poets. Gīlānī cites Jāmī many times in his letters (ruqʿāt), always appropriately for the occasion in question. Writing to his brother in Iran about his excitement at his brother’s imminent arrival, he immediately mentions the following line by Jāmī to express the intensity of his feelings: 3.2

41   jafr-dān-i zamāna mast u junub/pīsh nihāda z’īn maqūla kutub. And: na zi aḥvāl ʿāqibat tarsān/na zi asbāb ʿāfiyat pursān. Ibid., 2:121–22. 42  Ibid., 3:137–39. The meter is from the following verses of Nūr al-Dīn Tarkhān’s satire: muftīyi dihlī’st Miyān Khān Jamāl/muft nadāda-ast fatāwātihī. “The muftī of Delhi is Miyān Khān Jamāl;/he has not given out his fatwās for free (muft).” Badāʾūnī doesn’t approve of the satire because of its low quality, and thus tarnishes the following verses by Jāmī, whose meter Tarkhān used: āh min al-ʿishqi wa-ḥālātihī/aḥraqa qalbī bi-ḥarārātihī. mā naẓara al-ʿaynu illá ghayrakum/uqsimu bi-llāhi wa-āyātihī. “O the passion and its states/ that scorched my heart by its heat; [my] eye looked upon none but you,/I swear by God and by His signs.” 43  Ibid., 3:111–12.

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har ki paydā mī-shavad az dūr pindāram tū-ī Everyone I see approaching from a distance, I think it is you.44 Similarly, when Gīlānī’s younger brother, Ḥakīm Humām (d. 1004/1595)—long employed in the service of the Mughal court—was back in Iran, he wrote a letter to him describing his separation. Among the poets whose couplets he quotes in the letter are Amīr Khusraw, Ḥāfiẓ, and of course the following poignant verse from a ghazal of Jāmī: ṣabr az hama nīkūʾān tavānam lek az tū namī-tavānam ay dust I can bear separation from all beautiful people but I cannot bear to be parted from you, o friend!45 There are a multitude of examples to evidence Jāmī’s fame as it continued without wane throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, Muḥammad Bakhtāvar Khān (d. 1096/1685), the author of Mirʾāt al-ʿālam, cited Jāmī and his Nafaḥāt al-uns several times, and took pride in the fact that among his books there was also an abridgement of the Nafaḥāt.46 In the eighteenth century, Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ (1111–64/1699–1750) cited a story from Jāmī’s Subḥat al-abrār in his Chamanistān, which unfolds as follows. There was a king somewhere who would invite the wisest—or perhaps the most foolish—people of the time to accept the position of vazīr to him at his court, but on one condition: that after one year of service, that person would have one of his hands chopped off and thrown into the sky. Whoever was lucky (or unlucky) enough to catch it would become the next vazīr, and so forth. At the end of his term, one vazīr managed to catch his own severed hand 44  For this hemistich, see Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī, Ruqʿāt-i Ḥakīm Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī, ed. Muhammad Bashir Hussain (Lahore: Idara-yi taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Danishgāh-i Panjāb, 1968), 44. Letter to Ḥakīm Luṭfallāh. The first line of this couplet is: bas ki dar jān-i figār u chasm-i bīdār tū-ī. See Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 692. For the Gīlānī brothers’ careers in Mughal India, see Samsam al-Dawlah Shahnawaz Khan, Ma’athir ul-Umara, ed. Maulavi Abd ur-Rahim (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1888–91), 558–62 and 563–65; a brief notice on Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī’s career is also in Shaykh Farid Bhakkari, Dhakhīrat al-khavānīn, ed. S. Moinul Haq (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1961–74), 1:195. 45  Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī, Ruqʿāt, 132, letter to Ḥakīm Humām. For the ghazal see, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 208. 46  Muḥammad Bakhtāvar Khān, Mirʾāt al-ʿālam, ed. Sajidah Alvi (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1979), inter alia 2:439, 472, 518, 621, 651, 655, 672, 687.

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with his remaining one, and after his second year of service was over, his remaining hand was cut off as well. The moral of the story is that one should not be avaricious and grasping to the point of self-destruction, for that is madness.47 Another eighteenth-century writer who references Jāmī is ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī (d. 1198/1784), the author of Bayān-i vāqiʿ. When Nādir Shāh was looking for an entourage to accompany him on the ḥajj to Mecca after sacking Delhi, ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī travelled with him. He writes that, as he was approaching Medina, some lines from Jāmī’s naʿt (praise poems for the Prophet) came to mind: From one side, the guiding call; from the other side, the sound of the bell. He who is not moved by this must have a heavy soul. When the camel hears the name of the beloved and his station, although it is weighed down, the mountain becomes fleet-footed. When Kashmīrī was returning to India from the ḥajj, he passed by the grave of Abū al-Ḥasan ʿUmar Shādhilī at Mokha in Yemen. There, too, Jāmī’s description of Shādhilī and his miracle in Nafaḥāt al-uns came to mind. He paraphrases Jāmī’s description of how Shādhilī turned the brackish water into sweet, fresh water by his saintly grace: ba barakat-i vujūd-i sharīf-i ān maʿdan-i karāmat shīrīn u guvārā gardīd48 By the blessing of the noble existence of that source of miracles, [the water] became sweet and palatable. 47  Anānd Rām Mukhliṣ, Chamanistān (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1877), 7–8. Mukhliṣ also mentions that on one occasion on Ramadan 19th, 25th RY of Muhammad Shah (November 18, 1742) in one of the poetic assemblies at his own house he mentioned the maṭlaʿ of one of his ghazals to the noted eighteenth-century poet Mirzā Muḥammad Riḍā Qizilbāsh Khān Ummīd; this maṭlaʿ contained the word nāranj (orange); instantly a spontaneous response came from Qizilbāsh Khān Ummīd, citing the following verse from Jāmī:  bar mah-i ān rūz turanj-i dhaqan-ash mīcharbīd/ki ba bāzīcha zi nāranj tarāzū mīsākht. Idem, 29–30. For Qizilbāsh Khān Ummīd, see Jamīl Jālibī, Tārīkh-i adab-i urdu (Delhi: Educational Publishing House, fifth print, 1993), 2.1:133–40. 48  ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī, Bayān-i vāqiʿ, ed. K.B. Nasīm (Lahore: Idāra-yi taḥqiqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Panjāb, 1970), 155–56: yak ṭaraf bāng-i hudī yak jānib āvāz-i darāy/az girānjānī buvad ān rā ki mānad dil ba-jāy. nāqa chūn dhikr-i ḥabīb u manzil-i ū bishnavad/garchi bāshad dar girānī kūh gardad bād pāy. See also Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 737. This edition mistakenly has printed hudā instead of hudī.

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This example demonstrates how Jāmī’s thought and verse formed the framework through which other Sufi saints were remembered. 4

Jāmī’s Reception among the Sufis

As a towering figure in the Indo-Muslim intellectual world, Jāmī was famous not only as a poet and a scholar, but also as a great Sufi writer and practitioner. It is perhaps due to his great stature as a mystic and an authoritative reference in mystical writings that Jāmī was so often cited in the Indo-Muslim world; but before arriving at any conclusions on that score, we will first see how Jāmī’s legacy as a Sufi in his own time lived on in Mughal India. Badāʾūnī reports in Najāt al-rashīd in the context of a disquisition on the etiquette of majlis that once, in Herat, the ruler, Sulṭān Ḥusayn Mirzā, and ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, his vazīr, convened a gathering of mystics and scholars. Particularly careful attention was paid to the placement of the attendees: where each person was meant to sit had been very strictly established ahead of time. After nearly a month’s deliberation, Jāmī was invited to this gathering. Jāmī was naturally supposed to sit in a prominent place in the front row—instead, he made himself comfortable in a lowly corner on the fringes of the gathering, where everyone else had left their shoes. By that time, several other important personages (including the sultan and his vazīr) had arrived, and, instead of taking their places in their intended seats, they all sat next to Jāmī, utterly reversing the pre-assigned order of the majlis. The shaykh al-islām of Herat, who was the son of the well-known scholar Mawlānā Sa‌ʾd al-Dīn Taftāzānī and who was himself a great scholar, did not approve of this flouting of majlis seating procedure. He left in a fit of pique, and subsequently wrote a complaint to Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār, Jāmī’s preceptor, expressing his negative opinion of Jāmī’s behavior. In the meantime, Jāmī had also composed a letter and sent it to Aḥrār, apologizing for what had happened. Aḥrār then came out in defense of Jāmī’s action, since it was clear to him that Jāmī had acted out of humility, and had not intended to upset the seating arrangements. Aḥrār’s support implied a public proclamation of Jāmī’s high status in the most elite Sufi circles. After this incident, the scholars of Herat understood that Jāmī was not simply a scholar and a poet, but that he held another position as well:

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ḥaḍrat mawlavī ghayr az mullāʾī va shāʿirī ḥaythīyat-i dīgar ham dāshtand. The honorable mawlavī also occupies positions other than that of a scholar and poet.49 It is also reported that Khwāja Aḥrār would say to his devout followers who visited him from Khurasan: “Why do you take the trouble of coming here when Mawlānā Jāmī is already in your country? It is strange that people come to light their lamps here, while the tides of the ocean of light (daryā-yi nūr) are surging over there.”50 It is clear, then, that Jāmī was no ordinary Sufi. He was a Naqshbandī shaykh; moreover, one who enjoyed the privilege of having received a unique imprimatur from Aḥrār—the greatest master of the order. Badāʾūnī mentions this anecdote in the context of a discussion of majlis etiquette, for which he again cites Jāmī’s own verses. This confirms, yet again, that Jāmī was indeed a poet for all occasions. The verses are the following: O Master of Reason: behold the nobles of our city! How they crowd and cluster in the world’s courtyard! For instance, the leader makes his way towards the gathering; Everyone prepares a seat for the leader of the gathering. The center of the world is in another realm: They take out the swords of their tongues and quarrel.51 4.1 Jāmī and the Mughal Indian Naqshbandis However, Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1034/1624)—the greatest of the Naqshbandi saints in Mughal India and the founder of a new branch of the order—did not approve of everything that Jāmī had said as a Sufi. Jāmī, we know, was a wujūdī: a commentator of Shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (560– 638/1165–1240), with an unqualified admiration for his well-known Sufi doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd, while Sirhindī, on the other hand, was a staunch shuhūdī, introduced and promoted in India by his murshid, Khwāja Bāqī-billāh 49  Badāʾūnī, Najāt al-rashīd, ed. Sayyid Muʾin al-Haqq (Lahore: Idāra-yi Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i, Panjāb, 1972), 442–43. 50  Aslam Jayrājpūrī, Ḥayāt-i Jāmī, (Delhi: Maktaba Jāmīʿa, 1987), 18, 20. 51  Badāʾūnī, Najāt al-rashīd, 442. yā khwāja ʿaql bīn ki buzurgān-i shahr-i mā/bar khwīshtan faḍā-yi jahān tang mī-kunand. fī- l-mithl ba majlis āvarand ṣadr rūy/har yak bi ṣadr-i majlis āhang mī-kunand. markaz-i zamīn ki buvad mulk-i digarī/tīgh-i zabān kashīda baham jang mī-kunand.

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(d. 1012/1603). For Sirhindī, Jāmī, together with Ibn ʿArabī and all of his followers, had fallen into grave error. Asserting that they remained only at the initial stage of the quest for Truth (ḥaqīqat), Sirhindī claimed that they mistook their error for truth. In this regard, a letter written by Sirhindī is of interest. One such letter begins by expressing his disapproval of Ibn ʿArabī, whose ideas found fertile ground in Jāmī’s poetry. Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī, Sirhindī says, were only capable of seeing whatever they saw in this wide and expansive world, taking all that was manifest for God Himself. There is nothing, according to them, that exists beyond what is manifest. Illustrating his position, Sirhindī cites the following verses of Jāmī, which, in his view, captured the misguided position of Jāmī and Ibn ʿArabī: We take the anthology of existence for the laws of the lesson; we examine them closely, page after page. Truly we have not seen, and have not read anything, except the essence and the elemental attributes of truth.52 Sirhindī then proceeded to present his own understanding of the matter by emphasizing the beginner’s trap into which, in his view, both Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī had fallen. This initial stage of comprehension was one that he too had once attained, and in which he too used to believe, as Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī. However, Sirhindī maintained that this stage was simply an illusion (vahm) in the mind of the neophyte. All things in the world are contingent, but Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī mistook them for certainties (vājib). Sirhindī claimed that he, by the grace of God, had now gone far beyond that initial stage: that he had emerged from the wilderness of illusion and had seen the Divine Reality for what it truly is—something beyond all else (warā al-warā), beyond even what we could ever comprehend (dīd u dānish u kashf-i shuhūd). Sirhindī said that, in this way, he had scaled the highest point of Truth: khalq rā vajh kay numāyad ū dar kudām āyīna dar āyad ū How could He reveal his face to creation? In which mirror could He be reflected?

52   majmūʿa-yi kawn rā ba qānūn-i sabaq/kardīm tafaḥḥuṣ varaqan baʿd varaq. ḥaqqā ki nadīdīm nakhwāndīm dar-ū/juz dhāt-i ḥaqq u shuyūn-i dhātī-yi ḥaqq. From Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī, Maktūbāt-i Imām-i Rabbānī (Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1906), 3:110, letter no. 67.

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Sirhindī finally concluded his letter with the following quatrain: Like an arrow, we have passed quickly through the field of existence with keen comprehension. We have become all eyes, but have seen nothing in it; nothing in [our] illusion is substantiated except the shadow of attributes.53 In other words, Sirhindī had been rightly guided, while others, including Jāmī, were led astray. In another letter, addressed to one of his disciples, Sirhindī returned to this very question of Ibn ʿArabī’s observation of—or rather, his failure to observe—the Truth, but he added a caveat: that all of his criticism was in reference to what Ibn ʿArabī had written, and so he conceded the possibility that Ibn ʿArabī progressed beyond this stage later. What we have in writing, therefore, is a merely a reflection of an earlier stage of spiritual development. Sirhindī wrote that he was commenting on Ibn ʿArabī’s qāl (speech), and that he did not have full knowledge of that Sufi’s final ḥāl (state).54 Take, for example, another letter in which Sirhindī elaborated his position on Sufi knowledge, which he described as passing through three stages. The first stage, ʿilm al-yaqīn (“the science of certainty”), is derived from the observation of signs (nishān) that indicate the absolute divine power of God. This type of observation is called sayr-i āfāqī (“celestial travel” or a journey to the beyond). However, the observation or experience of a divine person cannot be imagined without embarking on the sayr-i anfusī (“spiritual travel” or a journey within), which takes place in the mind of the sālik (neophyte) himself. Everything that one observes on the outward journey belongs to the category of the observation of traces and proofs (āthār va dalāʾil) of God, which is not the same thing as beholding God Himself. Sirhindī marshals supporting evidence for this from Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh, who similarly describes two kinds of journey: the sayr-i mustaṭīl, which takes the disciple far away, and the sayr-i mustadīr, which takes him deep within. The first kind of journey is a search for something outside of one’s own orbit, while the second is a journey through one’s own heart, searching for the goal within one’s own self. Thus, all the manifestations (tajallīyāt) that are projected onto the curtain of illumination are included in this first stage of ʿilm al-yaqīn, and they can appear in myriad ways—sometimes they are colorful, sometimes they are without color; they can be finite or infinite. As Jāmī says in his commentary on the Lamaʿāt: 53   dar ʿarsa-yi kāʾināt bā diqqat-i fahm/bisyār guzashtīm ba surʿat chū sahm. gashtīm hama chashm u nadīdīm dar ū/juz ẓill-i ṣifāt āmada thābit dar vahm. Maktūbāt, 3:110. 54   Maktūbāt, 3:124, letter no. 75. See also ibid., 127–30, letter no. 77.

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ay dūst turā ba har makān mī-justam har dam khabarat az īn u ān mī-justam O friend, I searched for you in every place; every moment, I searched for news of you in this and that. The second stage of mystical knowledge outlined by Sirhindī is called ʿayn alyaqīn, which is the observation of truth itself (ḥaqīqat), not just of its signs (nishān). At this stage, the sālik becomes annihilated (fānī), and, overwhelmed by the experience of truth, loses his own sense of self. In the process of this stage, there is nothing left of the disciple’s own personhood; that is, he becomes entirely annihilated (fānī). Sirhindī also called this stage of knowledge “extended sensory perception and gnosis” (idrāk-i basīṭ va maʿrifat), and noted that there is a difference at this stage between commoners (ʿavāmm) and the elect (khavāss). When ordinary people arrive at this stage, they get confused by the evidence (shuhūd) of creation and of creation and of God (khalq and ḥaqq), and cannot perceive the difference between them, while elect disciples are able to maintain the distinction between the two. The commoners are overwhelmed (ḥayrān) by their experience, and remain forever in the realm of intoxication (sukr), instead of passing into the higher realm of sobriety (sahv). This stage of sobriety is attained only by a few chosen disciples (like Sirhindī and his sect), whom God himself has blessed with unusually keen abilities. The veil (ḥijāb) between the three stages of knowledge, Sirhindī said, disappears at the third stage, and it is only the elect who are finally able to behold truth through truth itself. In other words, they observe the real truth, but maintain the distinction between this and contingent existence. This third and final stage, according to Sirhindī, is called ḥaqq al-yaqīn, a direct experience of Truth. In other words, this observation of Truth takes place from the point of view of Truth itself. This is the stage of persistence in God after annihilation (baqāʾ/fanā bi/fī-llāh). This is the stage where God tells the disciple that he, the disciple, is looking with God’s own eyes and listening with God’s own ears. Of course, Sirhindī made sure to note that attainment of this highest level of knowledge was the exclusive preserve of him and his sect of followers; it takes a sturdy mind to be able to bear such a rich and weighty gift of acute perception, and not just any ordinary mind is capable of bearing such a burden.55 This letter further illustrates the point mentioned above: here, Jāmī has been delicately sidelined by Sirhindī, who claimed that only he and his close 55   Maktūbāt, 1:359–61, letter no. 277. For a discussion of the Sufi terms and discourses that figured in the letter, see Arthur F. Buehler, Revealed Grace: The juristic Sufism of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2011), 115–68.

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disciples were able to pass into the highest stage of gnosis (maʿrifat). We may note here that Sirhindī was very selective and clever in his choice of verses by Jāmī, selecting ones that, of course, suited his purposes, and conveniently omitting couplets that contradicted his position. For instance, in this letter, he cites only the first half of the quatrain given in the Lamaʿāt. In Jāmī’s commentary (the Ashiʿat al-lama‘āt), the full quatrain is as follows: ay dūst turā ba har makān mī-justam har dam khabarat azīn u ān mī-justam dīdam ba tū khwīsh rā tū khud man būdī khajlat zada-am kaz tū nishān mī-justam O friend, I searched for you in every place; every moment, I searched for news of you in this and that. I saw myself in you; you yourself were me; I am ashamed that I searched for [outward] signs of you. Jāmī, too, in his commentary on the Lama’āt, outlines three stages of knowledge, and in the full quatrain, the second and third lines represent the second and third stages respectively, while the first line refers to the first stage.56 By citing only the first half, then, Sirhindī made it seem as though Jāmī only knows about this first stage. From what we have seen in his previous letter, perhaps the reason behind this editorial maneuver was Sirhindī’s deliberate intention to portray Jāmī as less advanced in the stages of knowledge than himself and his sect. And, if he cited the full quatrain, he would then be forced to say that, for Jāmī, the second and third stages are somehow equivalent to the first—and this would be so egregious a theological misrepresentation that he knew he would not be able to defend it. Maybe Sirhindī, by selectively citing only the part of Jāmī’s quatrain that directly supported his own argument, deftly avoided a situation in which he could be understood as differing from Jāmī. To further test this hypothesis, it is worth examining yet another letter of Sirhindī’s which mentions Jāmī. In this letter, Sirhindī discusses the distinctive features of the Naqshbandī order as he had rebuilt and reformulated it. He describes the intimate connection of the order to the first caliph, Abū Bakr, in contradistinction to all the other Sufi orders, for whom the fourth caliph, ʿAlī, is of central importance. Sirhindī argues that Abū Bakr was superior to ʿAlī, since he was closely 56  Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Ashiʿat al-lamʿāt, ed. Ḥāmid Rabbānī (Tehran: Nāṣir-i Khusraw, 1352 Sh/1973), 138–40.

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acquainted with the Prophet and was the first to have the khilāfat to lead and rule the community. Sirhindī further says that in his Naqshbandī order, his followers begin from the point at which all others end, going further than any other order. He and his disciples progress to the stage where they experience naked and absolute communion (vaṣl-i ʿuryānī), which is far beyond all manifestations and epiphanies (tajallīyāt). In fact, at this stage, even the manifestations of God (tajallīyāt-i rabbānī) come to an end. This is Sirhindī’s boldest innovation, which distinguished him from other Naqshbandīs (not to mention other Sufi orders), who maintain that manifestations are infinite, and have no end of any kind.57 Here, too, Sirhindī reinterprets (or rather, distorts) Jāmī’s ideas. Sirhindī polemicises through an imagined dialogue between himself and a disciple, in which the disciple asks him if it is possible for manifestations (tajallīyāt-i dhātī) to have a limit, since others—like Jāmī—have said that they are endless. Sirhindī answers the disciple by saying that the manifestations that Jāmī and people with similar convictions have described as endless are still located within the realm of qualities and aspects (shuyūn u iʿtibārāt) which only appear endless to people like Jāmī. These misguided mystics are doomed to remain traveling through the realm of names and attributes (asmāʾ va ṣifāt); but scholars like Sirhindī have passed through this stage and have entered into a higher reality, where they have attained naked and absolute communion with God (vaṣl-i ʿuryānī). It is at this extreme limit of knowledge that, Sirhindī claims, one can behold the end of all manifestation, even that of God. Sirhindī says that others, like Jāmī, have not been able to reach this highest and purest stage. He concludes by telling his disciple that he may ask all he wants about the first, second, third, fourth, and other stages; but he, Sirhindī, has in fact gone so far along the Sufi path of knowledge that he is beyond (mā-warāʾ) all stages (darajāt). His exact words are as follows: ay birādar, vāṣilān-i īn nihāyat az īn ṭarīq va az ṭuruq-i dīgar aqall-i qalīland; agar taʿdād-i ān afrād numāyad, nazdīk-i nazdīkān dūrī jūyand va az inkār-i baʿīdān khud chi istibʿād numāyad. O brother, there are very few who have attained this limit from my Sufi order and from other orders; if one were to look at the number of these people, the closest of the close search at great distances, and consider themselves to be at a great distance through the denial of others who are distant. 57   Maktūbāt, 1:230–36, letter no. 221.

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He then cites the following ḥadīth: kullu dhālika li-l-kamāli al-wuṣūli ilá nihāyati al-nihāyati bi-ṣadaqati ḥabībinā All of that perfection [which I have attained] to the end of all ends has been through the help of my beloved. 58 Does this imply that, according to Sirhindī, Jāmī was never able to attain the final stage of naked and absolute communion (vasl-i ʿuryānī)? To address this question, let us examine yet another letter in which Sirhindī comments upon Jāmī’s level of knowledge. In this letter, he discusses the relative stature of the four rightly guided caliphs, saying that there is unanimous agreement among Sunnīs that the first two caliphs, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, held a status superior to ʿAlī. But Sirhindī also raises questions in this connection about which there is a wide spectrum of differing opinions: he discusses the concepts of nubuwwat (prophethood) and walāyat (friendship with Allāh), both of which the Prophet combined. Sirhindī emphasizes that Abū Bakr and ʿUmar possessed a greater share of nubuwwat from the Prophet himself, and prophethood for Sirhindī is superior to walāyat. Sirhindī here also discusses the difference and conflict between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya. What he says about the difference between the two, and what he finally says about Jāmī, is important for our purposes, and the relevant passage is as follows: […] In some jurists’ writings, the word jawr (tyranny) is used in connection with Muʿāwiya, for whom they use the expression kāna muʿāwiyatu imāman jāʾiran (“Mu‘āwiya was a tyrannical leader”). The word jawr in this case has connotations of being the opposite of khilāfa (caliphal rule), because Muʿāwiya claimed (power) while ʿAlī was still officially the caliph. This is not the sense of jawr which implies corruption and sinfulness (fisq u ḍalālat), but rather, it implies that Muʿāwiya put forth his claim to power when ʿAli was still the rightful leader. Correct people refrained from using words which would give a sense of error (khaṭāʾ) and Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, who has used the expression khaṭāʾyi munkar, “unlawful error”, has actually committed an excess. Whatever Jāmī has said, it is inappropriate, and is something that should be rejected as an opinion that does not have any veracity. If he had used this

58  Ibid., 1:233, letter no. 221.

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expression for Yazīd, that would have been appropriate; but for Jāmī to have used this expression for Muʿāwiya is an abomination (shanāʿat) …59 We cannot say that Sirhindī included Jāmī among those who abused the Prophet, because in Herat, he was close to Shīʿas who were in power. Sirhindī did not accuse Jāmī of being Shīʿī, and was more lenient in his final judgment, saying that Jāmī could have cited the ḥadīth: “O God, don’t catch me if I have forgotten something and in forgetfulness have committed error.” Therefore, we can read this as approaching an exoneration of Jāmī. Further, Sirhindī cited Jāmī wherever it suited him, as we have seen, quoting passages from Nafaḥāt al-uns and using anecdotes about Sufis to illustrate his own positions with reference to various doctrines. For instance, in the same letter he cites the famous lines: naqshbandīya ʿajīb qāfila-sālār-and ki barand az rah-i pinhān ba ḥaram The Naqshbandī saints are unique guides; they take you to the ḥaram through a hidden path. Considering Sirhindī’s position, can we conclude, then, that in Mughal Indian mujaddidī circles Jāmī was condemned for the falseness of his views? Given the evidence in Sirhindī’s letters, the answer is no. While he disagreed with Ibn ʿArabī and disapproved of his position, he did refer to his writings, and he mentions Jāmī often with great respect and reverence, using expressions like makhdūmī and khidmatī. Khwāja Muḥammad Zubayr, who was the fourth qayyūm to memorize the entirety of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, would, towards the end of his life, often recite the following line: bi-ḥamdi-llāh ki ān raghm-i zamāna ba pāyān āmad īn dil-kash fasāna Thank God that despite the envy of the people of the time, this charming story came to an end.60 59  Ibid., 1:268–75 letter no. 251—see 273 for reference to Jāmī. With reference to the positions of the first two pious caliphs and ʿAlī, ʿAbd al-Rāḥmān Chishtī’ view is different; to him ʿAlī has a very special status. See ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī, Mirʾāt al-asrār, British Museum, Add. Mss. 16,858, fol. 18a. 60  Muḥammad Iḥsān, al-Rawḍat al-qayyūmiyya, Urdu trans. Iqbāl Aḥmad Fārūqī (reprint, Lahore: Maktaba al-nabawiyya, 2002), 4:251. See Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, ed. Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999), 207, verse no. 3,983.

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We may also note that not all Mughal Indian Naqshbandīs received Jāmī in the same terms. They were not all shuhūdīs. There were non-Mujaddidī Naqshbandīs in Kashmir, and later also in the Deccan.61 We also know that Sirhindī’s murshid, Khwāja Bāqī-billāh’s son, Khwāja Khwurd, and several of his disciples were wujūdīs. Shaykh Tāj al-Dīn, a disciple of Khwāja Bāqī-billāh, was perhaps the first to translate Nafaḥāt al-uns into Arabic.62 Furthermore, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ʿAbbāsī Gujarātī (d. ca. 1049/1639), a noted scholar and member of the Naqshbandī order who was perhaps the first to “edit” all six volumes of Rūmī’s Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī, was also a wujūdī and thought very highly of Jāmī and his Sufi legacy. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf characterizes Rūmī’s Mathnawī as “the Persian Quran” (Qurʾān-i fārsī).63 It is very likely that this expression led to a “mistaken” attribution to Jāmī of the oft-cited verse: mathnavī-yi maʿnavī-yi mawlavī/hast qurʾān dar zabān-i pahlavī. “Rūmī’s Mathnavī-yi Maʿnawī/is the Quran in the Persian language.” Sirhindī’s negative comments aside, they did not affect Jāmī’s veritable stature as a Sufi ideologue and a source of inspiration for Mughal Indian Sufi discourses. 4.2 Jāmī, Dārā Shukoh and the Qādirī Shaykhs For Prince Dārā Shukoh, the noted Qādirī at the royal court, Jāmī’s greatest significance was his taṣawwuf. When Dārā Shukoh composed Safīnat al-awliyāʾ, he took his cues from Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns as well as ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ. He mentioned that he studied Jāmī’s prose and poetry very meticulously, 61  See Simon Digby, “The Naqshbandis in the Deccan in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century AD: Baba Palangposh, Baba Musafir and their adherents”, in Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone, eds, Naqshbandis: Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order (Istanbul-Paris: Editions ISIS, 1990), 167–207; Idem, Sufis and Soldiers in Awrangzeb’s Deccan: Malfuzat-i Naqshbandiyya, translation from the Persian and with an introduction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), introduction; Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the seventeenth century: Saints, books, and empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006) for the Deccan Naqshbandis. For Kashmir Naqshbandis, see Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, 2:181–85; David W. Damrel, “Forgotten Grace: Khwaja Khawand Mahmud Naqshbandi in Central Asia and Mughal India” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1991). 62  S.A.A. Rizvi, “Sixteenth century Naqshbandiyya leadership in India”, in Gaborieau et al., Naqshbandis, 162–63; Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, 2:337. In a recently published edition of Tāj al-Dīn’s Arabic rendering of Nafahāt al-uns, the editor Muḥamad Adīb alJādir reproduces the facsimiles of the first and the last pages of an old manuscript of transcribed in 1700 on which he based his edition. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥmad al-Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Adīb al-Jādir (Beirut: Dār al-kutub alʿilmiyya, 2003), 33–34. 63  ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s introduction to his Nuskha-yi nāsikha, Tehran: Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Millī, MS 5261/66809, fol. 11.

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including his ghazals and his mathnavī, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā.64 He also pleaded with his sister, Jahān-Ārā Begam (d. 1092/1681), to read Nafaḥāt al-uns, and he himself claimed to be a spiritual disciple of Jāmī. Jahān-Ārā wrote that she would always keep her copy of Nafaḥāt with her (musāḥib-i jānī-yi khud sākhtam) and read it regularly (hamvāra va hamīsha).65 Dārā Shukoh cited Jāmī’s following rubāʿī at the opening page of the preface of Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn: hamsāya u hamnashīn u hamrah hama ū-st dar dalq-i gadā va aṭlas-i shāh hama ū-st dar anjuman-i farq u nihān-khāna-yi jamʿ bi-llāh hama ū-st, thumma bi-llāh hama ū-st The neighbor, the companion and the co-traveller is He, In the rags of beggars and the raiments of kings is He, In the conclave on high and the secret chamber below, By god, He is all and, verily, by God He is all.66 He reproduced several verses by Jāmī in Ḥasanāt al-ʿārifīn as well. On another occasion, in one of his letters to the saint Shāh Dilrubā, he wrote that, due to Jāmī’s “saintly grace,” the “illusory Islam” (islām-i majāzī) had left his heart and was replaced by the “true infidelity” (kufr-i ḥaqīqī). He then cited the following quatrain by Jāmī: dar dīda aʿyān-i tū buda-yi man ghāfil dar sīna nihān tū buda-yi man ghāfil az jumla jahān nishān-i tū mī-justam khud jumla jahān tū buda-yi man ghāfil67

64  Dārā Shukoh, Safīnat al-awliyāʾ (Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1894), 83. 65  Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 61, 64. Naushahi cites from Jahān-Ārā Begam’s Sāḥibiyya, ed. Muḥammad Aslam (Lahore: Pīshkash-i Sardār ʿAlī Khān, 1993). 66  Dārā Shukoh, Majmaʿ-ul-baḥrain, ed. and trans. M. Mahfuz-ul-Haq, reprint (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1998), 80, 37. See also Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 753; Dārā Shukoh, Dīvān-i Dārā Shukoh, ed. Aḥmad Nabī Khān (Lahore: Idāra-yi Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Panjāb, 1969), 135. 67  Dārā Shukoh, Ḥasanāt al-ʿārifīn, ed. Saiyid Makhdum Rahim (Tehran: Taḥqīqāt va Intishārāt-i Vīsman, 1352 Sh/1973), 50–51. See also Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, 2:131, 144–45; also Muḥammad Salīm, Dārā Shukoh: Aḥvāl u afkār (Lahore: Maktaba-yi Kārvān, 1995), 65, 118. See also Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 765.

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You were manifest before the eyes, [but] I was oblivious. You were hidden in the chest, [but] I was oblivious. I searched for a sign of you throughout the whole world. You were the whole world itself, and I was oblivious. There are many cases of exceptionally dedicated study: for instance, Ḥaḍrat Mīyan Mīr (d. 1635), the noted Qādirī shaykh, is said to have memorized each and every word that Jāmī wrote on Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam.68 In Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ, which was primarily a tadhkira of Mīyan Mīr and his disciples, Dārā Shukoh wrote: taʿrīf-i baḥr-i ḥaqīqat-i Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī va ʿārif-i nāmī ḥadrat-i Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī rā—qaddasa allāhu sirrahumā— bisyār mī-numāyand va sukhanān-i daqīq va ashʿār-i laṭīf-i īshān rā akthar bar zabān mī-rānand va mī-farmūdand ki bihtarīn taṣānīf-i mawlānā jāmī Lavāʾiḥ ast, va mī-farmūdand ki agar Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī ba-wujūd namī-āmad, sukhanān-i Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī rā ki bayān mī-tavānist kard? He greatly praised the ocean of the reality of Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī and the famous saint, the noble Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, and often he used to mention and recite their nuanced utterances and elegant couplets and he used to say that Lavāʾiḥ is the best of Jāmī’s treatises, and he also said that if there were no Jāmī, who else could have explicated the utterances of Ibn ʿArabī?69 Earlier in the sixteenth century, Shaykh Amānallāh (d. 957/1550), an eminent Qādirī, had written a commentary with a detailed introduction on this important treatise on mysticism.70 68  Muḥammad Sāliḥ Kambūh, Shāhjahānnāma, ed. Ghulām Yazdānī and Vaḥīd Qurayshi (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqī-yi Adab, 1967–72), 3:278–79. 69  Dārā Shukoh, Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ, ed. Tara Chand, Saiyid Muḥammad Riḍā and Jalālī Nāyīnī (Tehran: Maṭbuʿāt-i ʿIlmī, 1344 Sh/1965), 166. Unfortunately, there is more than one error in the Urdu translation of this passage by Professor Maqbul Beg Badakhshani. He translates the first two lines as follows: Nāmvar ʿārif Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī ne baḥr-i ḥaqīqat Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī—qaddasa allāhu sirrahu—kī bahut ta’rīf kī. Is bāre meṅ un ke daqīq rumūz aur laṭīf ashʿār akthar logoṅ kī zabān par haiṅ … Shāhzāda Dārā Shukoh, Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ, trans. Maqbul Beg Badakhshani (Lahore: Packages Limited, 1971), 196. 70  ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī, Akhbār al-akhyār, 484.

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4.3 Jāmī’s Sufi Writings, the Chishtīs, and the Other Sufis Among the numerous other Mughal Indian commentaries on Lavāʾiḥ are one by ʿAbdallāh Khwīshgī Qaṣūrī (d. 1106/1694), and another by Muḥammad Sharīf, both titled Ravāʾih. There are also some Shaṭṭārī saints’ commentaries on Lava‌ʾiḥ: one by Muḥammad b. Faḍlallāh, a disciple of the noted seventeenthcentury Gujarati Shaṭṭārī saint Shaykh Vajīh al-Dīn ʿAlavī, titled Ḥāshiyat alʿajība al-lāmiyya fī ḥall baʿḍ al-lawāʾiḥ; another by one ʿAbd al-Nabī Shaṭṭārī Akbarābādī, titled Fawātiḥ al-anwār fī sharḥ Lawāʾiḥ al-asrār, which was printed in 1220/1806. Akbarābādī also prepared an abstract of his commentary, which he called Ravāʾiḥ. There are also several Urdu translations and commentaries on Lava’iḥ, both published and unpublished. Several Urdu translations of Nafaḥāt al-uns were also completed. There is even an Arabic commentary by one Sayyid ʿAlī Aḥmad Shāh Sahsawānī (d. 1259/1852) on Jāmī’s commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, called Naqd ʿalá al-Fuṣūṣ. Sahsawānī called his commentary al-Bunyān al-marṣūṣ.71 The list of the Chishti sūfīs who studied and commented upon Jāmī’s mystical texts is long indeed: Shāh Fakhr al-Dīn Dihlavī, Muḥammad Jamāl Multānī, Muḥammad Sulaymān Tonsvī, and Ghulām Farīd Chishtī, to name only a few from amongst the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Chishtī shaykhs.72 At the Chishtī and Qādirī samāʿ circles, Jamī’s ghazals and naʿts were also very popular. A measure of Jāmī’s popularity in Chishtī circles is indicated by the manner in which a post-Mughal Chishtī, Khwāja Ghulām Farīd Chishtī (d. 1901), referred to him in his writings. He said that he read Jāmī’s text several times along with his peers and teachers, and that one of the major features of the Lavāʾiḥ is its power to attract the reader (jadhb). He is reported to have once said that he and other Sufis of his order who came after Jāmī’s time were all followers of Jāmī in the matter of tawḥīd. Farīd Chishtī claimed that one factor that could be taken as proof of the legality of samāʿ is that Jāmī, despite being a Naqshbandī, regarded this practice to be lawful and elegant (mustaḥsan)—so much so that Jāmī appreciated it very much and was even passionate about it (shāʾiq). In mahfils commemorating Jāmī’s death anniversary (ʿurs), Farīd Chishtī enjoyed hearing Jāmī’s ghazals recited and sung.73 A well-known seventeenth-century Gujarati Chishtī saint, Shaykh Khūb Muḥammad Chishtī, composed a Hindavī mathnavī titled Khūb-tarang, which 71  Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 57. One of the most recent Urdu translations (with commentary) of Lava‌ʾiḥ is by Vāḥid Bakhsh Siyāl, Sharḥ-i lavāʾiḥ-i Jāmī (Lahore: al-Fayṣal, 2008). 72  K.A. Niẓāmī, Tārīkh-i mashāʾikh-i Chisht (Delhi: Idāra-yi adabiyāt-i Dillī, 1984), 5:188, 320, 332, and 404. 73  Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 58–59.

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discusses ethics and Sufism, and the influence of Jāmī’s Salāmān u Absāl here is quite evident.74 Later, the noted Urdu poet Rāsikh ʿAzīmābādī (d. 1822) was inspired by Subḥat al-abrār to compose his Nūr al-anẓār, a mathnavi on ethics and Sufism.75 Additionally, Jāmī’s mathnavī entitled Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, which deserves a separate detailed analysis, was also widely read in India as an important Sufi text, and was translated into several languages (including Sanskrit, Bangla, and Urdu) from as early as the sixteenth century. Several commentaries on it are available from the eighteenth century. Yūsuf u Zulaykhā remains unsurpassed in popularity in India as both a love story and a Sufi text, and attracted tremendous amounts of attention from Indian scholars, Sufis, and poets alike. Brindāban Dās Khūshgū mentions that Bīdil followed the meter of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in his mathnavīs Ṭilism-i ḥayrat and Ṭūr-i maʿrifat. Khūshgū also mentions yet another mathnavī, by Mīr ʿAlī Riḍā Ḥaqīqat, composed in the meter of the same poem.76 We have more than one version of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Dakani, one by Aḥmad Gujarātī, prepared in Golconda in 1580,77 two again in Dakani Urdu by Sayyid Mīrān Hāshimī (d. 1108/1697), in 1687 in Bijapur, and three by Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ʿĀjiz, the son of Ahmad Gujarātī, in 1634.78 Niẓāmī’s Laylī u Majnūn was perhaps the only other mathnavī comparable to Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in the number of commentaries, translations, and adaptations.79 It is said that a late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century Chishtī saint from Panjab wanted his qawwāls to memorize the entire mathnavi. He used to love hearing it in parts, and had it regularly sung in his khānqa at the samāʿ assemblies. Yūsuf u Zulaykhā was also part of the standard madrasa syllabus. There are several commentaries on this mathnavī, beginning in 1073/1664 with 74  Ibid., 59–60. 75  Gyan Chand Jain, Urdu mathnavī shimālī Hind meṅ (Aligarh: Anjuman-i taraqqī-yi Urdu, 1969), 131, 282; Jālibī, Tārīkh -i Urdu adab, 2.2:945–961. 76  Bindrāban Dās Khūshgū, Safīna-yi Khūshgū, ed. Sayyid Shāh ʿAtāʾ al-Raḥmān Kakwī (Patna: Bihar Institute of Arabic and Persian Research, 1959), 124 for Bīdil and 34 for Mīr ʿAlī Riḍā Ḥaqīqat. See also ʿAlī Ibrāhīm Khān Khalīl Banārasī, Ṣuḥuf-i Ibrāhīm, ed. Mīr Hāshim Muḥaddith (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār va Mafārkhir-i Farhangī, 1385 Sh/2006), 78–79. 77  Jālibī, Tārīkh-i Urdu adab, 1:422–28. See also Aḥmad Gujarātī, Yūsuf Zulaykhā (1580–1585), dabistān-i Golkunda kī pahlī mathnavī, ed. Sayyida Jaʿfar (Hyderabad: National Fine Printing Press, 1983), 182–96. 78  Jālibī, Tārīkh-i Urdu adab, 1:247–50, 359–63; Aḥmad Gujarātī, Yūsuf Zulaykhā (1580–1585), 33–38. 79  See, for instance, Jālibī, Tārīkh-i Urdu adab, 1:359–60, 509–10 and Aḥmad Gujarātī, Yūsuf Zulaykhā (1580–1585), 39–40.

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Mīr Nūrallāh Aḥrārī Dihlavī. Among others, we could mention two extensive ­eighteenth-century sharḥs, one by ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Hānsavī (late seventeenth century), who wrote commentaries on other classical Persian texts like Saʿdī’s Bustān; and another major eighteenth-century commentary by Muḥammad Shāh, a disciple of Muhammad Sājid of Jhanjhāna, which was prepared in 1157/1744 and was translated later into Urdu as well, printed in 1310/1892 by Abū al-Ḥasan Farīdābādī. The story was also transposed into Persian prose under the title Iʿjaz-i muḥabbat in 1286/1869 by Sayyid Vazīr ʿAlī ʿIbratī. The care and detail that went into the writing of this commentary indicates the meticulousness with which Jāmī’s poem was read, studied, and taught in India. In addition to these, there are several Urdu translations of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, available in manuscript form and also as published texts. ʿĀrif Nawshāhī mentions in particular the following four translations: (1) by Muḥammad Amīn Godhrevālā, done in 1109/1697; (2) by Qādir ʿAlī Figār ʿAzīmābādī, done in 1208/1793; (3) by Mujīb-Allāh, in 1230/1814; and (4) by Nand Kishor, done in 1288/1871.80 There are three additional Urdu translations: an early Urdu rendering by Fidvī Lāhūrī,81 and two others that have been recently edited and published: one by Muʿtabar Khān ʿUmar (d. 1187 or 1127/1773 or 1715?),82 and a manuscript noted by Sprenger and preserved in Berlin.83 Jāmī also figures prominently in Muḥammad Afḍal’s (d. 1034/1625) Bikat’ kahānī84 and in the works of several early Urdu poets such as Valī Dakanī (ca. 1119/1707): har palak terī ay nigah-i bad-mast nasha-bakhshī maiṅ shiʿr-i Jāmī hai85 80  Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 60–62; Jain, Urdu mathnavī shimālī Hind meṅ, 129, 388–89 for Figār whom he mentions as Figār Dihlavī. 81  See Qudrat Allāh Qāsim, Majmuʿa-yi naghz, ed. Maḥmūd Shīrānī (Lahore: University of the Punjab, 1933), 2:40 and Mīr Ḥasan, Tadhikira-yi shuʿarā-yi hindī, ed. Akbar Haydarī Kashmīrī (Lucknow: Urdu Publishers, Nazirabad, 1979), 40. 82  Muʿtabar Khān ʿUmar, Mathnavī Yūsuf Zulaykhā ed. Aḥmad ʿAlī Shakīl (Delhi: Takhlīq Publishers, 2011). 83  Aloys Sprenger, A Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindu’sta’ny Manuscripts, of the Libraries of the King of Oudh (Calcutta: Printed by J. Thomas, 1854), 626 [ms. no. 1728]. The abjad value of the chronogram āh āh dāgh-i jigar gives 1240/1824 as the date of composition of the work, but the manuscript was copied in 1251/1835. In addition, there are also prose translations into Urdu: one of them we noted earlier, and another by Sayyid Aḥmad Ṭayyib (Nawshāhī, Jāmī, 60–62). 84  Muḥammad Afḍal, Bikat’ kahānī, ed. Nūr al-Ḥasan Hāshimī and Masʿūd Ḥusayn Khān (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1979), 28, 61, and 54, 89. 85  Valī Dakkanī repeatedly expressed his appreciation for Jāmī’s poetry; see for instance Divān-i Valī, ed. Nurul Hasan Hashimi (Lahore: al-Wiqār Publications, 1996), 294, 392.

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Each wink of your intoxicated eye in bestowing pleasure is like Jami’s poetry. The print history of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā provides yet another measure of its popularity. Several of Jāmī’s works were printed in 1811 in Calcutta: Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (of which there have been 124 printing runs up to today), his Kulliyyāt (15 printing runs), and Subḥat al-abrār (ten printing runs). Among the other books by Jāmī that were printed are the Lavāʾiḥ, Silsilat al-dhahab, Nafaḥāt al-uns, and Tuḥfat al-abrār, all of which were printed multiple times since 1867. Yusuf u Zulaykha was also an integral part of madrasa curricula (Dars-i Niẓāmī), as was his grammatical text al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, popularly known as the Sharḥ-i Jāmī. This text also went through many printings, and we have several commentaries on it from the seventeenth century onward. Jāmī’s Bahāristān was perhaps the only text that could compare with Saʿdī’s Gulistān and Būstān in terms of pedagogical popularity. 5 Conclusion Jāmī left an unparalleled legacy in India, on both the elite and the popular levels, and across many different facets of Indo-Muslim culture. He is mentioned in almost all the tadhkiras composed in India from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth.86 He was very vocal in his appreciation of Indo-Persian literature and scholarship, had high praise for Amīr Khusraw and Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī, and held Maḥmūd Gāvān in high estimation not just for being a member of the ruling class, but as a great scholar as well. His poetry was read, recited, sung, commented upon, and taught in madrasas and Sufi centers, and a large number of his couplets and hemistiches found their way into everyday parlance. Jāmī may or may not have been a truly great Persian poet qua poet, but his clarity sets him apart from the poets of the subsequent generations, in whose complex Indian style (sabk-i hindī) every line is considered to be saturated with ambiguity.87 This runs against the opinion held by some that Jāmī (along with Fighānī and others) was responsible for planting the seeds of the sabk-i 86  The latest is a small but informative pamphlet by Aslam Jayrājpūrī, Ḥayāt-i Jāmī, written in 1911. Ḥayāt-i Jāmī, (Delhi: Maktaba Jāmīʿa, 1987). Besides the references in Shiblī Nuʿmānī’s classic, Shiʿr al-ʿajam, (repr. ʿAzamgarh: Darul Musannefin, 1991), 5:117, 175. 87  See, for example, Ehsan Yarshater, “The Indian or Safavid Style: Progress or Decline?” in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Albany: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 217–70; and the contributions of Paul Losensky in this volume.

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hindī style which later flourished in India.88 Perhaps the proverbial quality of Jāmī’s verse lies in its directness and lack of polysemy, in his verses’ ready offerings of neatly packaged ethical lessons and advice that one could recall on all kinds of different occasions. This impression of Jāmī as a source of wisdom was strengthened by his legacy, which was cherished in the popular memory of him as both great scholar and as a Sufi. He therefore not only had ready and apt formulations of everyday wisdom for how to lead a good, disciplined, and righteous life, but he also had the authority to dispense this wisdom as well. For example, Jāmī writes: It’s good to be kind to one’s enviers, but without water, one cannot douse that fire which is concealed in the heart of the flint-stone. … It is not good to hear reproaches from anyone, however sweet-talking; the wound a reed inflicts upon the eye is deep, even if it is a sugarcane. And: You can gnaw a whole through the wall with your teeth; you can claw through stone with your fingernails; you can dive head-first into the fireplace; you can pick up scraps of fire with your eyes; you can bear a hundred camels’ loads upon your head; you can run all the way from East to West; all these seem easier to Jāmī than bearing the burden of obligation to lowly people.89 Fayḍī, the famous Mughal Indian poet, further illustrates this point with the following citation of Jāmī in one of his letters: 88  Muḥammad Taqī Bahār, Sabkshināsī (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1958), 3:227: […] va īn shīva[-yi hindī] az harāt tavassuṭ-i jāmī va fighānī ba dihlī va dakkan va isfahān sirāyat namūd. For a different opinion, see, Muḥammad Riḍā Shafīʿī Kadkanī, Shāʿir-i āʾina-hā: Barrasī-yi sabk-i hindī va shiʿr-i Bīdil (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Āgah, 1350 Sh/1971), 140–42. 89   bā hasūdān luṭf khush bāshad valī natavān bī-āb/kushtan-i ān ātish ki andar sang-i ātish muḍmar ast. […] ṭaʿna az kas khush nabāshad garchi shīrīn-gū buvad/zakhm-i nay bar dīda sakht ast ar hama nay-shakkar ast. And: ba dandān rakhna dar dīvār kardan/ba nākhun rah-i khārā rā burīdan. furū raftan ba ātish-dān nigūn sar/ba nūk-i dīda ātish pāra chīdan. ba farq-i sar nihādan ṣad shutur bār/zi mashriq jānib-i maghrib davīdan. basī bar Jāmī āsāntar numāyad/zi bār-i minnat-i dūnān kashidan. Divan-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan, 71, 73, 846. See also Aslam Jayrājpūrī, Ḥayat-i Jāmī, 65–67.

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mustalzim-i mamāt buvad zahr u qīmatī’st mustalzim-i ḥayāt buvad āb u kam-bahā’st Poison that kills is expensive; water, which sustains life, has little price.90 In these simple and down-to-earth verses, we see how easily they could have been called to mind by anyone who encountered enviers or invidious flatterers. It is this quality of universal applicability that allowed Jāmī’s verses to enter into proverbial usage and to be preserved in the collective memory of India. Every genre of Persian poetry has its own undisputed virtuosos: Ḥāfiz and Saʿdī are, by common consent, masters of the ghazal; Khāqānī and Anvarī are kings of the qasīda; and in the mathnavī genre, Niẓāmī and Firdawsī are unsurpassed. While Jāmī perhaps cannot be distinguished as a great master in this same sense, he is nonetheless the unrivalled master of jāmiʿīyat—comprehensiveness. “Eloquence in prose and verse,” Fayḍī proclaimed, “culminated with him.” It is due to this quality, perhaps, that he has rightly earned the title of khātim al-shuʿarāʾ: by making use of and consolidating the entire foregoing Persian literary tradition, Jāmī created a style which Paul Losensky has called a kind of neo-classicism.91 Jāmī’s popularity in India was also due in large part to his naʿts, or praise-poems for the Prophet. Amīr Khusraw’s popularity also rested on this very genre, and his naʿts were recited at Chishtī Sufi samāʿ gatherings. Jāmī was not far behind Khusraw in terms of popularity, even though Jāmī was a Naqshbandī. Jahāngīr himself, as we have seen, admitted that while not all of Jāmī’s poetry is good poetry, in naʿt he was unequalled. In this way, in spite of some doctrinal differences and disputes between the Chishtīs and the powerful mujaddidī Naqshbandīs, Jāmī assumed a central role not only among different Sufi orders in India, but among both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. His Sufi writings, such Nafaḥāt al-uns, Lavāʾiḥ and Naqd al-nuṣūṣ, the last two in particular, are among the most subtle and widely read texts across the Sufi orders. Thus Jāmī was not simply a poet in India, but a spiritual leader, a shaykh— a title that he acquired, remarkably, in spite of both the denominational 90  Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī, Inshāʾ-yi Fayḍī Fayyāḍī, ed. A. D. Arshad (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqī-yi Adab, 1973), 104. 91  “What distinguishes Jāmi’s poetics, however, is the effort to codify and consolidate the entire literary tradition up to his time, a largely conservative project that might be best characterized as neo-classical.” Paul Losensky, “Jāmī: Life and Works,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 14.5:469–75. See also F.F. Arbuthnot, Persian Portraits: A Sketch of Persian History, Literature, and Politics (London: B. Quaritch, 1887).

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divisions between Sufi orders, and also despite the fact that a major shaykh of an important branch of his own order did not assess him very positively. Finally, we cannot overlook the larger political and cultural geography of the time as a factor in the establishment of Jāmī’s prominence in the IndoMuslim imagination. From the Ghaznavid era (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), and continuing throughout the Timurid period, Herāt was not a distant cultural outpost on the periphery of the Indo-Muslim cultural sphere. On the contrary, it was, along with Delhi and Lahore, one of several thriving cultural capitals of a larger, trans-regional Persianate domain (ʿajam). Since Jāmī was the preeminent scholar and poet in Herat under the Timurids, it is natural, therefore, that his popularity spread to India as well. Of course, Jāmī was known in India before the Mughals, but his popularity there was further bolstered by the general nostalgia experienced by the Mughal-Indian elites (political as well as intellectual) for the cultural and intellectual legacy of Timurid Herat. Herat was not only a direct forebear of Mughal power, but of Mughal culture, and thus was preserved in Mughal cultural memory as the direct source of noble origin and illustrious cultural inheritance. Part of this memory was the image of Herat as the centre of flourishing Islamic multiculturalism: for instance, there did not appear to be sharp sectarian divisions between Sunnī and Shīʿī creeds under Bāyqarā. When Timurid power was completely destroyed in Herat by the invading Uzbek armies, we know that many scholars fled from death at the hands of the ruthless Shaybanids to the countryside, taking up residence in small towns like Jām, and led out their lives in quiet retirement “accompanied and favored there by the souls of their own saints and ancestors.” It was in these hinterlands that the memory of Timurid glory was cherished and quietly kept alive. When a day came when they heard that “the lamp of the illustrious Tīmūrid house had again been re-lit” in Kabul by Bābur; these exiled intellectuals began flocking to Kabul, accompanied by several princes and great men of Herat.92 Kabul, then, became the new temporary centre for the Herat elites that survived. Once Bābur established the Mughal empire, all the scholars, saints, and poets, as well as their descendants, started pouring into India, bearing the hope and conviction that this new empire would revive the glory of Herat. Thus, from the very beginning, Herat’s halcyon days lived on as part of the living memory of the past—and hope for the future—of the new Mughal elites, many of whom were direct descendants of the elites that had migrated from Herat. Herat was reborn in India, both politically and culturally. 92  Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of political Islam: India 1200–1800 (London: Hurst & Company, 2004), 2–53.

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If Herat had come alive again in Mughal India, then it is hardly surprising that Jāmī figured so prominently in the Indo-Persian imagination. Once Jāmī’s role was established as part of this Mughal revival of Herat, it was impossible to diminish or erase his popularity. Even when Mughal power was on the wane, Jāmī’s legacy continued to live on, unflagging, surviving the sea changes that had swept so much away. One of the great poets of India, Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938), whose political, philosophical, and poetic vision was perhaps the last great embodiment of Indo-Persian and Indo-Muslim culture, wrote the following couplet about Jāmī: kushta-yi andāz-i mullā jāmī-am naẓm u nathr-i ū ʿilāj-i khāmī-am I sacrificed myself to mullā Jāmī’s style; his poetry and prose cured me of my naïveté.93 When Iqbāl speaks of Jāmī’s “style” (andāz), he does not mean simply that he, Iqbāl, aesthetically followed in Jāmī’s footsteps. For Jāmī’s poetry “strikes fire in his soul,” and a single couplet by Jāmī or Rūmī is of greater intellectual value for him than all Aristotelian logic and reasoning.94 Rather, he is making a much stronger claim here: he says that he has given his life for everything that Jāmī represented—for that particular vision of a correct way of life which was set forth in Jāmī’s writings, and which was kept alive by his long-enduring popularity. This “style” of thought was part of an overall conception of Islam as a religious, political, and cultural framework capable of great flexibility, accommodation, and tolerance of other religions, which at the same time conferred a distinctive identity upon every individual believer, and upon the state as well. Jāmī’s abiding popularity in India perhaps has most of all to do with this: that his ideas dovetailed so perfectly with the great Mughal dream of a versatile Islam, one that could adjust to the realities of lived experience. Acknowledgments Thibaut d’Hubert rekindled my interest in Jami and persuaded me to study him in the South Asian context. My discussions with him were of significant help in developing 93  Muḥammad Iqbāl, Kulliyāt-i Fārsī (Lahore: Shaykh Ghulam Ali & Sons, 1968), 21. 94  Ibid., 910, 1014.

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the theme of this paper. He and Alexandre Papas then provided a wonderful opportunity to learn so much from the conferences they sponsored. Jane Mikkelson’s assistance was valuable in the writing of the paper. I am grateful to them all.

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Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds. Edited by Adīb al-Jādir. Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2003. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Dīvān-i Jāmī. Vol. 1. Edited by Aʿlá Khān Afṣaḥzād. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Dīvān-i Jāmī. Edited by Muḥammad Rawshan. Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1389 Sh/2010. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Kulliyyāt-i Jāmī. Lucknow: Nawal Kishor, 1890. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds. Edited by Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī. Tehran: Īṭṭilāʿāt,1375 Sh/1997. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Aḥamd. Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī. Edited by ʿIṣām al-Dīn Ūrūnbāyif and Asrār Raḥmānūf. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1999. Jayrājpūrī, Aslam. Ḥayāt-i Jāmī. Delhi: Maktaba Jāmīʿa, 1987. Kashmīrī, ʿAbd al-Karīm. Bayān-i vāqiʿ. Edited by K.B. Nasīm. Lahore: Idāra-yi taḥqiqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Panjāb, 1970. Khūshgū, Bindrāban. Safīna-yi Khūshgū. Edited by Sayyid Shah Ataur Rahman Kakwi. Patna: Bihar Institute of Arabic and Persian Research, 1959. Lāhūrī, Muḥammad Qāsim. Majālis-i jahāngīrī. Edited by ʿĀrif Nawshāhī and Muʿīn Niẓāmī. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2006. Losensky, Paul. “Jāmi: Life and Works.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, 469–475. Maḥmūd Gāvān, Khwāja ʿImād al-Dīn. Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ. Edited by Shaykh Chānd ibn Ḥusayn. Hyderabad: Sarkār-i ʿĀlī, 1948. Maḥmūd Gāvān, Khwāja ʿImād al-Dīn. Manāẓir al-inshāʾ. Edited by Maʿṣūma Maʿdankan. Tehran: Farhangistān-i zabān va adab-i fārsī, 1381 Sh/2002. Mīr Ḥasan. Tadhikira-yi shuʿarā-yi hindī. Edited by Akbar Haydarī Kashmīrī. Lucknow: Urdu Publishers, Nazirabad, 1979. Muḥaddith Dihlavī, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq. Akhbār al-akhyār fī asrār al-abrār. Edited by ʿAlīm Ashraf Khān Tehran: Anjuman-i āthār va mafākhir-i farhangī, 2005. Muhammad Afḍal. Bikat’ Kahānī. Edited by Nūr al-Ḥasan Hāshimī and Masʿūd Ḥusayn Khān. Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1979. Muḥammad Sāliḥ Kambūh. Shāhjahānnāma. Vol. 3. Edited by Ghulām Yazdānī and Vaḥīd Qurayshi. Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqī-yi Adab, 1967–72. Muḥammad Salīm. Dārā Shukoh: Aḥvāl u afkār. Lahore: Maktaba-yi Kārvān, 1995. Muqtadir, Abdul. Mirʾat al-ʿulūm: fihrist-i dastī-i nuskha-hā-yi khaṭṭī-i makhzūna-yi Khudā Bakhsh Lāʾibrīrī, Paṭna. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. Patna: Khudā Bakhsh Oriyanṭal Pablik Lāʾibrerī, 2006. Mushtāqī, Shaykh Rizqullāh. Vāqiʿāt-i Mushtāqī. Edited by Iqtidar Hussain Siddiqui and Waqarul Hasan Siddiqi. Rampur: Rampur Raza Library, 2002. Mushtaqui, Shaikh Rizq Ullah. Waqiʻat-e-Mushtaqui of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui: A Source of information on the life and Conditions in the Pre-Mughal India. Translated

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by Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi. New Delhi: Co-published by Indian Council of Historical Research and Northern Book Centre, 1993. Muʿtabar Khān ʿUmar. Mathnavī Yūsuf Zulaykhā. ed. Aḥmad ʿAlī Shakīl. Delhi: Takhlīq Publishers, 2011. Nawshāhī, ʿĀrif. Jāmī, based on the Persian work by ʿAlī Asghar Ḥikmat. 2nd ed. Islamabad: Markaz-i taḥqīqāt-i fārsī-yi Īrān va Pākistān, 2012. Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad, Khwāja. Ṭabaqāt-i akbarī. Vol. 3. Edited by B. De and Muhammad Hidayat Hosain. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1935. Niẓāmī, K.A. Tārīkh-i mashāʾikh-i chisht. Vol. 5. Delhi: Idāra-yi Adabiyāt-i Dillī, 1984. Qāsim, Qudrat Allāh. Majmuʿa-yi naghz. Edited by Maḥmūd Shīrānī. 2 vols. Lahore: University of the Punjab, 1933. Qazvīnī, Mirzā Asad Beg. Vaqāʾiʿ-i Asad Beg, Rampur Raza Library MS 2069. Rizvi, S.A.A. A History of Sufism in India. Vol. 1. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987. Seyller, John W. Workshop and patron in Mughal India: the Freer Rāmāyaṇa and other illustrated manuscripts of ʿAbd al-Raḥīm. Zürich and Washington, D.C.: Artibus Asiae Publishers; Museum Rietberg in association with the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1999. Shafīʿī Kadkanī, Muḥammad Riḍā. Shāʿir-i āʾina-hā: Barrasī-yi sabk-i hindī va shiʿr-i Bīdil. Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Āgah, 1350 Sh/1971. Shahnawaz Khan, Samsam al-Dawlah. Ma’athir ul-Umara. Vol. 1. Edited by Maulavi Abd ur-Rahim. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1888–91. Sharīfī, Javād. “Jāmī dar shibh-i qārra.” In Dānishnāma-yi adab-i fārsī. Edited by Hasan Anushe. Tehran: Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1996. Shiblī Nuʿmānī. Shiʿr al-ʿajam. Vol. 5. Reprint. ʿAzamgarh: Darul Musannefin, 1991. Siddiqi, Muhammad Suleman. The Bahmani Sufis. Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 2009. Sirhindī, Muḥammad Iḥsān. al-Rawḍat al-qayyūmiyya. Vol. 4. Urdu translation by Iqbāl Aḥmad Fārūqī. Reprint, Lahore: Maktaba al-nabawiyya, 2002. Sirhindī, Shaykh Aḥmad. Maktūbāt-i Imām-i Rabbānī. Vol. 3. Kanpur Nawal Kishor, 1906. Siyāl, Vāḥid Bakhsh. Sharḥ-i lavāʾiḥ-i Jāmī. Lahore: al-Fayṣal, 2008. Sprenger, Aloys. A Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindu’sta’ny Manuscripts, of the Libraries of the King of Oudh. Calcutta: Printed by J. Thomas, 1854. Valī Dakkanī. Divān-i Valī. Edited by Nurul Hasan Hashimi. Lahore: al-Wiqār Publications, 1996. Yarshater, Ehsan. “The Indian or Safavid Style: Progress or Decline?” in Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, 217–70. Albany: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988. Zubaid Ahmad, M.G. The Contribution of Indo-Pakistan to Arabic Literature. Lahore: M. Ashraf, reprint, 1968.

chapter 5

The Arab Reception of Jāmī in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya and al-Durra al-fākhira Florian Schwarz In September 1713 AD a scholar from the eastern Iranian world, Muḥammad Bāqī al-Bukhārī, completed a copy of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s al-Fawāʾid alḍiyāʾiyya in Tunis. The characteristic Central Asian hand and a marginal note by the scribe in Persian make it very likely that Muḥammad Bāqī had come from Transoxania to the capital of the North African beylik (domain) relatively recently. His copy of Jāmī’s popular commentary on Arabic syntax remained in the Ottoman vassal principality of Tunis until at least the early nineteenth century. In 1804, a certain ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Darwīsh al-Tūnusī bought the codex. The codex contains glosses in a North African hand.1 A copy of a work by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī produced and used west of Egypt is quite exceptional, and even in the eastern Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire his works found less resonance than in the Ottoman heartland. The eminent Timurid scholar left a comparatively small footprint in the Arab world, and hence it is not surprising that the reception of Jāmī’s work and the perception of his persona in this region has been largely overlooked.2 Yet Jāmī, and at least some of his prose works in Arabic, were not at all unknown among Arab scholars in Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, the Hijaz and Yemen. Ottoman scholars and educated officials played an important role in the dissemination of Jāmī’s works in the Arab provinces of the empire. The Bosnian scholar Muḥammad b. Mūsā Ghulāmak (d. 1045/1635–36), for example, taught during his tenure as Ottoman chief judge in Aleppo his own glosses on the Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. Ghulāmak’s glosses, which circulated in the form of students’ notes from his lectures, became very popular (ishtaharat) in Aleppo.3 Arab readers had access to a substantial biographical note on Jāmī in Tashköprüzade Aḥmed efendi’s 1  Staatsbibliothek Berlin, MS Or. Oct. 3868. Rudolf Sellheim, Materialien zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte 1. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1976), 234‒35, no. 62 and plate 57, fig. 83. 2  Hamid Algar, for example, in his excellent biography of Jāmī devotes an entire chapter on the impact of Jāmī beyond the Timurid realm, but leaves out the arabophone regions. 3  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar fi aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1966), 3:302‒3.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_007

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(d. 968/1561) biographical dictionary of the Ottoman Empire, the Shaqāʾiq alnuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya, written in Arabic and widely quoted by Arab scholars since the sixteenth century.4 The Syrian Ḥanbalī scholar ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād (1032–1089/1623–1679) quotes an abbreviated version of Tashköprüzade’s biography of Jāmī in his biographical annals to the year 1000 h., Shadharāt al-dhahab fī akhbār man dhahab (completed in 1080/1670).5 In the light of the strong Ottoman and Persian presence in Aleppo and also in Damascus since the early sixteenth century it is hardly surprising that even the Persian poetry of Jāmī was known and discussed in the two Ottoman metropoles of Syria. Darwīsh Muḥammad al-Ṭālawī al-Artuqī (950–1014/1543/44–1606), whose father had come to Damascus with Sultan Selim in 1516, studied under several Persian scholars (fuḍalāʾ al-ʿajam) who had settled in Damascus; he read Jāmī’s Sharḥ al-rubāʿiyyāt (sic in al-Muḥibbī), a commentary on several of his own quatrains, with a Tabrīzī scholar.6 The sixteenth-century Aleppan scholar Raḍī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ḥanbalī (908–971/1501/2–1563/4) quotes a controversy around a scholar from Qazvīn who lived in Aleppo in the first half of the sixteenth century and who identified heretical tendencies in Jāmī’s poetic dīwāns. Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, unsurprisingly, clearly sides with Jāmī and ridicules the Qazvīnī scholar.7 Jāmī’s personal encounters with local scholars during stopovers in Aleppo and Damascus on his way to and back from Mecca in 877–878/1473 were not without consequences.8 His brief sojourn in Aleppo seems have to been particularly fruitful. He was received well by local scholars in Aleppo when he arrived from Baghdad in shaʿbān 877/January 1473. Ibn al-Ḥanbalī describes an encounter of Jāmī with the prominent Aleppan shāfiʿī scholar Badr al-Dīn 4  Tashköprüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya (Beirut: Dār alKitāb al-ʿArabī, 1395/1975), 159‒60. 5  Ibn al-ʿImād, Shadharāt al-dhahab fī akhbār man dhahab, ed. Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūt and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ (Damascus-Beirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1413/1993), 9:543. Copies of Tashköprüzade’s biography of Jāmī are not rarely found in manuscripts of Jāmī’s works in Arabic. 6  al-Muḥibbī, Durr al-ḥabab fī ta‌ʾrīkh aʿyān Ḥalab, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Fākhūrī and Yaḥyā Zakariyā ʿAbbāra (Damascus: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa, 1972), 2:149‒55. 7  Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Durr al-ḥabab, 640, in the biography of Rūḥallāh b. ʿAbdallāh al-ʿAjamī al-Qazvīnī, and op.cit. 761 in the biography of Jāmī, where he states that if someone like Rūḥallāh al-Qazwīnī lacks understanding for the difficulties of Jāmī’s poetry, this does not affect the general agreement on Jāmī’s excellence; he quotes in this context a verse from the ghazal “az khār khār-i ʿishq-i tū dar sīna dāram khārhā.” 8  On Jāmī’s pilgrimage see Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīniyān (Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūriyānī, 1371/1992), 1:262‒63.

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al-Suyūfī.9 When Jāmī came through the metropolis of northern Syria again on his return trip from the Holy Cities, he famously received and declined an invitation from the Ottoman sultan Meḥmed II to the court.10 Ibn al-Ḥanbalī was himself interested in Jāmī’s writings. He wrote glosses on the Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya,11 and al-Khafājī attributes a poem in praise of this work to Ibn al-Ḥanbalī.12 When a student of Jāmī’s student ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Lārī visited Aleppo in 945/1538–9, Ibn al-Ḥanbalī was eager to meet him and “took great benefit” from him.13 Ibn al-Ḥanbalī’s student and son-in-law14 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-ʿUrḍī (950–1024/1543–1615), the father of the author of the Maʿādin al-dhahab, also wrote a poem in praise of Jāmī’s commentary of the Kāfiya.15 He was considered an expert (shadīd al-iʿtināʾ) on Jāmī, and authored a commentary on the Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya.16 The Egyptian scholar ʿAbd al-Barr al-Fayyūmī read Jāmī’s commentary on the Kāfiya with al-Lārī’s glosses while stopping in Aleppo on his way to Anatolia in 1048/1638–9; his teacher in Aleppo was the ḥanafī scholar Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Najm al-Dīn 9  Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Durr al-ḥabab, 760. Ibn al-Ḥanbalī quotes the date of Jāmī’s arrival in Aleppo from an autograph note by Jāmī in an appendix (dhayl) to a copy of his Manāsik [al-ḥajj], a pilgrims’ guide which Jāmī wrote—as Ibn al-Ḥanbalī states—during his sojourn in the Holy Places. Badr al-Dīn Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Ḥaṣkafī al-Suyūfī (851–925/1447–1519) was a prominent shāfiʿī scholar of Aleppo. Al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib al-sāʾira bi-aʿyān al-miʾa al-ʿāshira, ed. Khalīl al-Manṣūr (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1418/1997), 1:181 calls Ibn al-Suyūfī a student of Jāmī, probably paraphrasing Ibn al-Ḥanbalī’s Durr al-ḥabab. 10  Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, 1:262. 11  al-Ghazzī quotes from Ibn al-Ḥanbalī’s Ḥāshiya in al-Kawākib al-sāʾira, 2:25. 12  al-Khafājī, Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ wa-zahrat al-ḥayāt al-dunyā, ed. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw (Cairo: ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1386/1967), 1:280. 13  al-Ghazzi, al-Kawākib al-sāʾira, 2:25; the Transoxanian scholar was Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Khālidī al-Kishī thumma al-Samarqandī al-Ḥanafī; he was on his way to Mecca but died in Aleppo in the same year 945 h. He was known as an expert on Jāmī’s commentary on the Ibn ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ. 14  Muḥammad b. ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-ʿUrḍī mentions his grand-father (jadd) „Ibn al-Ḥanbalī“ in a letter dated between 1657 and 1660 to the Dutch scholar Levinus Warner, see Witkam, “Precious books and monuments of friendship in 17th-century Istanbul,” in Essays in honour of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu. Volume I. Societies, cultures, sciences: a collection of articles, eds. Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Duruka (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 2006), 469‒70. 15  al-Khafājī, Rayḥāna, 1:280. On al-Khafājī see van Gelder, “Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (ca. 1571—3 June 1659),” in Essays in Arabic Literary biography: 1350–1850, eds. Joseph Edmund Lowry and Devin J. Stewart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 251‒62. 16  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 3:216; al-Murādī, Silk al-durar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-thānī ʿashar, 3rd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1408/1988), 2:78 also mentions this commentary in his biography of ʿUmar’s grandson Khālid al-ʿUrḍī. Al-ʿUrḍī studied also with an Aleppan scholar of Kurdish origin, munlā Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Kurdī.

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al-Ḥalfawī al-Anṣārī al-Ḥalabī, the khaṭīb of the Umayyad mosque in Aleppo,17 who himself had studied with ʿUmar al-ʿUrḍī.18 It becomes clear from these notes from Syrian biographical dictionaries that in important local scholarly lineages, such as the Ibn al-Ḥanbalīs or the al-ʿUrḍīs in Aleppo, Jāmī and in particular his al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya was held in high esteem from at least the first half of the sixteenth century to the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars from the Kurdish provinces and principalities between Mesopotamia and Iran were important intermediaries in the dissemination of the post-Mongol scholarly tradition to the eastern Arab world. Jāmī was widely studied in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands. Yūsuf al-Aṣamm al-Ṣuhrānī,19 a prominent scholar in sixteenth-century Kurdistan, wrote glosses on ʿIṣām al-Dīn’s glosses on the Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya;20 in the eighteenthcentury ʿUbaydallāh b. Ṣibghatallāh al-Kurdī al-Ḥusaynābādī wrote yet another set of glosses on Yūsuf al-Aṣamm’s ḥāshiya.21 Another member of the Kurdish Ḥusaynābādī family, Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥaydar, wrote glosses on Jāmī’s al-Durra alfākhira, of which at least five manuscript copies are preserved in libraries in Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and Alexandria (on the Durra al-fākhira, see below).22 These examples may suffice to show the place of Jāmī’s works in the scholarly curriculum of the Kurdish principalities in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The influence of Kurdish scholars as transmitters of “the books of the Persians” on the scholarly scene of seventeenth-century Damascus is well documented in Muḥibbī’s biographical dictionary, the Khulāṣat al-athar.23 The 17  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 2:292. 18  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 4:183. 19  Reading Ṣuhrānī for Muḥibbī’s Ṣafrānī. 20  On Yūsuf al-Aṣamm see Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 4:509, who gives the death date as “shortly after 1000 h.” (1591–92). Ḥamawī, Fawāʾid al-irtiḥāl wa-natāʾij al-safar, MS Cairo, Dār alKutub al-Miṣriyya, Ta‌ʾrīkh Taymūr 923, 3: 896 erroneously gives the year of death of Yūsuf al-Aṣamm as “around 1100 h.” (1688–89). On the relationship between al-Isfarāʾinī’s glosses and Jāmī’s commentary see El-Rouayheb, “The Opening of the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab-Islamic Florescence of the 17th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2006): 267. 21  Austrian National Library, Cod. Mixt 879 = Helene Loebenstein, Katalog der arabischen Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek: Neuerwerbungen 1868–1968 (Vienna: Hollinek, 1970), no. 2450. 22  Florian Schwarz, “Writing in the margins of empires: The Husaynabadi family of scholiasts in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands,” in Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, eds. Tobias Heinzelmann and Henning Sievert (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 151‒98. 23  El-Rouayheb, “The Opening of the Gate of Verification.”

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majority of Kurdish scholars recorded in the Khulāṣa migrated to Syria (and occasionally beyond) between ca. 1605 and the 1620s. This coincides with a period of intermittent Ottoman-Safavid warfare that had been triggered by Shah Abbas’s reconquest of Tabriz in 1603. It seems that this migration ebbed with the Safavid annexation of Mesopotamia in 1032/1623, with only occasional new arrivals especially in the 1650s and 1660s. Among this later group of Kurdish scholars settling in Damascus was Ilyās b. Ibrāhīm b. Dāwūd b. Khiḍr al-Kurdī al-Kūrānī (d. 1138/1726). Born in 1047/1637–38, he received his original education mostly in Baghdad before moving to Syria after 1070/1660.24 He became an influential teacher in Damascus; among his students one finds members of influential local families like the khalwatī shaykh Muṣṭafā al-Bakrī and the naqīb of Damascus Ibn Hamza, a teacher of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī.25 The Damascene chronicler Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā Ibn Kannān (d. 1153/1740), who knew Ilyās al-Kūrānī well enough to visit him on the day of his death, lists first among the writings of the Kurdish scholar glosses on “Jāmī” and glosses on “ʿIṣām”, obviously referring to Jāmī’s al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya and ʿIṣām al-Dīn al-Isfarāʾīnī’s critical glosses on the Fawāʾid.26 References to the study and teaching of Jāmī’s commentary on the Kāfiya seem to be rarer for Egypt and the Hijaz. In 1012/1603 the Egyptian shāfiʿī scholar Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Ma‌ʾmūnī (991–1079/1583–1669) wrote notes (taḥrīrāt) on the Fawāʾid.27 The grandson of ʿIṣām al-Dīn al-Isfarāʾinī, ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-ʿIṣāmī (d. 1007/1598), the Mecca-born shāfiʿī qāḍī of Mecca, continued his grandfather’s tradition of philological commentaries and taught also the Fawāʾid. Among his students was a member of the Ṭabarī family, one of the patrician families of Mecca, who read a part of the Fawāʾid with al-ʿIṣāmī.28 Manuscripts of Jāmī’s works are relatively rare in Arabophone regions. The only work by Jāmī that is attested to in a substantial number of manuscripts on the Arab peninsula, in the Arab Levant, in Egypt and even—as the manuscript cited above attests—in North Africa, is his al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya (or al-Fawāʾid 24  al-Murādī, Silk al-durar 1:272; Ibn Kannān, Yawmiyyāt shāmiyya, ed. Akram Ḥasan al-ʿUlabī (Damascus: Dār al-Ṭabbāʿ, 1994), 102. Ilyās al-Kūrānī has occasionally been mistaken for a son of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī, e.g. by Basheer M. Nafi, “Taṣawwuf and Reform in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture: In Search of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī,” Die Welt des Islams 42 (2002): 347. 25  Samer Akkach, ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 5. On Muṣṭafā alBakrī see Ralph Elger, Muṣṭafā al-Bakrī: zur Selbstdarstellung eines syrischen Gelehrten, Sufis und Dichters im 18. Jahrhundert (Schenefeld: EB-Verlag, 2004). 26  Ibn Kannān, Yawmiyyāt shāmiyya, 102. 27  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 1:46 (giving the nisba as al-Maymūnī); Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (Weimar: Felber, 1898–1942), I:304. 28  al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 3:148 (on al-ʿIṣāmī), 2:458 (on ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Muḥammad al-Ṭabarī al-Makkī).

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al-wāfiya, or simply Sharḥ al-Jāmī or Ḥāshiyat al-Jāmī), a commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s handbook on Arabic syntax al-Kāfiya fī l-naḥw. This fits well with the evidence from biographical dictionaries, where the Fawāʾid also appears as the most widely received text by Jāmī in Arabophone learned circles. The number of recorded manuscripts of the Fawāʾid in the Arab province of the Ottoman Empire is still small if compared with the manuscripts of this work produced and preserved in its Anatolian and European provinces, where the Fawāʾid was so popular that it became simply referred to as Molla Cami in shorthand reference to its author.29 A substantial number of copies of the Fawāʾid are recorded in library catalogs in Syria and Egypt. The online catalogs and handlists of manuscript collections in Ṭanṭā and Shibīn al-Kawm in the Nile delta and of the Maktaba Markaziyya li-l-Awqāf in Cairo alone yielded eighteen copies. The dates of the manuscripts in the last-mentioned library range from 977/1569–70 to 1135/1722–23.30 Four of the manuscripts from the Nile delta collections are described as written in a “Persian hand” (two with marginal notes in Persian), and a fifth one was written in Belgrade by a certain al-Ḥusayn al-Daghīnī.31 The catalog of the Ẓāhiriyya collections in Damascus, now incorporated into the Syrian National Library, records 18 manuscripts of the Fawāʾid. Based on the brief catalog descriptions, at least eight manuscripts might be attributed to scribes of a non-Arabophone background. The two oldest dated manuscripts of the Fawāʾid recorded in the Ẓāhiriyya catalog, copied in 971/1563–64 and 991/1583, were written by scribes with Anatolian (al-Qaraḥiṣārī) and Kurdish (al-Zarzāʾī) nisbas, respectively.32 The cataloger specifically mentions “Persian hands” or taʿlīq or nastaʿlīq (which may refer to any scribe of nonArab background and training) for six more manuscripts, including one dated 999/1590–91. Other manuscripts, however, may be attributed to local scholars. Of particular interest is a manuscript of the Fawāʾid that belonged to ʿAbd 29  H. Algar, Jami (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134. 30  977 h., 1037 h., 1054 h., 1105 h., 1119 h., 1135 h. plus two undated copies. The data are taken from the handlist published on the website Jāmiʿ al-makhṭūṭāt al-islāmiyya, http://wqf.me (last accessed on 12 July 2015) and need to be checked. 31  Zaydān, Fahras makhṭūṭāt Shibīn al-Kawm, online nos. 46 and 185; Zaydān, Fahras makhṭūṭāt Dār al-Kutub bi-Ṭanṭā, online nos. 48, 78, 82, 148, 173, 195, 219 and 227; see the searchable online version of the catalogs at http://www.ziedan.com/index.asp (last accessed 12 July 2015). 32  al-Ḥimṣī, Fahras makhṭūṭāt Dār al-Kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya: ʿUlūm al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya: alNaḥw (Damascus: Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, 1973), 405‒6, no. 5427: ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Qara Ḥiṣārī 971 h., “Persian hand”; p. 401, no. 1668: Aḥmad b. mullā Ḥusayn b. ʿĪsā al-Zarzāʾitī (read: al-Zarzāʾī) 991 h.

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al-Wahhāb b. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. Aḥmad Ibn ʿImād, apparently a son of the author of the Shadharāt al-dhahab whose biographical note on Jāmī is cited above.33 A certain number of manuscripts are recorded for Yemen. Whether or not the acquaintance with the Fawāʾid in Yemen should be attributed to the Ottoman presence since the second quarter of the sixteenth century or to other channels of transmission would require further research. In any event, the extant manuscript record points to a significant regional reception in Yemen after the Ottomans ceded control over Yemen to the Zaydi Imams by 1635. Dated manuscripts of the Fawāʾid of Yemeni provenance in European libraries typically were copied in the second half of the 11th/17th century.34 A manuscript of a seventeenth-century Yemeni commentary on Ibn al-Ḥājib’s alKāfiya, the Miṣbāḥ al-rāghib by the Zaydī scholar Muḥammad ibn ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Muʾayyadī (d. 1050),35 contains many marginal glosses copied directly from a manuscript of the Fawāʾid; the reader notes in this manuscripts all point to a Yemeni readership.36 The evidence from historical-biographical texts and manuscript catalogs presented so far suggests a solid dissemination and reception of some of Jāmī’s Arabic prose works, in particular his popular commentary on Ibn 33  al-Ḥimṣī, Ẓāhiriyya: Naḥw, 407, no. 1667. 34  E.g. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Nuovo Fondo Serie B 26 = Eugenio Griffini, “Lista dei manoscritti arabi nuovo fondo della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano II,” part 1. Rivista degli studi orientali 4 (1911–12): 101, no. 150, dated 1050/1644–45; Berlin Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Glaser 203 = Wilhelm Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis der Arabischen Handschriften (Berlin: Asher, 1887–98), 6576,3, dated shaʿbān 1060/1650; Ṣanʿāʾ, Muʾassasat al-Imām Zayd (http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/nc580n948), copied by ʿAlī b. Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Ḥaṭabī in 1086/1675; Austrian National Library Cod. Gl. 225 from the Eduard Glaser collection of Yemeni manuscripts, dated 1088/1677–78; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Nuovo Fondo Serie F49 = Renato Traini, Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana. Vol. IV. Nuovo Fondo: Series F-H (Nos. 1296–1778) (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2011), no. 1344/1, dated 1092/1681–82; an example of a pre-1635 Yemeni copy of the Fawāʾid is al-Ḥabashī, Fahras makhṭūṭāt baʿḍ al-maktabāt al-khāṣṣa fī l-Yaman, ed. J. Johansen (London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1994), 284, no. 695, dated 1017/1608–09. 35  al-Ḥamawī, Fawāʾid al-irtiḥāl, 1:322: Monday 12 shaʿbān 1050 (= 26 November 1640); 1049/1639–40 according to Gregor Schwarb, “MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. Arab. 1294: Guide to zaydī Kalām-Studies during the Ṭāhirid and Early Qāsimite Periods (Mid-15th to Early 18th Centuries),” in The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition, ed. David Hollenberg, Christoph Rauch, and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 194. 36   Munich, Bayerischer Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Arab. 1250; the information on reader notes and glosses is cited from the catalog description by Florian Sobieroj, Arabische Handschriften, Teil 8: Arabische Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek zu München unter Einschluss einiger türkischer und persischer Handschriften; Band 1 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), 370 (no. 191).

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Ḥājib’s al-Kāfiya, in the Arabophone provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries—although to a considerably lesser degree than in the Ottoman heartland. This reception was not limited to the Ottoman administrative and intellectual milieu in the provincial capitals and major centers, but was also established in local Arabophone circles. 1

Jāmī in Seventeenth-Century Arabia: Kurdish or Naqshbandī Transmission?

The following section shifts to emphasize Sufi prose texts by Jāmī, and narrows the focus to a specific group of scholars in the seventeenth-century Haramayn who took a strong interest in those texts and may have been mainly responsible for their wider dissemination among Arab and non-Arab pilgrims and sojourners (mujāwirūn) in the Holy Cities. At the center of this activity stood Jāmī’s al-Durra al-fākhira and its reception in the Hijaz and Yemen in the seventeenth century. A close examination of the manuscript evidence helps to clarify the transmission of Jāmī’s Sufi prose texts to scholarly circles on the Arab peninsula. Jāmī wrote al-Durra al-fākhira in response to a request by the Ottoman sultan Meḥmet II Fatih who asked for an adjudication (muḥākama) between the positions of the theologians, philosophers and Sufis. A first version with 73 chapters was completed in 886/1481, the year the sultan died; later Jāmī added 19 more chapters.37 In the introduction to his English translation of the Durra al-fākhira Nicholas Heer lists 24 manuscripts of the Durra (of either the short and the long version), most of which contain one or several sets of glosses or commentaries by Jāmī himself, by Jāmī’s close follower ʿAbd alGhafūr al-Lārī (whose commentary on the Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya has been cited above), by Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kūrānī, by the Baghdadi scholar of Kurdish origin Ibrāhīm b. Ḥaydar b. Aḥmad al-Ḥusaynābādī (completed in 1106/1694–95), or by Muḥammad Maʿṣūm al-Samarqandī. The selection of manuscripts of the Durra al-fākhira studied by Heer seems to be fairly representative for manuscripts of the text with an Arab provenance. 37  Nicholas Heer, The Precious Pearl: al-Jāmī’s al-Durrah al-Fākhirah together with his glosses and the commentary of ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Lārī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979) and id., al-Durra al-fākhira fī taḥqīq madhhab al-ṣūfiyya wa-l-mutakallimīn wa-lḥukamāʾ al-mutaqaddimīn: bi inḍimām-i ḥawāshī-yi muʾallif va sharḥ-i ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī (Tehran: McGill University-Tehran Branch, 1358/1979). Heer’s magisterial edition, translation and study remains the main point of reference for any study of this text besides the important Italian translation and study by Moreno, La perla magnifica, posthumously published by Alberto Ventura.

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At least 16 of the 24 codices described by Heer can reasonably be assumed to have been produced and used in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. These codices are kept today in libraries in Egypt (7 manuscripts), Syria (1 manuscript), Princeton (7 manuscripts) and Berlin (1 manuscript).38 The manuscripts of the Durra al-fākhira of certain or likely Arab provenance include a particular group of codices that can be directly or indirectly traced to a group of scholars in seventeenth-century Medina around a mujāwir scholar of Kurdish origin, Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥasan al-Kūrānī (1025–1101/1616–91).39 The following brief descriptions are given in chronological order of the copies of the Durra contained in this group of codices: 1. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Sprenger 677.40 A scholar from the Malay world, Yūsuf al-Jāwī al-Maqāṣirī, wrote this copy of the short version of the Durra without glosses in late shawwāl 1066 (August 1656). Jāwī apparently copied also the two seventeenth-century theological treatises that follow the Durra in this codex.41 2. Princeton University, Garrett collection, MS Yahuda 3872. Yūsuf al-Jāwī produced also MS Yahuda 3872 in rabīʿ II 1075 (October 1664), eight solar years after MS Sprenger 677. The volume contains the long version of Jāmī’s al-Durra with Lārī’s commentary and Jāmī’s al-Risāla fī l-wujūd, together with a number of other texts.42 The copy was commissioned (bi-rasm) by Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥasan al-Kūrānī and written outside Medina in the ribāṭ of Imām ʿAlī al-Murtaḍā. The codex is discussed in detail below. 3. Cairo, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, MS ʿAqāʾid Taymūr 393. The codex contains the short version with in the margins Jāmī’s glosses and a selection of Kūrānī’s glosses, Lārī’s commentary. In 1085/1674–75 a certain Aḥmad b. Muḥammad added in Medina Lārī’s commentary.43 38  For pragmatic reasons this survey is based only on the manuscripts described by Heer, The Precious Pearl, 5–15. 39  I do not have sufficient information on the MSS Alexandria, Maktaba Baladiyya ḥikma 24, Cairo, Dār al-Kutub Majāmīʿ Ṭalʿat 217 and Majāmīʿ Ṭalʿat 274, MS Princeton, Houtsma 464 (Philip K. Hitti, Nabih Amin Faris and Buṭrus ʿAbd al-Malik, Descriptive Catalog of the Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library [PrincetonLondon: Princeton University Press, 1938], 478, no. 1584) and MS Berlin, or. oct. 1854 to decide if any or several of them belong to this group as well. 40  Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis, 2324; Heer, The Precious Pearl, 13. 41  Muḥammad ʿAlī b. Muḥammad ʿAllān al-Bakrī (d. 1057/1647), al-ʿIqd al-farīd fī taḥqīq altawḥīd ( fol. 107b–113a, Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis, 2345; on the Meccan author see Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa 4: 18–19; GAL II 390) and Muḥammad Amīn al-Bakrī al-Lārī (d. 1066/1656), Risāla fī ithbāt wājib al-wujūd bi-l-dhāt wa-ṣifātihi ( fol. 113b–150, Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis, 2446; on the author, a Damascene Sufi of southern Iranian origin, see Muḥibbī, Khulāṣa, 4:308; GAL II 330). The first text in the codex (Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis, 3533) was copied in 1145/1732. 42  Heer, The Precious Pearl, 15. Mach, Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts, 205, no. 2393 (1). 43  Heer, The Precious Pearl, 12.

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4.

Damascus, National Library 9276. This copy of Jāmī’s al-Durra and Ḥusaynābādī’s commentary was written by a Damascene scholar, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Ḥanbalī, in 1127 h.44 5. Cairo, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya Majāmīʿ Taymūr 134. This collection contains 20 texts. Beside Jāmī’s al-Durra in the long version with his own glosses and two risālas by Jāmī’s southwest-Iranian contemporary Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī, it includes mostly texts by fifteenth-century Egyptian authors, such as Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505). Three seventeenthcentury texts are also included, a treatise by al-Ḥasan b. ʿAmmār al-Shurunbulālī (d. 1069/1658), the Ithbāt al-khalaf li-taḥqīq madhhab alsalaf composed in 1088/1677 by Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥasan al-Kūrānī, and ʿAbd alGhanī al-Nābulusī’s (1050–1143/1641–1731) al-Ṣulḥ bayn al-ikhwān fī ḥukm ibāḥat al-dukhān.45 The year of the composition of al-Nābulusī’s risāla, namely 1109/1697, provides the terminus ante quem for this codex.46 6. Cairo, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya Taṣawwuf 300. A late manuscript (1290/1873), it was copied from a seventeenth-century manuscript which contained an ijāza by Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī to Aḥmad al-Bannāʾ. The ijāza traces al-Kūrānī’s authority to transmit the text through al-Qushāshī, Aḥmad al-Shinnāwī, and Ghaḍanfar al-Nahrawālī to Jāmī’s nephew Mullā Muḥammad Amīn.47 Princeton MS Yahuda 3872 contains several clues concerning the transmission, study and dissemination of Jāmī’s al-Durra and related texts by Jāmī through the circle of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī. In its present form the codex is incompletely preserved, but it contains only original parts, without additions from other codices. It has two foliations, an old one that was made when the codex was still complete, and a modern one that counts only the preserved folios. The old foliation, in combination with the extant table of contents, permits a reconstruction of the contents of the original codex. In Table 5.1, the lost parts of the codex are marked with an asterisk and square brackets. This codex was written by several scribes in the immediate environment of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī during the first four months of the year 1075 (August– October 1664). Al-Kūrānī personally commissioned (bi-rasm) the scribe Yūsuf al-Jāwī with the task of copying Jāmī’s texts and Lārī’s glosses, a task he 44  Ẓāhiriyya Taṣawwuf, 1:530. The name of the scribe and the date appear at the end of Ḥusaynābādī’s commentary, Ẓāhiriyya Taṣawwuf, 1:639. 45  Heer, The Precious Pearl, 13. Further information on the contents in this majmūʿa is taken from the very basic handlist of the Taymūr collection published on the jāmiʿ al-makhṭūṭāt al-islāmiyya website (http://wqf.me, last accessed on 12 July 2015). I have not had access to the printed catalog of the Khizāna Taymūriyya. 46  For the date of this risāla see e.g. MS Vienna N.F. 265 = Flügel 1661/13. 47  Heer, The Precious Pearl, 13‒14.

The Arab Reception of Jāmī in the 16th and 17th Centuries table 5.1

MS Princeton, Yahuda 3872, codex contents

#

Old foliation

1*

[–22b]

2

22a–43a

3a–23°

3

44a–47b

24a–26b (sic)

al-Jāmī: ris. fī l-wujūd

4

47a–58a

28a–39a

al-Lārī: Ḥāshiyat al-durra al-fākhira

5

61b

42a

6

7* 8

9

10

187

Modern foliation

Author: Work

[al-Kūrānī? Ris. fī l-aʿmāl] al-Jāmī: al-Durra al–fākhira

al-Suyūṭī: al-La‌ʾālī al-maṣnūʿa fī l-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa (khuṭba only) 62a–103a 43a–85a al-Suyūṭī: K. (sic) al-taʿaqqubāt ʿalā l-mawḍūʿāt [103b–117b] [al-Ṣaghānī: al-Durr al-mulṭaqa] 118a–146b 86a–96b al-Kūrānī: al-Maslak [gap: 128–145] (sic) al-wasaṭ al-dānī (incomplete) 147a–150b 97a–100b al-Kūrānī: al-Lumʿa al-saniyya

151a–187a

101a–137a Thabt of Zakariyā al-Anṣārī

Copy date and Scribe, remarks place

Thursday 2 rII 1075, Ribāṭ al-Imām ʿAlī outside Medina Friday 3 rII 1075, Ribāṭ al-Imām ʿAlī outside Medina Do, 10 rII 1075, Ribāṭ al-Imām ʿAlī outside Medina

Yūsuf al-Jāwī; autograph glosses and reader’s notes by al-Kūrānī and his circle Yūsuf al-Jāwī; autograph gloss by al-Kūrānī

End of ṣafar 1075, outside Medina

ʿAbdarraḥmān al-Jāwī

Monday 16 rI 1075, outside Medina Thursday 14 muḥarram 1075, outside Medina 1075

al-Kūrānī (autograph clean copy, half year after composition) al-Kūrānī (autograph clean copy, one month after composition) ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Jāwī

Ribāṭ al-Imām ʿAlī outside Medina, autograph gloss by al-Kūrānī and readers’ notes

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completed within one week in rabīʿ II 1075 (October 1664) at a place outside Medina, the ribāṭ of Imām ʿAlī al-Murtaḍā, close to al-Kūrānī’s residence.48 The codex contains two autograph clean copies (tabyīḍ) of treatises by Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī, both produced in the first half of 1075/1664 between one and six months after the original final drafts (taswīd).49 Autograph glosses by al-Kūrānī appear in the margins of the Durra and the Risāla fī l-wujūd often with dates in the 1080s h.; at least one gloss, however, bears a date in late 1074 h., several months before the writing of the codex.50 This may indicate that al-Kūrānī copied the glosses—or at least some of them—with the dates of their original composition from an earlier autograph copy of his glosses. The codex contains two reader’s notes (qirāʾa) in al-Kūrānī’s own hand: one for ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf alJāwī (Saturday 7 rabīʿ I 1078/27 August 1667), and a common qirāʾa for Aḥmad al-Bannāʾ al-Dimyāṭī and for akh mullā Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī (22 dhū l-qaʿda 1085/ca. 18 February 1675).51 This codex allows us to connect a number of individuals to the circle of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī in Medina, and to his interest in Jāmī’s mystical-theological prose, especially the Durra and the Risāla fī l-wujūd; namely, the scribes Yūsuf al-Jāwī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh al-Jāwī, and ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm b.ʿAbd alKarīm al-Jāwī,52 and the readers ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf al-Jāwī, Aḥmad al-Dimyāṭī and Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī. Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī deserves a few additional remarks. His full name was Muḥammad Saʿīd b. Ḥusayn al-Qurashī al-Kawkanī al-Naqshbandī.53 Surprisingly, he does not seem to be mentioned in the rich biographical literature of the period. The nisba al-Kawkanī points to an origin from Konkan, the Western coastal region of India. Manuscript evidence ties him closely to the circle of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī, who commissioned him with clean and collated copies of collections of his works. Thus MS Laleli 3765 in the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul contains a collection of works by al-Kūrānī copied by alKawkanī in 1089/1678 and collated by him with the author in the same year. Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī is also the scribe of a collection of works by Jāmī and al-Kūrānī that has been fragmentarily preserved in a rather uncomely collection of fragments of several older volumes, sloppily rebound into a new 48   M S Yahuda 3872, fol. 23a, fol. 26b, fol. 39a. 49   M S Yahuda 3872, fol. 96b, fol. 100b. 50   M S Yahuda 3872, fol. 13a: 13 dhū l-qaʿda 1074/ca. 8 June 1664. Examples of other dated glosses: fol. 13b: 1 rabīʿ I 1080 h., fol. 16b: 2 rajab 1089 h., fol. 22b: 8 rajab 1089 h. 51   M S Yahuda 3872, fol. 23a. 52  Beside text 10 he signed a short excerpt from the 14th majlis of the Amālī of Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī, fol. 96b. 53  Thus in MS Serez 3916.

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volume and donated in 1785 to the students’ lending library in the Bedestan of Serez, roughly 100 km north of Saloniki in modern Greece. The volume, preserved today in the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul under the shelf number MS Serez 3916, contains at the beginning the fragment of a codex—one quire and the beginning of an incomplete second quire—with one text by ʿAbd alRaḥmān Jāmī and two texts by Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī. It breaks off in the middle of the second treatise by al-Kūrānī. Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī completed the copy of a risāla by Jāmī in Medina in rabīʿ II 1088 (June 1677).54 Almost exactly two years later, in rabīʿ I 1090 (April–May 1679), he added a copy of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s Mashraʿ alwurūd. Al-Kūrānī had finished the composition of this short treatise only two months earlier, in muḥarram 1090 (February–March 1679). The same scribe continued with a copy of Ibdāʿ al-niʿma by Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī. The end of this treatise with the colophon is lost and the precise date of the copy of the Ibdāʿ therefore cannot be determined. The terminus post is provided by the date of the composition of the Ibdāʿ, 1088–1089/1678–79, which is known from other manuscripts. The manuscripts Yahuda 3872 and Serez 3619 show how closely the study and copying of Arabic mystical-theological prose texts by Jāmī, above all his Durra al-fākhira and his Risāla fī l-wujūd, were connected with the study and dissemination of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s own writings in his circle in Medina. table 5.2 MS Bedestan, Serez 3916, codex contents

Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī writes in Medina

Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī copies in Medina (MS Serez 3916)

1088/1089 1677–79 14 muḥarram 1090 ca. 26.2.1679

rabīʿ II 1088 June 1677 18 rabīʿ I 1090 ca. 30.4.1679 after rabīʿ I 1090 after May/June 1679

Ibdāʿ al-niʿma Mashraʿ al-wurūd

Jāmī, Nafḥat al-ta‌ʾyīd (?) Mashraʿ al-wurūd Ibdāʿ al-niʿma

54  According to my notes the title of this text is given as Nafḥat at-ta‌ʾyīd. I have not been able to identify this text.

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Where did the interest in the Durra al-fākhira in Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s circle in Medina come from? Was the study of the Durra and other Sufi prose texts by Jāmī a “Kurdish” import to the Haramayn? This would not be surprising, considering the evidence for the study of the Durra in seventeenth and eighteenth century, which has been cited above. However, other factors may have contributed to al-Kurānī’s circle’s interest in this text. Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kūrānī was born in 1025/1616 in the Shahrazūr region of Kurdistan, where he also received most of his education. He was almost 30 years old when he left Kurdistan in 1055/1645. After a seven-year journey, interrupted by stays in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, he reached the Haramayn in 1062/1652. Through his broad education in his Kurdish homeland he inherited the legacy of post-Mongol Persophone scholarship, which he documented in a voluminous catalog of teaching authorizations (thabt).55 His main teacher was Muḥammad Sharīf al-Kūrānī. Muḥammad Sharīf also introduced his disciple to Jāmī’s works. The Durra al-fākhira, however, is absent from the list of works al-Kūrānī studied with Muḥammad Sharīf. Rather, al-Kūrānī claims in the “Amam” to have received an ijāza for the Durra from his Medinan teacher Ṣafī al-Dīn Aḥmad alQushāshī. Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī joined al-Qushāshī in the Haramayn in 1062/1652. Al-Qushāshī was a Medinan scholar of Palestinian origin. Together with his own teacher, the Egyptian Aḥmad al-Shināwī, he was at the center of an influential circle of mujāwirūn, which included many North African, Egyptian and Yemeni scholars. Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī eventually became his master disciple and son-in-law, and upon al-Qushāshī’s death in 1071/1660, he inherited his position as head of the community of al-Qushāshī’s fellows and disciples. Al-Qushāshī may appear in this context in the Amam only because he transmitted to al-Kūrānī a particularly attractive ijāza to teach the Durra, but there are a few clues that point in the direction of an actual interest in the Durra in al-Qushāshī’s circle. Yūsuf al-Jāwī, the Southeast Asian scholar whom al-Kūrānī commissioned to copy the Durra in 1664, had already written a copy of the short version of the Durra, without Jāmī’s or Lārī’s glosses, in 1066/1655–56 (eight years earlier), and during the lifetime of al-Qushāshī, while al-Kūrānī was still studying with al-Qushāshī.56 One of Yūsuf al-Jāwī’s teachers was ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-Mizjājī (d. 1074/1663–64), a Yemeni scholar from the Zabid area. Al-Mizjājī was a khalīfa of Tāj ad-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī, an Indian Naqshbandī who quite successfully 55  al-Kūrānī, al-Amam fī īqāẓ al-himam (Hyderabad: Dāirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1328/1910). 56   M S Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Sprenger 677 = Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis, II 536.

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implanted the Naqshbandiyya on the Arab peninsula in the early seventeenth century and who is known for his Arabic translation of Jāmī’s biographical dictionary of Sufi saints, the Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds.57 The Tājiyya, i.e. the Naqshbandī community around Tāj ad-Dīn Zakariyā, should be taken into consideration as a possible channel for the transmission of mystical-theological treatises by Jāmī, including the Durra al-fākhira, into the Haramayn and Yemen. Al-Kūrānī, despite his background in the post-Timurid scholarly curriculum, may have become acquainted with or particularly interested in it through the connection of al-Qushāshī’s circle with the Tājiyya. It may not be a coincidence that al-Kūrānī commissioned the same Yūsuf al-Jāwī, who was already familiar with the text, with producing a personal copy of the Durra, on which he would then write his own glosses. The manuscript copy that Yūsuf al-Jāwī produced for al-Kūrānī, Yahuda 3872, also contains interesting readers’ notes that all point to the same circle of Arabian Naqshbandīs who had joined al-Kūrānī’s circle. There is al-Kūrānī’s autograph qirāʾa for the Egyptian scholar Aḥmad ibn al-Bannāʾ al-Dimyāṭī, who read the manuscript under al-Kūrānī’s supervision, together with his “fellow” (ṣāḥib), the Indian Naqshbandī Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Kawkanī. Aḥmad alDimyāṭī had also been a fellow student of Yūsuf al-Jāwī, and a fellow initiate into the Tājiyya, in the circle of Qushāshī and Mizjājī.58 The late Cairo MS Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya Taṣawwuf 300 was copied from a manuscript that contained an ijāza by Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī for Aḥmad al-Dimyāṭī. There is also a different kind of evidence for a Yemeni channel of transmission to Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī. Tashköprüzāde (and Ibn al-ʿImād) mentions in his biogram of Jāmī that the Durra was known among the Yemenites (ahl al-Yaman) under a particular title, ḥuṭṭu raḥlak (“put down your saddle bag”). Al-Kūrānī actually lists the work in the Amam fī īqāẓ al-himam under the title al-Durra al-fākhira al-mulaqqaba bi-Ḥuṭṭa raḥlak. This title appears also in Yūsuf al-Jāwī’s copy written for al-Kūrānī (Yahuda 3872), and in another copy of the Durra produced in Medina in shawwāl 1085 (January 1675), Cairo Dār 57  Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 94 ff. 58  An extensive literature exists on networks of scholars in 17th- and 18th-century Mecca and Medina in the context of attempts to reconstruct an early modern, pre-Wahhabi genealogy of modern Islamic reformism or revivalism. This is not the place for a critical review of this literature and concept. For a quick orientation on the main figures in those “networks” one may refer to Nafi, “Taṣawwuf and Reform,” and Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ʿulamāʾ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

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al-Kutub ʿAqāʾid Taymūr 393, which includes many of al-Kūrānī’s glosses. The scribe of the latter manuscript, who signed only as Aḥmad b. Muḥammad, may tentatively be identified as Aḥmad b. Muḥammad ibn al-Bannāʾ al-Dimyāṭī. The evidence cited for the transmission of the Durra in the seventeenthcentury Haramayn, although not entirely conclusive, suggests the following hypothetical reconstruction: The Durra al-fākhira became prominent among followers of Tāj ad-Dīn alʿUthmānī, a Naqshbandī shaykh of Indian origin, in Yemen and the Haramayn in the first half of the seventeenth century. While the Durra might have reached Yemen and the Haramayn also in other ways, Tāj ad-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī’s Naqshbandī circles must have been an important channel of transmission for the Durra, together with other late and post-Timurid Naqshbandī texts such as Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns and Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, both translated into Arabic by Tāj al-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī. It should be noted in this context that Tāj ad-Dīn’s Naqshbandī silsila includes a link to Jāmī through Jāmī’s nephew. Tāj al-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī’s circle included Aḥmad al-Qushāshī, Aḥmad alDimyāṭī and Yūsuf al-Jāwī. Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’s acquaintance with—or at least his particular interest in—the Durra may have been the result of his association with Aḥmad al-Qushāshī and his fellows in the 1060s/1650s, rather than his education in his Kurdish homeland. The Qushāshī/Kūrānī circle in the Haramayn and Yemen (and beyond) owed a Naqshbandī silsila going back to Jāmī to Tāj ad-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī. Through the Arabic translations of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns and Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, Tāj al-Dīn also provided a deep historical grounding of the Arabian Naqshbandiyya in the Islamic tradition that was connected with the name of Jāmī. Al-Kūrānī may or may not have brought acquaintance with the Durra with him from Kurdistan, but he certainly brought his specific training in the Persian tradition to this text, which became an important focus of his teaching activity; a substantial part of the Western manuscript transmission of the Durra and its commentaries can be traced back to al-Kūrānī’s circle. 2

A Profile of Jāmī in the Arabophone West?

If al-Kūrānī promoted the study and dissemination of the Durra and its commentaries, how far did this dissemination reach? Al-Kūrānī retained close links with scholars especially in the Maghreb and in Syria. These connections manifest themselves, for example, in the granting or exchange of teaching certificates, or ijāzas, which would as a rule also include Jāmī’s works. So far, however, I could not find evidence for a particular interest in the Durra or related texts among al-Kūrānī’s North African or Syrian contacts, apart from mentioning

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those texts in ijāzas. There is substantial evidence for the study and dissemination of several of Jāmī’s works in the Arabophone world, especially in Syria, Yemen and the Ḥaramayn in the seventeenth century.59 As the evidence from Syrian bio-bibliographical compendia shows, Jāmī was more than just a name for scholars in Damascus or Aleppo. But does a “profile” of Jāmī emerge in the West? The Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, though certainly popularized by Ottoman elites in the Arab provinces of the empire, took, to a certain extent, roots in Arab learned circles. The picture is very different when it comes to Jāmī’s mysticaltheological prose works. The study and dissemination of this aspect of Jāmī’s oeuvre seems to have remained quite exclusive to communities of scholars with a strong Naqshbandī background. It remains to be seen to what extent any instances of copies of the works of Jāmī beyond the confines of this circle attest to a wider reception. Bibliography Ahlwardt, Wilhelm. Verzeichnis der arabischen Handschriften. Berlin: Asher, 1887–98. Akkach, Samer. ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007. Algar, Hamid. Jami. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Azra, Azyumardi. The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ʿulamāʾ in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Brockelmann, Carl. Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. Weimar: Felber, 1898–1942. Dirāyatī, Muṣtafā. Fihristvāra-yi dastnivishthā-yi Īrān. Tehran: Kitābkhāna, Mūze va Markaz-i Asnād-i Majlis-i Shūrā-i Islāmī, 1389/2010. Flügel, Gustav. Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der Kaiserlich Königlichen Hofbibliothek zu Wien. Vienna: K.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1865. van Gelder, Geert Jan. “Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (ca. 1571–3 June 1659).” In Essays in Arabic Literary Biography: 1350–1850, edited by Joseph Edmund Lowry and Devin J. Stewart, 251‒62. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009. al-Ghazzī, Najm al-Dīn Aḥmad. al-Kawākib al-sāʾira bi-aʿyān al-miʾa al-ʿāshira. Edited by Khalīl al-Manṣūr. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1418/1997. Griffini, Eugenio. “Lista dei manoscritti arabi nuovo fondo della Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano II,” part 1. Rivista degli studi orientali 4 (1911–12): 87‒106. al-Ḥabashī, ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad. Fahras makhṭūṭāt baʿḍ al-maktabāt al-khāṣṣa fī l-Yaman. Edited by J. Johansen. London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1994.

59  Iraq and the Kurdish principalities, due to their close connection with Iran, represent a different context and should be considered separately.

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al-Ḥamawī, Muṣṭafā b. Fatḥallāh. Fawāʾid al-irtiḥāl wa-natāʾij al-safar. MS Cairo, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, Ta‌ʾrīkh Taymūr 923. Heer, Nicholas, trans. The Precious Pearl: al-Jāmī’s al-Durrah al-Fākhirah together with his glosses and the commentary of ʿAbd al-Ghafūr al-Lārī. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979. Heer, Nicholas, ed. al-Durra al-fākhira fī taḥqīq madhhab al-ṣūfiyya wa-l-mutakallimīn wa-l-ḥukamāʾ al-mutaqaddimīn: bi inḍimām-i ḥawāshī-yi muʾallif va sharḥ-i ʿAbd alGhafūr Lārī. Tehran: McGill University-Tehran Branch, 1358/1979. al-Ḥimṣī, Asmāʾ. Fahras makhṭūṭāt Dār al-Kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya: ʿUlūm al-lugha alʿarabiyya: al-Naḥw. Damascus: Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, 1973. Hitti, Philip K., Nabih Amin Faris and Buṭrus ʿAbd al-Malik. Descriptive Catalog of the Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library. Princeton-London: Princeton University Press, 1938. Ibn al-Ḥanbalī, Raḍī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm. Durr al-ḥabab fī ta‌ʾrīkh aʿyān Ḥalab. Edited by Maḥmūd Muḥammad al-Fākhūrī and Yaḥyā Zakariyā ʿAbbāra. Damascus: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa, 1972. Ibn al-ʿImād, Shihāb al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. Aḥmad. Shadharāt al-dhahab fī akhbār man dhahab. Edited by Maḥmūd al-Arnāʾūt and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Arnāʾūṭ. DamascusBeirut: Dār Ibn Kathīr, 1413/1993. Ibn Kannān, Muḥammad. Yawmiyyāt shāmiyya. Edited by Akram Ḥasan al-ʿUlabī. Damascus: Dār al-Ṭabbāʿ, 1994. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad. al-Durra al-fākhira. See Heer, Nicholas. Kāshifī, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn. Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt. Edited by ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīniyān. Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūriyānī, 1371/1992. al-Khafājī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad. Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ wa-zahrat alḥayāt al-dunyā. Edited by ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad al-Ḥulw. Cairo: ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1386/1967. al-Kūrānī, Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan. al-Amam fī īqāẓ al-himam. Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1328/1910. Le Gall, Dina. A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Loebenstein, Helene. Katalog der arabischen Handschriften der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek: Neuerwerbungen 1868–1968. Vienna: Hollinek, 1970. Mach, Rudolf. Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts (Yahuda Section) in the Garrett Collection, Princeton University Library; Index by Robert McChesney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. al-Māliḥ, Muḥammad Riyāḍ. Fahras makhṭūṭāt Dār al-Kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya: al-Taṣawwuf. Damascus: Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, 1980. Moreno, Martino Mario. La perla magnifica (al-Durrat al-fāḫira): traduzione, introduzione e note, a cura di Alberto Ventura. Naples: Istituto orientale di Napoli, 1981.

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al-Muḥibbī, Muḥammad Amīn b. Faḍlallāh. Khulāṣat al-athar fi aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar. Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1966. al-Murādī, Muḥammad Khalīl b. ʿAlī. Silk al-durar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-thānī ʿashar. 3rd edition. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1408/1988. Muṣṭafā al-Bakrī: zur Selbstdarstellung eines syrischen Gelehrten, Sufis und Dichters im 18. Jahrhundert. Schenefeld: EB-Verlag, 2004. Nafi, Basheer M. “Taṣawwuf and Reform in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture: In Search of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī.” Die Welt des Islams 42 (2002): 307‒55. El-Rouayheb, Khaled. “The Opening of the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten ArabIslamic Florescence of the 17th Century.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 38 (2006): 263‒81. Schwarb, Gregor. “MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. Arab. 1294: Guide to Zaydī Kalām-Studies during the Ṭāhirid and Early Qāsimite Periods (Mid-15th to Early 18th Centuries).” In The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition, edited by David Hollenberg, Christoph Rauch, and Sabine Schmidtke, 155‒202. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Schwarz, Florian. “Writing in the margins of empires: The Husaynabadi family of scholiasts in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands.” In Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Tobias Heinzelmann and Henning Sievert, 151‒98. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Sellheim, Rudolf. Materialien zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte 1. Wiesbaden: Steiner (Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland; 17, A,1), 1976. Sobieroj, Florian. Arabische Handschriften, Teil 8: Arabische Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek zu München unter Einschluss einiger türkischer und persischer Handschriften; Band 1. Stuttgart: Steiner (Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland; 17, B,8), 2007. Tashköprüzāde, Aḥmed efendi. al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawla alʿuthmāniyya. Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1395/1975. Traini, Renato. Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana. Vol. IV. Nuovo Fondo: Series F-H (Nos. 1296–1778). Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2011. Witkam, Jan Just. Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Library of the University of Leiden, Vol. 1, Manuscripts Or. 1 – Or. 1000. Leiden: Ter Lugt, 2007. Witkam, Jan Just. Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Library of the University of Leiden, Vol. 13, Manuscripts Or. 12.001 – Or. 13.000. Leiden: Ter Lugt, 2007. Witkam, Jan Just. “Precious books and monuments of friendship in 17th-century Istanbul.” In Essays in honour of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu. Volume I. Societies, cultures, sciences: a collection of articles, edited by Mustafa Kaçar and Zeynep Duruka, 467‒74. Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 2006. Zaydān, Yūsuf. Fahras makhṭūṭāt Shibīn al-Kawm. London 1421 (2000); online at http:// www.ziedan.com/index.asp. Zaydān, Yūsuf. Fahras makhṭūṭāt Dār al-Kutub bi-Ṭanṭā. Cairo 1422 (2001); online at http://www.ziedan.com/index.asp.

chapter 6

Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī in Sufi Writings in Malay Mohamad Nasrin Nasir Islam reached the shores of Southeast Asia in the thirteenth century. Ever since then Sufism and most particularly Sufi metaphysics have been taught in the region. Complex metaphysical thought of Sufi texts written in the Malay language, which was the lingua franca of the region, is found as early as the sixteenth century in the works of prominent Sufi teachers. These metaphysical teachings are integrated into the Malay texts from various Arabic and Persian sources. The connections between the region and the Middle East via the Indian subcontinent had made the transfer of knowledge easier. For instance, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī (d. ca. 17th AD) is known to have travelled from Aceh to Damascus and the wider Middle East region. Thus in his writings we find many traces or quotations from Arabic and Persian sources which I have studied and analyzed elsewhere.1 His prominent student, Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī (d. 1039/1630) is also known to have travelled widely in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.2 In a study of one of his important texts, I have shown that he was as versatile as his teacher Ḥamza and similarly quoted from various Arabic and Persian texts when explaining complex metaphysical concepts.3 From the study of the Persian sources on Sufism referred to in their works, it clearly appears that both Ḥamza Fanṣūrī and Shams al-Dīn Sumatrāʾī had a very good understanding of Persian language and complex metaphysical concepts associated with the school of the Shaykh al-Akbar, Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). They have drawn from these sources faithfully and have utilized them fully in their explication of those concepts. In some cases they have used 1  Mohamad Nasrin Nasir, “Persian Quotations in the Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī Aqīdat al-Muḥaqiqīn fī dhikr asrār al-Sufī al-Muḥaqiqīn of Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatraī; (d. 1630 ca),” al-Shajarah 11/2 (2006): 271–95. 2  This was the view of Teuku Iskandar, see De Hikajat Atjeh, ed. Teuku Iskandar (Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde (VKI) 26, 1958), 167–68. 3  “A Critical Edition and Study of Haqq al-yaqin fi ‘aqidat al-muhaqqiqin of Shams al-Din alSumatrai’” (PhD diss., International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC), Malaysia, 2008).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_008

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Persian poetry to elucidate key concepts. Furthermore their understanding of the teachings of the Shaykh al-Akbar is so sound that they are able to use Persian poetry for their didactic purposes. In a previous article I traced the quotations from Persian which are found in early writings in Malay by Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī about Sufi metaphysics.4 Little did I know that there were more quotations to be found in other works by other Malay scholars. Most of these were found after a close study of Malay writings that were available only in Manuscript form. Some of these texts have been published but many more require serious work in order to be made available.5 Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī is an interesting case of how a fifteenthcentury author from Central Asia played a pivotal role in defining how the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī were interpreted and argued between the different understandings and teachings of the Malay Sufis. As we shall see below, Jāmī’s explanation of certain Sufi doctrines central to the Ibn ʿArabī school is used to pass judgment as to what is acceptable in Islamic Sufism and what is not, and therefore deemed to be heretical. I believe that, before having a proper assessment of Jāmī’s influence upon Malay literature, we need to see how his work has been accepted by the Malays. Our aim here is to locate Jāmī’s teachings in Malay writings on Sufism or taṣawwuf. My approach here has been to identify Jāmī’s influence in the writings of well-known Malay Sufi scholars, particularly those who have written on the metaphysical aspects of Sufism following the Ibn ʿArabī school. This was indeed the most popular school and it was followed by a majority of Malay scholars from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. As these are findings from unedited manuscripts, therefore the authorship and arrangement is at times difficult to ascertain. For the time being, I have taken at face value the claims of authorship found in some of the manuscripts I have consulted. There are a few which were thoroughly studied and used to produce critical editions, and those will be identified as such. For the rest, I shall give my best judgment on them and hope for further research to ascertain their authorship. I hope this will not be a bane in the presentation as there are 4  See Mohamad Nasrin Nasir, “Persian Quotations in the Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī Aqīdat al-Muḥaqiqīn fī dhikr asrār al-Sufī al-Muḥaqiqīn of Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatraī (d. 1630 ca).” 5  See Muhammad Zainiy Uthman, Laṭā’if al-Asrār li Ahl Allāh al-Aṭyār of Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī, an annotated transliteration together with a translation and an introduction of his exposition on the fundamental aspects of ṣūfī doctrines (Kuala Lumpur: UTM Press, 2011). Also Mohamad Nasrin Nasir, Karya Agong Melayu: Haqqul Yaqīn fī Aqīdat al-Muḥaqqiqīn tulisan Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī (Kuala Lumpur: Yayasan Karyawan, Forthcoming). Both are studies on Malay Sufi metaphysics which originated from PhD theses.

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many more manuscripts that require a lot of work and expertise to assess their content. Government bodies can only do so much and what they have done till now is commendable, especially in helping to preserve these treasures but more and more academics should step up and take responsibility.6 1

Jāmī in Early Malay Sufism

1.1 Ḥamza Fanṣūrī (d. ca. early 17th century) Ḥamza Fanṣūrī was the first Malay expositor of Sufism in its doctrinal and metaphysical doctrines.7 After travelling to various places to study he came back to his hometown and composed many prose works and poetry that explain the Sufi doctrines and metaphysics of the sixteenth century.8 Unfortunately Only a few of his works are still extant as they were all targeted by “religious officialdom”9 represented by their most staunch adversary of waḥdat al-wujūd, Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī (d. 1068/1658).

6  Notable mention should be made of the Pusat Manuskrip Melayu which is located at Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, which is responsible for cataloguing Malay manuscripts and is accessible to the public. Their help has made the writing of this paper easier. Another body, which is not a governmental body though, is the Yayasan Karyawan which strives to publish great works of the Malay civilization, called Karya Agong. At the moment, they have published more than 15 titles of great works in Malay and edited by experts in the field. A list of their publications can be seen at www.yayasankaryawan.com. 7  This is according to Prof. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas in his A Commentary on the Ḥujjat al-Ṣiddīq of Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī (Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Culture, 1986), 6. 8  To get a detailed but not exhaustive treatment on the biography of Ḥamza Fanşūrī, see S.M.N. al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī (Kuala Lumpur: University Malaya Press, 1970) 3‒30. Also for its brief but lucid treatment see Hj. Muhammad Bukhari Lubis, The Ocean of Unity, Wahdat al-Wujūd in Persian, Turkish and Malay Poetry, reed. (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1994), 274‒81. G.W.J. Drewes and L.F. Brakel (The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri [Dordrecht: Foris KITLV, Bibliotheca Indonesia 26, 1986]) believed that Ḥamza died in 1590. Al-Attas, in The Mysticism of The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, is of the opinion that Ḥamza lived during the reign of Sultan Ala al-Din Riayyat Syah Sayyid al-Mukammil, which ended in 1604. Recently scholars have suggested that Ḥamza died much earlier than that; for a discussion of these views, see Vladimir Braginsky, “Towards the Biography of Hamzah Fansuri: When Did Hamzah live? Data from His Poems and Early European Accounts,” Archipel 57 (1999): 135–75. For a summary of the discussion and of Braginsky’s own views, see his The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 744n13. 9  This term was also used by Prof. Al-Attas when describing Rānīrī in Rānīrī and the Wujūdiyyah of the 17th Century Acheh (Singapore: Malaysian Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, 1966), 35.

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Ḥamza had quoted from the Lavāʾiḥ of Jāmī in his work Asrār al-ʿārifīn (Secret of the Gnostics).10 In the fiftieth section of this work, which is entitled “Know, in order that you may achieve the Act that is Final.” In this section he quotes a saying attributed to ʿUways al-Qaranī (37/657) which was quoted originally in Persian by Jāmī: ān-rā ki fanā-shīva u faqr-ā[īn]ast na kashf [na] yaqīn na maʿrifat na dīn ast raft u zi miyān hamīn khudā mānd khudā al-faqru idhā tamma huwa’llāhu īn ast For him who is engaged in annihilation and practices poverty, there is no insight, no certainty, no gnosis, or religion. He left and of all only God remains, God; When poverty is complete, there God is—that’s what he is.11 In another section of the work, when discussing how God and human beings cannot be separated, Ḥamza quotes from Jāmī again in the original Persian. The quotations are used to explain the nature of union with God. After asking how can union and separation be of two entities when in actual fact they are but one, Ḥamza quotes from Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ: hamchunīn vāṣil nish[as]ta pīsh yārī mīkunad ān ḥajr nāla-hā-yi zār tā shavad maḥjūb u maḥrūm az vaṣl vāqif ān bar ranj u malāl. The person who is in union is like one who sits [in sorrow]; he tells his companion about his separation and his sighs and his tears until he becomes deprived from union; he ceases [to be in union] because of his separation and because of his being full of grief.12 After these two quotations, there is a final quotation from Jāmī in Ḥamza’s writings.13

10  See also Paul Wormser’s chapter in this volume. 11  Attas, Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 403–4. Compare with Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Les jaillissements de lumière, ed. and trans. Yann Richard. Paris: Deux Océans, 1982, 64. 12  Attas, Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 347 (Malay Text) and 465 (English translation). 13  I have been informed by reliable sources that there are 3 more extant writings of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī which have recently been discovered. They are now in the hands of Professor Dr

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hamsāya u hamnishīn u hamrah u hama ū’st [dar dalaq-i gadā u [dar] aṭlas-i shāhī hama ū’st dar anjuman [u] farq [u] nihān-khāna u jamʿ[hama ū’st] biʾllāhi hama ū’st thumma biʾllāhi hama ū’st14 The neighbor, friend and travelling companion, all is He. In the veils of beggars and in the robes of kings, all is He. In union and in separation, in the cell of seclusion, and in the house of congregation; all is He. By God all is He, by God all indeed is He!15 2

Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī (d. 1039/1630) and his Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn

From local Acehnese reports—namely, Hikajat Atjeh, Adat Atjeh and Bustān al-salāṭīn16—we can safely say that he was a highly respected scholar at the court of Sultan Iskandar Muda (d. 1636). His presence is noted at various functions organized by the Sultan where he was asked to read the supplication of thanks, to meet dignitaries from foreign countries, and where he also met with local Acehnese Hajj pilgrims who brought news from Mecca.17 He died in 1630, which coincided with the attack on Malacca by the Acehnese forces.18 Since we do not know his date of birth we cannot determine how long he lived. However, we do know that he was originally from Pasai and a follower of the Shāfiʿī school of law.19 With regard to theology, he followed the Ahl al-Sunna school, specifically Ashʿarī kalām, as is shown in his theological work the Miʾāt Bukhari Lubis who is currently editing them in preparation for publication by Yayasan Karyawan. Nothing more is known about them. 14  Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 339‒40. 15  Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 458. Compare with Jāmī, Les jaillissements de lumière, 108. 16   De Hikajat Atjeh, ed. Teuku Iskandar (Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde (VKI) 26, 1958), 167–68; Adat Atjeh, ed. G.W.J. Drewes and P. Voorhoeve (Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde (VKI) 24, 1958), 87; Nūr al-Dīn Rānīrī, Bustān al-salātīn, ed. Teuku Iskandar (Kuala Lumpur: DBP, 1966). 17  See Mohamad Nasrin Nasir, “Persian Quotations in the Ḥaqq al-yaqīn.” 18  Al-Rānīrī, Bustān al-salāṭīn, b:b 2 faBl 13, 27. 19  This is what he stated in the introduction to Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn. He says, “orang negeri Pasai asalnya dan nasabnya […] dan Imam Shafi’i imamnya dan mazhabnya […]”

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al-muʾminīn.20 We know almost nothing of his training, who his teachers were, where he studied,21 or who taught him Persian and Arabic to a level that enabled him to claim, as he does in the introduction of Ḥaqq al-yaqīn, to have mastered these languages.22 Such questions can only be answered by conjecture at best. His teacher must have been Ḥamza Fanṣūrī since the two were acquainted, as is attested by historical records.23 He also wrote a commentary on a poem by Ḥamza and he frequently relies on the latter’s poetry when explaining complex metaphysical concepts.24 His Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn is intended to serve as a guide for the people of Aceh, to enable them to follow in the footsteps of the “verifiers” (muḥaqqiqīn). According to Shams al-Dīn, this work was needed because people did not understand the language of the verifiers (Arabic and Persian). Shams al-Dīn, being an able scholar, relies on specific sources and presents his findings in the form of a guide, hence the title “The Certified Truth in regard to the Faith of the Verifiers.” It is “certified” in the sense that the seeking subject unites with the sought object of knowledge at the end of the journey, and is able to certify its veracity. The text, which was studied and critically edited,

20  There is currently no edition of this work, considered by many to be Shams al-Dīn’s principal theological work. See C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze, Samsu’l-Din Van Pasai, Bijdrage Tot De Kennis Der Sumatraansche Mystiek (Leiden: Brill, 1945). 21  Teuku Iskandar is of the opinion that Shams al-Dīn travelled to Mughal India where he met with many Sufi masters, amongst them Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Faḍl Allāh alBurhānpūrī who had a great influence on him through his “Seven degrees of Being,” which later came to be known in Malay Sufi texts as “Martabat Tujuh.” Iskandar’s opinion is based on his other view that Shams al-Dīn was the writer of the Hikayat Atjeh, which, according to Iskandar, is modeled on Firdawsī’s Shahnāma. The Shahnāma was popular in Mughal India and Shams al-Dīn could have come across it while he was there. Iskandar does not provide any other evidence for this claim—as there are no surviving accounts of the early life of Shams al-Dīn. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with Iskandar for several reasons: one of which is that Shams al-Dīn’s work displays numerous influences that could not have come from Ḥamza, among them that of the Shaṭṭārī Sufi order. I argue this more fully in “A Critical Edition and Study of Haqq al-yaqin.” 22  “A Critical Edition and Study of Haqq al-yaqin”: He says, “Kerana tiada ada mereka itu tahu akan Bahasa Arab dan akan Bahasa Farisi, tetapi tiada diketahui mereka itu hanya Bahasa orang Pasai […] maka kuhimpunkan daripada erti segala kalimat […]” ([…] because they know not the Arabic and Persian languages for they only know the language of Pasai … therefore I compiled all the meanings of the words [in those languages] […]). 23  See van Nieuwvenhuijze, Samsu’l-Din Van Pasai, 18–24. 24  The title of the work is Sharḥ rubāʿī Ḥamza Fanṣūrī. See Wan Shaghir, Tafsir Puisi Hamzah Fansuri (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Fathaniyyah, 1997), 43–67, which contains, as well as this commentary on the poetry of Ḥamza, three romanized versions of short treatises written by Shams al- Dīn.

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includes quotations from various prominent Sufi writers including Maḥmūd Shabistarī (d. 720/1320) and Jāmī.25 Jāmī appears in the work right at the end of the concluding chapter (khātima): Maka sesungguhnya mushāhadah kepada wujūd Allāh taʿalā itu tiada hasil akan seseorang ʿārif hanya dengan iʿtibār tajallī wujūd Ḥaqq taʿalā itu beberapa martabatnya kerana bahawa sesungguhnya martabat tajallī Ḥaqq taʿalā itu kata Muḥaqqiq seperti kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn Jāmī (q.s.) lima martabat: pertama, ʿālam maʿānī yakni ʿālam aʿyān thābita; kedua, ʿālam arwāḥ; ketiga, ʿālam mithāl; keempat, ʿālam kabīr yakni ʿālam yang lain daripada manusia; kelima,26 ʿālam insān yakni manusia.27 For surely the witnessing of God’s Being will not bear fruit for the knower except through the various modes of God’s self-disclosure of His existence which has few levels. According to the sayings of the verifier such as Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn Jāmī (q.s), it has five levels: First: world of meanings (maʿānī) which is the world of the immutable entities Second: World of spirits Third: Imaginal world Fourth: The greater world which is the world which is different from man Fifth: The world of man.28 God manifests Himself in these five levels, which are not physical but more spiritual. To quote William Chittick, “our whole problem is that God is with us, but we are not with Him. Ibn ʿArabī often explains the distinction by commenting on the Quranic verse, ‘He is with you wherever you are’ (Quran 57:4).”29 Needless to say, this is placed here in Sumatrāʾī’s writing just as a note of academic importance but nothing more since his cosmology contains seven levels. Sumatrāʾī’s seven levels which are similar (in number) to Burhānpūrī’s,

25  Shamsuddin Sumatra‌ʾī, Ḥaqqul yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn, ed. Mohamad Nasrin Nasir (Kuala Lumpur: Karya Agong, forthcoming). 26  Not found in MS A. 27  Sumatra‌ʾī, Ḥaqqul yaqin, 211. 28  Sumatra‌ʾī, Ḥaqqul yaqin, 190. 29  This theme is discussed by William Chittick in his Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern world (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007).

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as stated in the latter’s Tuḥfat al-mursala.30 Thus, Malay Sufi writers did not follow Jāmī’s teachings of the five levels but nevertheless acknowledged their familiarity with his views on the subject.31 In another treatise on metaphysics by Shams al-Dīn we find another reference to some unidentified work by Jāmī. There, Jāmī is referred to as Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī: bahawasanya akan a’yan thabitah itu dua ibarat. Suatu ibarat bahawasanya ia hakikat a’yan kharijiyya […] rupa segala nama Haqq ta’ala. Kedua ibarat bahawasanya ia hakikat a’yan kharijiyyah. maka dengan iyan bahawasanya ia rupa segala nama Haqq ta’ala yang lahiq dengan nama Haqq ta’ala itu. Maka bahawasanya ia qadim tiada muhdath dan dengan ibarat bahasanya ia hakikat segala perkara ini yang adalah baginya barzakh dengan al-ḤaqqNya.32 Surely regarding the fixed entities are two expressions. The first is that they are in reality the external entities, […] which are the external forms of the divine names of the Real. Second, it is the reality of the external entities (without it being connected to the external forms of the Divine names). So, when looked from the angle that it is the form of all the Divine names of God as it is connected with the Divine names. Here it is eternal and not temporal. In in terms of langauge it is the reality for all these things, furthermore it is the intermediate world (barzakh) between the things and the Real. These quotations are the ones found after going through the various manuscripts associated with the figure Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī that is available to me. We can probably make an observation that the recourse to Jāmī’s works is 30  I have discussed this issue in my unpublished dissertation which is a study of the Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-Muḥaqqiqīn. For a brief discussion though see my article, Mohamad Nasrin Nasir, “Presence of God according to Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿAqīdat al-Muḥaqiqīn, a seventeenth-century treatise by Shaykh Shams al-Din al-Sumatra’i (d.1630),”Journal of Islamic Studies 21/2 (2010): 219–23 in particular. 31  Chittick has discussed this and further explained the differences between the main teachers of the school of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystical teachings. See William C. Chittick, “The Five Divine Presences,” The Muslim World 72 (1982): 107–28. Here he mentioned Qūnawī (d. 672/1274) to have believed in three levels: “Although the levels are numerous, they are reducible to the Unseen, the Visible and the reality which comprehends the two.” See Eve Feuillebois’ contribution in this volume. 32   M S 1556 (1), fol. 1.

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to explain “the divine presence” (al-haḍrat al-ilāhiyya) and also the meaning of aʿyān thābita.33 3

Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī as a Reader of Jāmī’s Works

Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī was a scholar at the court of the Sultan of Aceh from 1637 to 1644 during the reign of Sultan Iskandar Thānī (d. 1641). Originally from Rander he was born from a Malay mother and an Arab father34 with links to the ʿAydarūs Sufi lineage (ṭarīqa) via his grandfather.35 His uncle had made the journey to Aceh in 1580–83 and found that the people there were more receptive to Sufism than to his own domain of expertise, logic. Likewise when Rānīrī first came to Aceh, it was during the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda with his Shaykh al-Islām Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī. Aceh was then a fertile ground for teachings on taṣawwuf. Rānīrī realized that he could not find an audience or a place for teaching if he did not master taṣawwuf, and therefore left Aceh. When he returned after the death of the Sultan, he gained an audience with the newly crowned Sultan. Rānīrī was appointed Shaykh al-Islām and he had various debates with other local Sufi scholars whom he branded 33  In Qūnawī’s terms, the first presence is the divine knowledge, which “embraces all things” (Quran 40:7). Hence the divine knowledge, by embracing everything, whether divine or created, delineates the total sphere of influence of the name God. However, this is on the level of God Himself, within His own non-manifest knowledge. The second presence is the spiritual world, which manifests the full range of the properties of the name God in the appropriate spiritual modes of existence. The third and fourth presences are the imaginal and corporeal worlds, and the fifth presence is the perfect human being, who is the “all-comprehensive engendered thing” (al-kawn al-jāmiʿ). The divine presence specific to the perfect human being is the whole of reality on every level, which is to say that he experiences simultaneously the first four levels in their fullness and total integration. In the usual Sufi technical terminology, “absence” refers not to absence from God, but to absence from created things. To become absent from creation is to become present with God, since there is nothing other than these two, God and creation. Thus presence and absence are understood in terms of awareness and lack of it. Ibn ʿArabī employs the term “witnessing” (mushāhada or shuhūd) to refer to the state of presence, because the person who is present witnesses that with which he is present. See again Chittick, “The Five Divine Presences.” 34  See Paul Wormser’s contribution in the present volume. 35  Regarding his birth, see Peter Riddell in his Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World (Singapore: Horizon Books, 2003), 116. On ʿAydarūs lineage, see Esther Peskes, “Sainthood as Patrimony: ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿAydarūs (d. 1461) and his Descendants,” in Family Portraits with Saints. Hagiography, Sanctity, and Family in the Muslim World, eds. Catherine MayeurJaouen and Alexandre Papas (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2014), 125–57.

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heretical. Their heresies were recorded in many of his writings that we shall discuss below. It is interesting that he regards local Sufis as heretics because they do not understand the writings of the main Sufi scholars belonging to Ibn ʿArabī’s school. Thus, in order to correct them and perhaps justify his position in front of the Sultan, he brought quotations from various sources. He had labeled his opponents the wujūdiyya al-mulhīda or the heretical wujūdiyya group, and they were mainly the followers of both Ḥamza Fanṣūrī and Shams al-Dīn Sumatrāʾī.36 Creating a break from the writings of earlier Malay Sufi scholars, Rānīrī claims that these two figures had made man into God or God into man in their writings. In other words, Rānīrī had labeled them pantheist and, according to him, they misunderstood the teachings of the great Sufis such as Ibn ʿArabī. Therefore, in his own writings, he explained the doctrines of Sufism by emphasizing the distinction between God and men. Books associated with the heretical wujūdiyya were burnt in the courtyard of the Bayt al-Raḥmān mosque and the Sultan sentenced to death their unrepentant followers.37 Rānīrī’s attacks were rebutted by a Malay Sufi figure, Shaykh Sayf al-Rijāl who had returned to Aceh from Surat in India.38 Rānīrī lost his position because Sultanah Taj Alam Safiyatuddin, who was the wife of the deceased Sultan Iskandar Thānī, had preferred the arguments given by the Malay Sufi Shaykh Sayf al-Rijāl over his. Rānīrī had included parts of his debates in his last writing while in Aceh, the Jawāhir al-ʿulūm fī kashf al-maʿlūm. However the writing was not completed while he was in Aceh since he had to leave abruptly after he lost his position (perhaps fearing repercussions for his life). The task of completing the manuscript fell to an anonymous student of his in Aceh. As we have said above, in explaining the true teachings of wujūdiyya against the heretics, Rānīrī had brought and used many quotations and references to scholars who have written about this difficult subject. Amongst them is his referencing and quoting from Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī who was apparently a favorite authority in this matter. As we shall see, most of the references and quotations from Jāmī that are extant today come from the writings of Rānīrī. Our quotations here are taken from a selection of his writings

36  This can be seen in his Ḥujjat al-Ṣiddīq which was commentated upon by al-Attas (1987). 37  This is mentioned by al-Rānīrī himself in Fatḥ al-mubīn ʿalā al-mulḥidīn, MS 17667. 38  See Takeshi Ito, “Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri leave Acheh in 1054 A.H.?,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-Land-en Volkenkunde 134 (1978): 491. Ito’s evidence is based upon a diary written by an “opperkoopman” Pieter Sourij who was in Aceh in 1643. Unfortunately we do not have any information on who this Sayf al-Rijāl was apart from being someone who had debated with Rānīrī, nor do we have any of the details of the debate between them.

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that were neglected or forgotten. I have listed down some of his references from Jāmī. 3.1 Laṭāʾif al-asrār The Laṭāʾif was considered lost by many, however it was in the hands of a private individual i.e. Prof. Syed Naquib al-Attas.39 Apparently he had a collection of manuscripts that he had acquired personally over the years and one of them is the Laṭāʾif. Muhammad Zainiy Uthman acquired the permission to study the manuscripts of Laṭāʾif by Prof. Attas and as a result he received his Ph.D. on a study of the Laṭāʾif in 1997 and published his work in 2011. The Laṭā’if is a text devoted to metaphysics or ontology (as Zainiy termed it). We find in this book an exposition of Sufi doctrines. Rānīrī had divided it into four chapters with a prologue and a conclusion. The contents include a prologue in which is discussed the reasons behind the composition of the work; an introduction which discusses the affirmation of God’s existence, which is followed by a section on illuminative knowledge (maʿrifa); the last section is about states and stations (aḥwālāt and maqāmāt). Looking at the contents, it seems that the text deals with issues connected to reality and illuminative knowledge. We find a total of five quotations from Jāmī who is referred to as Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī. Each quotation is a paragraph long. The first quotation is found in the introduction. According to Rānīrī the teaching of Jāmī here is taken from “Kitāb Nuṣūṣ which comments upon the Fuṣūṣ.”40 Obviously the Fuṣūṣ is Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam of Ibn ʿArabī and the Kitāb Nuṣūṣ refers to Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fī sharḥ al-Fuṣūṣ. When comparing the source with the quotation as they appear in the Laṭā’if, one finds a few peculiarities. First, the quotation from Jāmī in the paragraph is not taken entirely from the Naqd but also from his other work, the Lavāʾiḥ. Secondly, this paragraph long quotation is not given in the original language but it is translated by Rānīrī into Malay. The second quotation is also from Jāmī, however it is unknown to the editor. He is unsure as to the source of the quotation. Again it is a paragraph long quotation and it is translated into Malay. It regards maʿrifa and idrāk of God the exalted.41 For the sake of our discussion, I shall bring some parts of the quotation here. 39  Lost could be a strong word, but my point is that the text is listed down by Tudjimah, Asrār al-insān fī maʿrifa al-rūḥ wa al-raḥmān (Jakarta: P.T.Penerbitan Universitas, 1961), 16, but its manuscripts were not, thus suggesting that the text was lost. 40  “Kitab Nusus pada mensharahkan Fuṣūṣ,” Laṭā’if, 472 of the published text and p. 197 for the English translation. 41   Laṭā’if, 576–78 for the Malay text and 277–78 for the English translation.

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Kata Shaykh Nur al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (radiyallahhu anhu) bahawa makrifah dan idrak akan Haqq Subhanahu wa ta’ala itu terbahagi atas dua bahagi. Pertama, idrak akan kunhi dhat Allah dengan tiada taayyunat Asma’ dan sifat dan tiada dengan libas menzahirkan pada makhluqat. Shaykh Nur al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (r.a.) says that gnosis (maʿrifa) and (spiritual) perception (idrak) of the Truth Most Sublime and Exalted are of two kinds. First is the perception of the innermost essence (idrak akan kunhi dhat) of God without the individuation (taayyunat) of the names and attributes and not through the “clothing” of outward manifestation (libas menzahirkan) in creatures. In this quotation we find that the original Persian text is not inserted by alRānīrī. Thus, this could be a paraphrase because of the use of the word bahawa or “that” in English. So instead of directly saying “Jāmī said this,” he used the word “that” to indicate a paraphrase. The third quotation is similar and seems to be a paraphrase from Jāmī. Dan lagi pula kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (qaddasa Allāh sirrahu) bahawa sanya Ḥaqq subhanahu wa ta’ala daripada pihak haqiqah dhatNya dan kunhiNya dan ghayb huwiyyahNya adalah Ia amat terbunyi daripada segala sesuatu. Sekali-kali tiada dapat dan tiada difahamkan dan tiada dimaklumkan dan tiada dimushahadahkan oleh seseorang jua pun seperti firmanNya dalam Qur’an, “wa-lā yuḥītūna bihi ʿilman” (Quran 20.110)—Tiada dapat liput mereka itu akan Allah ta’ala dengan ʿilmu mereka itu.42 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (may God sanctify His secret) continues to say that the Truth Most Sublime and Exalted, with respect to the reality of His essence, His innermost [essence] and His unseen individuality, is most hidden from things. It is never perceived, conceived, known, nor contemplated by anyone, as He decreed in the Quran: “But they shall not encompass God Most Exalted with their knowledge.” The fourth quotation is as follows: qāla al-shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (qaddasa Allāh sirrahu): al-tawḥīd tajrīd al-qalb ʿan mā siwā Allāh 42   Laṭā’if, 581. The editor does not indicate the source for this indirect quotation.

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kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī: yang tawhid itu menunggalkan (sic)43 qalbu daripada mā siwā Allāh. Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī says: Unification is to free the heart from [all] that is other than God. The quotation is from Jāmī but these are in Arabic, not in Persian. It must have come from one of Jāmī’s Arabic works but this is also not indicated by the editor of the Laṭā’if. The fifth quotation is as follows: qāla ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (qaddasa Allāhu sirrahu): Fa-subḥāna man iḥtajaba li-zāhiri nūrihi bi-asbābi sutūrihi. Kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī: Maha suci Tuhan yang terhijab Ia kerana zahir nurNya dan zahirlah Ia dengan segala tiraiNya.44 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī: Glory be to God who is veiled by the manifestation of His light and He becomes manifest through His veils.45 This is the last quotation from Jāmī that is given in the Laṭā’if. We can observe that the quotations are not taken from Jāmī’s Persian but rather from his Arabic works, and that some of the quotations are in Malay thus indicating a translation from an original source. Since quotations are not systematically indicated, there may be other paraphrases of Jāmī’s treatises. 3.2 Jawāhir al-ʿulūm fī kashf al-maʿlūm The work in question is the Jawāhir al-ʿulūm fī kashf al-maʿlūm which, according to scholars, is Rānīrī’s last work in the Nusantara before he left for good in 1642.46 Written in Jawi, the Jawāhir is a little known work that discusses meta43  I believe the word meninggalkan is more appropriate here. See Laṭāʾif, 630 for the Malay text and 317 for the English translation. 44   Laṭā’if, 723. 45   Laṭā’if, 383. 46  Al-Attas, A Commentary on the Ḥujjat al-Ṣiddīq, 16. Attas mentioned the possibility of ill health prompting him to stop the writing of the text, however Ito suggest it is due to him losing arguments to a Shaykh Saif al-Rijal. See Tudjimah, Asrār al-insān, 6–7 for further details on who completed the book. Tudjimah brings Rānīrī’s own words in Arabic in explaining the issue.

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physics. For the present study I consulted the microfilm of a manuscript kept at the King’s College in London. It has some comments by Prof. Voorhoeve, a scholar on Southeast Asian Islam.47 It has many quotations from Jāmī. They are all written in Malay, perhaps indicating a direct translation from the original language. Each reference and quotation is mentioned with the title of Jāmī’s work from which it was drawn. We can find at least six distinct works by Jāmī that are mentioned by Rānīrī within the Jawāhir. The sources are as follows: 1. Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam 2. Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt 3. Lavāʾiḥ fī bayān maʿānī ʿirfāniyya 4. Ashiʿāt al-Lamaʿāt 5. Naqd al-nuṣūṣ 6. al-Durra al-fākhira fī ḥaqāʾiq madhab al-ṣūfiyya48 Al-Attas had listed the places where each of the quotations is found in the Jawāhir.49 However he had not analyzed nor translated the quotations. Furthermore, he did not attempt to find and verify their locations in the original texts written by Jāmī as listed above. I have taken the initiative to bring all of these quotations here so that we can view them and further analyze them to assess the nature of Jāmī’s influence on Malay Sufism. Overall, I have managed to trace around 22 quotations from Jāmī in the Jawāhir. I will discuss some excerpts here, yet the full list will be given in the appendix at the end of this paper. All quotations are chosen from those texts to give a representation of how Rānīrī drew from Jāmī’s works. 47  See also P. Voorhoeve, “Van en over Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī,” B.K.I. 107 (1951): 365‒67, where he mentions that the Jāwāhīr al-ʿulūm was the last work of Rānīrī while he was in Aceh. He left Aceh and never to return in 1054 AH. Voorhoeve further surmised that Rānīrī had died in Rānīr in 1076/1666. 48  The text of Durrat al-Fākhira is a text detailing Jāmī’s treatment of theology, philosophers and Sufism in regards to God’s essence, His attributes and names and other related issues. There are several versions of the text with the same title at the Pusat Manuskrip Melayu, National Library Malaysia. However after comparing it with Heer’s edition of the Jāmī text, it is found that the Malay text titled Durratul Fakhirah is not the one by Jāmī but is written by a Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn and the text is different from the Arabic text of Jāmī. Although the text deals with theology but it follows the Ashʿarī theology and has no discussion with the Sufis and the philosophers as in Jāmī’s text. Furthermore Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn might mean Rānīrī, whose first name is Nūr al-Dīn. However, and this is where it is interesting, the text is not listed in any of the works attributed to Rānīrī. There is a possibility that it was written by Rānīrī but that is another story which is not relevant to the task at hand. 49  Attas, A Commentary on the Ḥujjat al-Ṣiddīq, 19–20.

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ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (q.s.) dalam kitab Lawāʾiḥ berkata bahawa haqiqat al-haqa’iq isinya itu wujud Ḥaqq ta’ala ialah haqiqat segala ash’ya. Jika adalah ia pada jadi zatnya isi segala-galanya tiada berbilang tetapi iktibar segala tajallinya zat.50 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (q.s) in his book Lavāʾiḥ has said that the reality of realities, its essence is the Being of the Real the Exalted and that is the reality of all things. When that is the case, the essence is not many but they are manifestations of His essential self-disclosure. Below is a quote about the Naqd al-nuṣūṣ, which is in Arabic and that Rānīrī considered as a commentary of the Fuṣūṣ although Jāmī had actually written another book for that purpose. Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī dalam kitab nusus pada mensyarahkan fuṣūṣ, fal ‘Amr al-Khāliq al-Makhlūq bahawa pekerjaan Ḥaqq taʿālā itu iaitu makhluq; fal hāl wa al-Shān annā al-Khāliq huwa Makhlūq ertinya bahawa hal itu sha’n khāliq itu iaitu makhluq; kamā annā al-wāḥid huwa al-ʿadad seperti bilangan esa itu iaitu bilangan yakni bahawa segala bilangan itu jadi daripada bilangan esa kerana ia pohon bilangannya. Dhalika idhan shahidna al-khaliq subhanahu wa ta’ala fi kamal aw itlaqihi wa ʿulūmuhu thumma lā ḥaḍanā tajalliya aw lā bi alfayḍ al-aqdas min suwwar aʿyān thābita wa thāniyya bil fayḍ al-muqaddas min suwwar al-aʿyān khārijiyya fa-qulnā al-makhlūq dan apabila kita mushahadahkan Haqq ta’ala pada kesempurnaan ItlaqNya dan … (unclear) martabatNya kemudian dari itu. Maka pertama kita bicarakan tajalli yang fayd aqdas dengan suwwar aʿyān thābita dan pada kedua kalinya kita bicarakan pula akan tajalliNya yang fayḍ muqaddas dengan suwwar aʿyān khārijiyya. Maka kata kita makhluq ertinya yang khaliq itu kemudian daripada iktibar tajalliNya dan tanzilNya iaitu makhluq yakni tajalli dan tanzil Ḥaqq ta’ala itulah dinamai akan dia makhluq …51 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in Kitāb Nūṣūṣ which is a commentary of the Fūṣūṣ, surely the work of God is the creation, means that the (various spiritual) states are the various predispositions of the Creator and those are the creation, like the number one is a number, and when we witness the Real from the angle of His perfections and 50   M S Jawāhir al-ʿulūm, 36. 51   M S Jawāhir al-ʿulūm, 33–34.

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perfect power, the degrees of His self-disclosures become evident. First we will discuss fayḍ aqdas which is God self-disclosure with the form of the permanent archetypes; second we will discuss His self-disclosure which is known as the fayḍ muqaddas in the form of external archetypes. Because when we say makhlūq it designates a result of the Creator’s selfdisclosing and (at the same time) His descent. In the case of the Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt, again we observe that Rānīrī quotes from an Arabic text and translates for the reader. Here is one example of the way Rānīrī quoted this text in the Jawāhir. Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (q.s.) dalam kitab Sharḥ rubāʿiyyāt, al-ittihād huwa shuhūd al-Ḥaqq al-wāḥid al-muṭlaq alladhī al-kull bihi mawjūd yakni yang ittihad itu iaitu mushahadah ʿabdku itu Ḥaqq taʿalā yang esa lagi mutlak yang dengan Dia jadi wujud segala mawjud. Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in his Sharḥ rubāʿiyyāt says: “[The experience of ] unity is the witnessing of the Real, unique and absolute, by whom everything exists,” that is to say that which unites is the occurrence of the witnessing of my slave that God is One and the ultimate and by whom every being comes to exist. It is clear that Rānīrī relied on those quotations to explain a certain doctrine or to correct the misunderstandings of his wujūdiyya opponants. Another interesting reference is from Jāmī’s Ashiʿāt al-Lamaʿāt on the writings of Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī. Rānīrī had referred twice to this source in the Jawāhir. Kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (q.s.) dalam kitab Ashiʿāt mensharahkan Lam’ah (sic) bahawa murad daripada mazhar atasnya itu iaitu suratnya yakni adalah aʿyān khārijiyya itu surat aʿyān thābita, ertinya menzahirnya. dan murad daripada surat shay’ itu iaitu ibarat daripada suatu pekerjaan yang jadi ku lahir shay’ itu maf’ul atau makhsus.52 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (q.s.) in his book Ashiʿāt which comments on the lam’ah says that it is clear that the form of the loci of 52   M S Jawāhir al-ʿulūm, fol. 51r.

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manifestation is the fixed entities (aʿyān thābita),53 and the fixed external entities are (in turn) the form of the fixed entities. 3.3 Fatḥ al-mubīn ʿalā al-mulḥidīn The text consists of two chapters: the first chapter focuses on the controversy with the deviant wujūdiyya of Aceh in which Rānīrī was involved;54 the second part deals with the reasons why people are divided.55 In the Fatḥ al-mubīn, one of his longest works, Rānīrī had dedicated the writing to the Muslims of Aceh, Kedah (northern state of present day Peninsular Malaysia), Banten, Makassar, Johore, Pahang, Petani (South of Thailand), Sanggora (Singapore) and other places below the wind.56 Considering that the Fatḥ was a refutation of the teachings of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī and Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī, this dedication shows the expanse of the influence of these figures beyond Aceh. There are three references to Jāmī in the Fatḥ al-Mubīn and each of them is taken from three of Jāmī’s most important books on Sufism. The first quotation or translation is from al-Durra al-fākhira: Dan ketahui olehmu bahawasanya wujud Haqq ta’ala daripada pihak iaitu ia tiada ia kali dan tiada ia juzuk dan tiada ia ʿām dan tiada ia khās, dan tiada ia wahid dengan wahdah yang mazīd atas zatNya, dan tiada ia kathrah.57 Know that God’s Being is not many, nor is it composed of parts; It is not general, nor specific; It is not one (as in countable) with unity which is attached to His essence and It is not numerous. 53  According to William Chittick, “The aʿyan are the things themselves. Thabita means maʿdūma, they are “nonexistent” in the world though known to God. When God creates them, they are aʿyan mawjuda, the “existent entities,” exactly the same things, the only difference being the addition of wujud.” Email correspondence in 2005. 54   M S 17667 Fatḥ al-mubīn, fol. 1–110. On this manuscript, see the mention and a short description by P. Voorhoeve in Bidragen Tot de Taal 125 (1969): 371–73. The manuscript that I used is the housed at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur. A short description is available in Ahmad Daudy, “Tinjauan atas “al-Fath al-Mubin ‘Ala al-Mulhidin” karya Syaikh Nuruddin Ar-Raniri,” in Warisan Intelektual Islam Indonesia, ed. Ahmad Rifa’i Hasan (Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1987), 21–38. This text is also available in Indonesia, yet there is no Romanized version of it. Tudjimah had mentioned the text in his thesis on the Asrār, see footnote below. For the short description, see page 21 of the published thesis. Following Van der Tuuk, Tudjimah believes that the Fatḥ had been seen in a single manuscript at Barus, Aceh. 55   M S Fatḥ al-mubīn, fol. 110–20. The text abruptly ends on fol. 120r. 56   Khazanah Karya Pusaka Asia Tenggara 2, 90. 57   M S Fatḥ al-mubīn, fol. 70r.

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The second quotation is allegedly from the Nafaḥāt and it tells the story of a Sufi master who dreamt of meeting the Prophet where he had asked the Holy Prophet (s.a.w) questions of Sufi doctrine. Kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī didalam Nafaḥāt (?) adalah Shaykh Zaynal Abidin Abu Bakr al-Kufi q.s. bermimpi melihat akan Nabi s.a.w serta katanya.58 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in his Nafaḥāt (?) said that Shaykh Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Abū Bakr al-Kūfī59 (q.s.) had dreamt of meeting the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.) and he questioned the Prophet. The third and last quotation is from an unidentified source: Kata Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī wa-mā li-l-ḥaqq nasaba iaitu tiada bagi Ḥaqq bangsa dengan seseorang jua pun. Tiada berputusan ia dengan makhluq melainkan tanzih jua daripada bangsa seperti firman Allah pada surah al-Ikhlas.60 Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī had said, wa-mā li-l-ḥaqq nasaba that there is none (in relation or have affinity) like The Real. He is not disconnected from (His) creatures but he is in that state of incomparability from all (types of creations) as God says in Surah al-Ikhlāṣ. tanzīh or incomparability of God from His creatures and creations. This is considered a very important theological point brought by al-Rānīrī. The constant emphasis on the incomparability of creation from God was an important point of contention that al-Rānīrī had with the wujūdiyya followers of Fanṣūrī and Sumatrā’ī. 3.4 Asrār al-insān fī maʿrifa al-rūḥ wa-l-Raḥmān61 Tudjimah, the scholar who had studied this text for his PhD thesis, regards the Asrār to have been written during the reign of Sultan Iskandar Thānī and his 58   M S Fatḥ al-mubīn, fol. 76r. 59  There is not such a person mentioned in the Nafaḥāt. It could be a misreading of Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Abū Bakr al-Khwāfī. I would like to thank Alexandre Papas for alerting me to this fact. 60   M S Fatḥ al-mubīn, fol. 87v. 61  See the published thesis of Tudjimah, Asrār al-insān fī maʿrifa al-rūḥ wa al-raḥmān (Jakarta: P.T.Penerbitan Universitas, 1961).

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wife Sultanah Safiya al-Dīn in 1050/1640.62 The aim of the text is to solve the difficulty faced by the ʿulamā regarding the states of the spirit (rūḥ). Rānīrī had composed the book following the order given by Iskandar Thanī. The book is divided into two chapters with many sub-topics. Each of the sub-topics deals with a definition of the main topic for each chapter. The first chapter is titled, “Regarding the names of the Great Spirit” (Mengenai namanama Rūḥ al-aʿẓam) and has six sub-topics: 1. The names of Rūḥ al-Aʿẓam 2. The characteristic and reality of the Rūḥ al-Aʿẓam and those that connects to this discussion 3. Regarding the heart (qalb) and its various names and the reason why it is known as the heart 4. Regarding the self and its character 5. Regarding the intellect, what it is, where it is located and what are its characteristics The second chapter deals with the various levels of the body and from what it was created by God; how does the body command the spirit; regarding all the secrets that the Real had placed in human beings and the loftiness of human beings over and above all other creations; the story of Adam and the angel and the story of Adam with Iblis; and the various levels of the spirit.63 In this text, Rānīrī discusses the concept of Rūḥ al-qudus or the Muḥammadian spirit. He says: Some of the scholars are of the view that what is meant by Rūh al-Qudus is the spirit of Prophet Muḥammad (s.a.w.). And because of that his (holy) spirit is eternal (qadīm). However some other scholars consider that his spirit is not eternal but new (hadīth).64 In this text we find two references to Jāmī in translation. They appear to support the views of Rānīrī and are located at the beginning of the first chapter: Shaykh Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī mengatakan bahawa Rūh alAʿzam pada hakikatnya ialah roh insan sebagai penjelmaan Tuhan dalam sifat ke-TuhananNya, oleh kerana itu roh tadi tidak akan hilang dan tiada seorangpun yang dapat mengerti tentang keadaannya kecuali Haqq Ta’ala.65 62  Ibid., 16. 63  Ibid., 233. 64   Rahsia Asrār al-insān fī maʿrifa al-rūḥ wa al-raḥmān (Jakarta: Penerbit Rosda, n.d.), xv. 65  Tudjimah, Asrār al-insān, 211.

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Jami says that the great spirit is in reality the human spirit as a manifestation of God. That is why this spirit will never disappear and no one can understand its existence except God most High.66 Rānīrī then continues with his own commentary by saying that because that spirit is veiled by various veils, therefore no one knows its reality apart from God Himself. The second mention of Jāmī’s name occurs in chapter one, sub-topic three, where Rānīrī talks about the importance of the heart to the believers (muʾmin). Rānīrī says: “Jāmī had mentioned that ‘the reality of human being is its heart (qalb) which is the place where fanā fī Allāh occurs.’67 (Kata Shaykh Nūr alDīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, hakikat insan ialah kalbu iaitu tempat fanā fī ‘llah.)”68 Again Jāmī is referred to in support of Rānīrī’s own view. 4

Shaykh Yūsuf Tāj al-Khalwatī Hidāyat Allāh (d. 1111/1699)

A prolific author who became a leader of the resistance against the Dutch, Shaykh Yūsuf Tāj al-Khalwatī69 was a contemporary of ShaykhʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf Singkel.70 A native from Makassar, Yūsuf was brought up in the court of the 66   Rahsia Asrār al-insān, 3. 67  Ibid., 67. 68  Tudjimah, Asrār al-insān, 227. 69  This important and influential figure was not however included in Peter Riddell’s discussion on Malay Scholars in his Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World (Singapore: Horizon Books, 2003). 70  His full name was ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf b. ʿAlī al-Fanṣūrī (1615–93) and was a native of Aceh. He is considered to be the close cousin of Shaykh Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī and had underwent preliminary studies at Aceh. Later he was to further his study to Medina and was a member of the circle of Shaykh Aḥmad al-Qushashī. After al-Qushashī passed away and was replaced by Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī, ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf became a member of his circle and later his khalīfa in Aceh thus becoming the earliest individual to introduce the Shaṭṭāriya to the region. For the link between this figure with various intellectual figures and milleu at the time, see Azra (2004), chapter 4. At the request of ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf, al-Kūrānī had written Itḥāf al-dhakī in explanation of al-Tuḥfa al-mursala ilā rūḥ al-nabī which was popular in Aceh and might have contributed towards a misunderstanding of its contents by a group known as the wujūdiyya mulḥida. ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf later return to Aceh (ca. 1642) and became the Shaykh al-Islam under Sultana Safiyatuddīn (1641–75). He was also a practitioner of many orders (ṭuruq) including the Naqshbandiyya, see Van Bruinessen (1995). A recent study on ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf has two notable students i.e. Shaykh ʿAbd al-Muḥyī of Pamijahan on Java Island and Shaykh Burhān al-Dīn of Ulakkan in Sumatra. Both of these students were influential in the propagation of Islam to their region. See Braginsky (2004) pp. 648– 51 and Laffan (2011) pp. 18–20 for further details on ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf.

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King of Gowa and later became a great scholar and resistance fighter against Dutch colonialism. Yūsuf had also written much along the lines of Islamic metaphysical thought in Jawi and in Arabic.71 Amongst his teachers it was Rānīrī himself who had initiated Yūsuf into the Qādiriyya ṭarīqa. In his Risāla safīna al-najāt Yūsuf declared that he was given the ijāza of the Qādiriyya order.72 He was also affiliated to various other Sufi orders including the Shaṭṭāriyya ṭarīqa through Shaykh Ibrāhīm Kūrānī while he was in Medina, and the Khalwatiyya order through Shaykh Abū al-Barakat Ayyūb b. Aḥmad b. Ayyūb al-Khalwatī al-Qurashī while he was in Damascus.73 This latter figure was the person who gave him the title Tāj al-Khalwatī Hidāyat Allāh or “the Crown of the Khalwatīs and the Guidance of God”. Yūsuf became the main propagator for this order when he went back to the Malay Archipelago after spending fifteen years in the Middle East. Yūsuf was a productive author. Wan Shaghir lists down at least 51 titles of works that are still extant.74 Amongst these are treatises in which he explicated Sufi metaphysics following the Ibn ʿArabī school.75 These include Zubdat al-asrār (in Arabic)76 and Maṭālib al-sālikīn (in Malay).77 He seems to have followed the system of the seven grades of Being as explicated by Shams al-Dīn and Burhānpūrī.78 Through these writings we can see that he was aware of the works of Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī whom he quoted extensively.

71  A local study on Yūsuf by Syamsul Bahri Andi Galigo undertaken at KUIM tends to minimize the influence of Ibn ʿArabī upon Yūsuf. This is probably due to the climate in Malaysia which is against most teachings connected to Ibn ʿArabī pace Ibn Taymiyya. Galigo even states, as did many others before him, that the concept of waḥdat al-wujūd is not associated with Ibn ʿArabī. The concept of waḥdat al-wujūd as a concept linked with Ibn ʿArabī was made popular by Ibn Taymiyya himself. See his Pemikiran Tasawuf Shaykh Abu Mahasin Yusuf al-Taj (Kuala Lumpur: Kolej Universiti Islam Malaysia, 2004). 72  Prof. Dr. Tudjimah, Syekh Yusuf Makasar Riwayat dan Ajarannya (Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia, 1997), 194–204. 73  On Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Kurānī, see Florian Schwarz’s contribution in the present volume. 74  Hj. Wan Mohd Shaghir Abdullah, Penyebaran Islam dan Silsilah Ulama Sejagat Dunia Melayu Jilid 6 (Kuala Lumpur: Khazanah Fathaniyah, 1999), 10–11. 75  See Abu Hamid, Syekh Yusuf Seorang Ulama, Sufi dan Pejuang (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1994). 76  See the study of this text by Nabilah Lubis, Zubdatul Asrar fi Tahkik Ba’d Masharib alAkhyar (Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1995). 77  Abu Hamid, Syekh Yusuf Seorang, 189. 78  Abu Hamid, Syekh Yusuf Seorang, 190–191.

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4.1 Futūḥāt al-rabbāniyya79 of Shaykh Yūsuf Makassarī (d. 1111/1699)80 This is a book that relates the life of various masters who were leaders of the Naqshbandī order. In a book which has many references to Naqshbandī Shaykhs and practices, we do not find any references to Jāmī directly, however we do find two textual references to Nafaḥāt al-uns.81 5

The Forgetting of Jāmī in Late Malay Sufism: 18th–19th Century Popular Writings on taṣawwuf

When investigating Jāmī and his influence in the writings of Malay scholars, in what follows, I have decided to survey works on taṣawwuf written by wellknown scholars whose writings are still available in the shops and are still being read by people today. Manḥal al-ṣūfī by Shaykh Daud al-Fatanī (ca. 1847)82 Daud al-Fatanī is one of the most important scholars in the Malay world. His writings on Sufism are still read by many and are taught in local mosques and madrasas. He is the most well known of all of the Fatanī scholars. This work represents perhaps one of the earliest attempts by a Malay Sufi scholar to write a dictionary of Sufi terms used by popular Sufi writers. A glance at the text indicates a nuanced treatment of much Sufi terminology taken from important thinkers such as Ibn ʿArabī and many others. al-Durr al-nafīs (The precious pearl) by Shaykh Muḥammad Nafīs ibn Idrīs al-Banjarī (d. 1812) 83 This text deals with the unity of God’s Acts and His Divine Names and with the unity of His Attributes and His Divine Essence (waḥdat al-afʿāl wa-l-asmāʾ 79  Found in Tudjimah, Syekh Yusuf Makasar, Riwayat dan Ajarannya (Jakarta: Penerbit Universitas Indonesia, 1997), 148–61. 80  This book is also seen in the list given by Martin van Bruinessen in his Tarekat Naqsyabandiyah di Indonesia (Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1992), 39. 81  Ibid., 153. For the Nafahāt al-uns, see Alexandre Papas’s contribution to this volume. 82  Shaykh Daud bin Abdullah al-Fathani, Wadah Minuman Suci Orang Sufi, Menyingkap rahsia diri orang ‘Arif billah (Manhal al-Sufi), ed. Amdan bin Hamid (Johor Bahru: Jahabersa, 2012). 83  Sheikh Muhammad Nafis Idris al-Banjari, al-Darun Nafis, Mutiara yang indah, kupasan tentang keesaan af’al, sifat-sifat, keesaan asma’, sifat-sifat dan zat Allah ta’ala yang Maha Suci, ed. Amdan bin Hamid (Johor Bahru: Jahabersa, 2000).

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wa-l-ṣifāt wa-l-dhāt al-taqdīs). After Rānīrī most of the later Sufi writers in Malay did not quote from Jāmī. Out of the fifteen texts that have been published and are still studied in madrasas and small circles that teach Sufism in the Nusantara, I have not found any mention of Jāmī or other Persian Sufi writers. The writers of these fifteen manuscripts include, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf Fanṣūrī/ Singkelī (Tanbīh al-masyī), Shaykh Arshad al-Banjarī (al-Durr al-nafīs), Shaykh ʿAbd Samad al-Palembanī (Sayr al-sālikīn), Shaykh Daud al-Fatanī (Manḥal alṣafī fī rumūz ahl al-ṣūfī), Shaykh Aḥmad al-Fatanī, Shaykh Zayn al-Fatanī. Their writings form the bulk of Sufi writings in Jawi-Malay that are still read today. Some scholars observed that later Malay scholars tended to focus on the “sober” Sufism of al-Ghazālī rather than the more ecstatic and speculative type of Sufism normally associated with the school of Ibn ʿArabī. This is normally explained in the backdrop of the rise of orthodoxy in the region. In fact, we still find discussions on Sufism following the school of the Shaykh al-Akbar. Concepts such as waḥdat al-wujūd are still mentioned as well as the various divine presences of God and the levels of existences known as the martabat tujuh (the seven levels of existences). Perhaps by “rise of orthodoxy” is meant Rānīrī’s challenge and eventual censure against the teaching of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī and Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrā’ī for the people of Aceh during the reign of Sultan Iskandar Thānī. This theory of the rise of “sober” Sufism or neo-Sufism in the Nusantara given by Azyumardi Azra84 and his student Oman Fathurrahman85 gives the impression to the lay people that Sufism had changed from the “heretical” tradition of waḥdat al-wujūd towards becoming acceptable by the orthodoxy supported by the government. This view corresponds to today’s understanding of Islam in the Nusantara region within which exists the Muslim nation state that controls the right conduct of Muslims in each state and, most often than not, shun metaphysical teachings in Sufism. Thus, in order to be acceptable, taṣawwuf has to conform to those “neo-Sufi” teachings which are in theory based on selected writings of al-Ghazālī, most notably the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. The situation on the ground is totally different since the texts that I have listed above are still read and commented upon by present day Sufi scholars. 84  Among his many writings on the rise of Sufism and Sufism in Southeast Asia, see for example his Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004). 85  For Oman, see his many works on the rise of Sufism in Southeast Asia, especially his treatment of Shaykh ʿAbd Ra‌ʾūf in Tanbih al-masyi (Jakarta: Masyarakat Pernaskahan Nusantara, 1998). Both these authors subscribe to the idea of neo-Sufism discussed critically by Bernd Radtke and O’Fahey and transpose it to Southeast Asia especially when explaining what happened after the wujūdiyya crisis mentioned above.

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Of course the reasons for the changes themes and sources have a lot to do with their family background, knowledge of various languages, and, most importantly, the place where they studied and their mentors. For instance, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī is considered to have come from a Persian family, which would explain is good knowledge of this language; Shams al-Dīn, being his close student and confidante, might have probably learned Persian from him or when traveling in India in his youth.86 Rānīrī of course was from India and thus might have learned Persian during his training there. Therefore, the shift from a bi-lingual approach, i.e. Arabic and Persian sources, towards a purely Arabic one is not coincidental. When we come to Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf, we find that he had neither collected any sayings from Persian nor referred to any Persian source in his writings. It seems that he had just focused on the Arabic sources on taṣawwuf that were available via his teacher Shaykh Aḥmad Qushashī and, later, Shaykh Ibrāhīm Kurānī. This could be due to the development of the linkages between the Nusantara scholars with their places of study in the Hijaz and surrounding areas. Whereas Ḥamza Fanṣūrī, Shams al-Dīn and Rānīrī had travelled to places where contacts were possible with Persian speaking communities, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ra‌ʾūf and later scholars had mainly travelled in Arabic speaking areas and, most importantly, their taṣawwuf “education” had concentrated on Arabic sources. 6 Conclusion There are various conclusions that we can derive from this study. First there are not many direct translations of the original work of Jāmī into the Malay lingua franca. Many are mere paraphrases of select texts from Jāmī. There are also no full translations of Jāmī’s Sufi texts in Malay. Of course the majority of Malays were not able to read the texts in their original language and translations would have helped them understand the teachings fully. Perhaps one of the reasons why Sufi texts were not translated in full was that the complete study of Jāmī’s texts never became part of any curriculum in the Malay world, because local texts were more suitable for that purpose. Thus the Malay Sufi writers took whatever was needed from the text and incorporated it into their own teachings. Furthermore, perhaps the Sultan had not commissioned any 86  This is a lengthy subject and has generated various responses from scholars utilizing various sources and ways of reading the texts. See the works of Attas (1966), (1970), (1982), (1986); Drewes (1986); Braginsky (1999), (2004); Riddell (2003); Iskandar (1958) amongst others.

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translated works. Among the many variables that are at play, one may recall, for instance, the turbulent period that preceded Sumatrā’ī because of Rānīrī’s attacks, which led towards book burnings and executions. It is possible that the books were burnt, thus preventing us from gaining a complete picture of the scholarly works available at the time. As it was observed from the various quotations, we can assert that most of the Malay writings that have these quotations can be traced to the period of the late sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. These can be seen in the writings of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī, Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrā’ī and Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī. The utilization of Jāmī as a source was meant to strengthen the doctrinal understanding of Ibn ʿArabī’s school of taṣawwuf. In the case of Rānīrī, it seems that he used Jāmī against the wujūdiyya of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī and Shams al-Dīn Sumatrā’ī. This is clearly seen in the selection of his writings studied here. Yet, I wish to point out that Rānīrī was working in an environment where he had to constantly “go against the tide,” that is to say against the prevalent teachings of Fanṣūrī and Sumatrā’ī. Thus his reference to Jāmī (and others) perhaps aimed at giving a kind of legitimacy which would make his own interpretation of the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī the most correct one in comparison with the former two scholars. We may argue that Jāmī was used to legitimize and to reinforce Rānīrī’s own teachings of Ibn ʿArabī especially when reading his Fatḥ al-mubīn: in his arguments against the “heretical” wujūdiyya (i.e. the teachings of Ḥamza and Shams al-Dīn), he always quotes Jāmī to reinforce his point against them. After this brilliant period of composition of polemical prose works, Malay Sufism seems to have refrained from referring to Jāmī. Metaphysical teachings in Sufism would still be taught in various texts but references to Jāmī are no longer to be found. It seems that Malay Sufism had left the Persian world and relied mainly on Arabic sources of reference. Never would Jāmī play a pivotal role in defining Malay Sufism as he did in the heated debates of seventeenthcentury Aceh. Bibliography (The references to manuscripts are given in the footnotes) Abu Hamid. Syekh Yusuf Seorang Ulama, Sufi dan Pejuang. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1994. Abdullah, Hj. Wan Mohd. Shaghir. Penyebaran Islam dan Silsilah Ulama Sejagat Dunia Melayu Jilid 6. Kuala Lumpur: Khazanah Fathaniyah, 1999.

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Abdullah, Hj. Wan Mohd. Shaghir. Tafsir Puisi Hamzah Fansuri. Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Fathaniyyah, 1997. Abdullah, Hj. Wan Mohd. Shaghir. Khazanah Karya Pusaka Asia Tenggara 2. Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Fathaniyyah, 1998. Adat Atjeh. Edited by Drewes, G.W.J. and P. Voorhoeve. Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde (VKI) 24, 1958. al-Attas, S.M. Naguib. Rānīrī and the Wujūdiyyah of the 17th Century Acheh. Singapore: Malaysian Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, 1966. al-Attas, S.M. Naquib. The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1970. al-Attas, S.M. Naquib. A Commentary on the Ḥujjat al-Ṣiddīq of Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī. Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Belia & Sukan, 1986. Azra, Azyumardi. The origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: networks of MalayIndonesian and Middle Eastern ‘Ulama’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004. al-Banjari, Sheikh Muhammad Nafis Idris. al-Darun Nafis, Mutiara yang indah, kupasan tentang keesaan af’al, sifat-sifat, keesaan asma’, sifat-sifat dan zat Allah ta’ala yang Maha Suci. Edited by Amdan bin Hamid. Johor Bahru: Jahabersa, 2000. Braginsky, Vladimir. The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004. Braginsky, Vladimir. “Towards the Biography of Hamzah Fansuri: When Did Hamzah live? Data from His Poems and Early European Accounts.” Archipel 57 (1999): 135–75. Chittick, William. “The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qunawi to al-Qaysari.” Muslim World 72 (1982): 107‒28. Daudy, Ahmad. “Tinjauan atas ‘al-Fath al-Mubin ‘Ala al-Mulhidin’ karya Syaikh Nuruddin Ar-Raniri.” In Warisan Intelektual Islam Indonesia, edited by Ahmad Rifa’i Hasan, 21‒38. Jakarta: Penerbit Mizan, 1987. De Hikajat Atjeh. Edited by Teuku Iskandar. Leiden: Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde (VKI) 26, 1958. Drewes, G.W.J. and L.F. Brakel. The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri. Dordrecht: Foris KITLV, Bibliotheca Indonesia 26, 1986. al-Fathani, Shaykh Daud bin Abdullah. Wadah Minuman Suci Orang Sufi, Menyingkap rahsia diri orang ‘Arif billah (Manhal al-Sufi). Edited by Amdan bin Hamid. Johor Bahru: Jahabersa, 2012. Galigo, Shamsul Bahri Andi. Pemikiran Tasawuf Shaykh Abu Mahasin Yusuf al-Taj. Kuala Lumpur: Kolej Universiti Islam Malaysia, 2004. Ito, Takeshi. “Why did Nuruddin ar-Raniri leave Acheh in 1054 A.H.?” Bijdragen tot de Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde 134 (1978), 491. Laffan, Michael. The Makings of Indonesian Islam. Orientalism and the Narration of a Sufi Past. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.

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Lubis, Hj. Muhammad Bukhari. The Ocean of Unity, Waḥdat al-Wujūd in Persian, Turkish and Malay Poetry. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, reed. 1994. Nabilah Lubis. Zubdatul Asrar fi Tahkik Ba’d Masharib al-Akhyar. Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1995. Nasir, Mohamad Nasrin. “A Critical Edition and Study of Haqq al-yaqin fi ‘aqidat almuhaqqiqin of Shams al-Din al-Sumatra’i.” PhD diss., International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC), Malaysia, 2008. Nasir, Mohamad Nasrin. “Persian Quotations in the Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī Aqīdat alMuḥaqiqīn fī dhikr asrār al-Sufī al-Muḥaqiqīn of Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatraī; (d. 1630 ca),” al-Shajarah 11/2 (2006), 271–95. Nasir, Mohamad Nasrin. “Sufism in Southeast Asia.” Oxford Online Resources, 2012. Nasir, Mohamad Nasrin. Karya Agong Melayu: Haqqul Yaqīn fī Aqīdat al-Muḥaqqiqīn tulisan Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī. Kuala Lumpur: Yayasan Karyawan, forthcoming. al-Rānīrī, Nūr al-Dīn. Rahsia Asrār al-Insān fī Maʿrifa al-Rūḥ wa al-Raḥmān. Jakarta: Penerbit Rosda, n.d. al-Rānīrī, Nūr al-Dīn. Bustān al-salātīn. Edited by Teuku Iskandar. Kuala Lumpur: DBP, 1966. Riddell, Peter. Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World. Singapore: Horizon Books, 2003. Tudjimah. Syekh Yusuf Makasar, Riwayat dan Ajarannya. Jakarta: Penerbit Universitas Indonesia, 1997. Tudjimah. Asrār al-Insān fī Maʿrifa al-Rūḥ wa al-Raḥmān. Jakarta: P.T. Penerbitan Universitas, 1961. Uthman, Muhammad Zainiy. Laṭā’if al-Asrār li Ahl Allāh al-Aṭyār of Nūr al-Dīn alRānīrī, an annotated transliteration together with a translation and an introduction of his exposition on the fundamental aspects of ṣūfī doctrines. Kuala Lumpur: UTM Press, 2011. van Bruinessen, Martin. Tarekat Naqsyabandiyah di Indonesia, Survei Historis, Geografis dan Sosiologis. Edisi Revisi. Bandung: Penerbit Mizan, 1995. van Bruinessen, Martin. Tarekat Naqsyabandiyah di Indonesia. Bandung: Mizan, 1992. van Nieuwenhuijze, C.A. O. Samsu’l- Din Van Pasai, Bijdrage Tot De Kennis Der Sumatraansche Mystiek. Leiden: Brill, 1945. Voorhoeve, P. “al-Fath al-Mubin.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI), 125 (1969): 371‒73. Voorhoeve, P. “Van en over Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI), 107 (1951): 365‒68.

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Appendix Jāmī’s works forms the y-axis. The title of Malay works that quote from Jāmī is in the x-axis. The number of time the reference appears is denoted by/. * Indicates it has been published and edited. Table 6.1 Jāmī’s works and title of Malay works quoting Jāmī Asrār Ḥaqq Untitled Laṭāʾīf Jawāhīr Fatḥ Asrār Futūḥāt Total al-ʿārifīn* al-yaqīn al-asrār* al-ʿulūm al-mubīn al-insān* al-rabbāniyya*

Lavāʾiḥ Naqd al-nuṣūṣ Ashiʿāt Durrat al-fākhira Sharḥ fuṣūṣ Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt Nafaḥāt al-uns Unknown

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part 2 Translating Islam and Sufism

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chapter 7

Before the Safavid-Ottoman Conflict Jāmī and Sectarianism in Timurid Iran and Iraq Sajjad H. Rizvi Sectarianism is one of the key themes in the study of the contemporary Middle East. But to what extent can we project sectarian discourses, attitudes, and activity, contextualized in political contestation, to the Safavid period itself, and even more so to the preceding Timurid period? The memorialization of the history of the collective experience of communities brings symbols, figures, and movements of the past to life, and places them into the conflicts of the present. In that sense, one can talk of the continuity of the Safavid-Ottoman conflict today—but can we go further into the past? Can we avoid considering figures such as the poet and Sunni Sufi theologian ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī through the lens of that conflict? One rather common line of argument that one might call the Chicago school (associated with the late Marshall Hodgson and more recently Cornell Fleischer and his students) would argue that while the Ottoman-Safavid conflict constitutes a particular type of élite struggle, the Timurid period that predated it exhibited hybrid forms of religiosity in which definitive Sunni and Shiʿi identities cannot always be discerned. In certain esoteric, occultist elite associations, and even among apocalyptic movements, a form of philo-Imamism or tashayyuʿ-i ḥasan was common: thinkers who would normally be considered to be Sunni, and who were active members of Sunni legal schools, nevertheless at the esoteric level of their engagement with occult philosophy and the discernment of the reality of things “as they truly are” had a deep affinity and devotion to the Imams of the Ahl al-Bayt.1 Akin to Shiʿi thinkers, they saw in the Imams 1  Mohammad Masad, “The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition: Divination, Prophecy, and the End of Time in the 13th Century Eastern Mediterranean” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2008), esp. 156–166; Evrim Binbaş, “Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (ca. 770s–858/ ca. 1370s–1454): Prophecy, Politics, and Historiography in Late Medieval Islamic History” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009), 76–174; Matt Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Ira” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012), esp. 69– 77; Adam Jacobs, “Sunnî and Shîʿî Perceptions, Boundaries, and Affiliations in Late Timurid and Early Ṣafawid Persia: An Examination of Historical and Quasi-historical Narratives” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1999); Cornell Fleischer, “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s İstanbul,” in Identity and Identity Formation in

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individuals with superior and divine knowledge, except that they were more concerned with privileged knowledge of the esoteric arts: jafr, mujarrabāt, nayranjāt, and of course, varieties of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ). But even more generally, the school argues that “good Shiʿism” or “ʿAlid loyalism,” as Hodgson put it, was a common feature of medieval religiosity. Even the Iranian historian Rasūl Jaʿfarīyān has referred to the phenomenon as “Twelver Sunnism” (tasannun-i ithnāʿasharī yā davāzdah-imāmī).2 Masad sums it up: The overlapping of madhhabs and religious affiliations seems to be more or less a regular feature of the medieval Islamic period. Being a member of a Sunni school of thought apparently didn’t exclude the appreciation, contemplation or full embrace of ideas and influences that might have been construed as Shiʿi in nature or sympathy. Judging from the evidence, a fairly sizable number of people had what one might call mixed SunniShiʿi affiliations, straddling the traditional divide between the two main denominations of Islam. This is of course not such an exceptional situation, especially in relation to Sufism, where the special reverence for Ahl al-Bayt has produced colorful and diversified forms of piety and religious allegiances.3 While the Chicago school’s position on occultist circles and their transcendence of sectarian identity may be worth considering, it cannot be generalised for the religious and political history of the period. For some, there was no confessional ambiguity. On the opposite side, one has the position of Hamid Algar the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, eds. B. Tezcan and K.K. Barbir (Madison: Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, 2007), 51–62; Ihsan Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kültür Hayatında İhvanu’s-Safâ ve Abdurrahman Bistâmî,” Dîvân İlmî Araştırmalar Dergisi 2/229–40 (1996); idem, “Forcing the Boundaries in Religion, Politics and Philosophy: Science in the Fifteenth Century.” Conference paper, Before the Revolutions: Religions, Sciences and Politics in the Fifteenth Century, Berlin, 13–15 January 2005. In an earlier generation, a number of authors wrote about syncretic beliefs centred on spiritual attachment to the Imams: Marijan Molé, “Les Kubrawiya entre Sunnisme et Shiisme aux huitième et neuvième siècles de l’hégire,” Revue des Études islamiques 29 (1961): 61–142; Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), I: 1–38. 2  Rasūl Jaʿfarīyān, Tārīkh-i tashayyuʿ dar Īrān (Qum: Anṣārīyān, 1387 Sh/2008), 843; idem, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār-i ṣafavī (Tehran: Nashr-i ʿilm, 1388 Sh/2009), I: 50–51; Muḥammad Jaʿfar Maḥjūb, “Az faḍāʾil va manāqib-khwānī tā rawḍa-khwānī,” Īrān-nāma 2/3 (1984): 414 also uses the term sunnī-yi davāzdah-imāmī. 3  Masad, “The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition,” 160; see Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), II: 283–84, 446.

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who, focusing upon the Naqshbandiyya and even the Timurid Khwājagānī order,4 has argued that the Naqshbandiyya did not express philo-Shiʿism of any kind, but rather that their strategy was one of appropriating the Imams for the Sunni cause and using the Imams against the Shiʿa. Algar, in particular, argues against a certain caricature which sees Sufi orders in the pre-Safavid periods as prompting hybrid philo-Shiʿi religiosity, and that if it were not for the persecution of the Safavids, much of the Persianate world would have become Shiʿi. The evidence suggests quite the opposite. Algar puts it thus: There is in general no firm evidence that a pacific evolution toward Shiʿism was under way that sooner or later would have reached its natural conclusion and that all the Safavids contributed was a coercive acceleration. In particular, the case of the Naqshbandiyya casts considerable doubt on the notion of allegedly proto-Shiʿite Sufi orders preparing the way for the mass acceptance of Shiʿism in Iran. For it is evident that neither in Herat nor in the Iranian northwest did the devotion of the Naqshbandis to the Twelve Imams predispose them in the least to the acceptance of Shiʿism; on the contrary, they proclaimed themselves convinced that Shiʿism was an erroneous doctrine slanderously ascribed to the Twelve Imams by its adherents.5 The particular evidence relating to the Khwājagānī silsila and the inclusion in it of the sixth Shiʿi Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq is an important element of the appropriation of the Ahl al-Bayt for the Sunni cause.6 At the same time, while the Khwājagānī shaykhs were combatting Shiʿi ideas and appropriating the Imams for their cause, the Safavids in particular targeted them for persecution.7 The Safavid conquest of Tabriz in 1501 and then of Herat in spring of 1511 hit the order particularly hard: the order was suppressed (like other Sufi rivals to the Safavids, especially those espousing Sunni theological ideas), 4  The Timurid Khwājagānī order is sometimes exempt from the judgement of supra-Sunni orthodoxy that is applied to the order from the seventeenth century and perhaps as a result of the interaction with Safavid power that crushed the order in Azerbaijan, symbolically desecrating the tombs of major figures in Herat such as Jāmī. 5  Hamid Algar, “Naqshbandis and Safavids: A Contribution to the religious history of Iran and her neighbors,” in Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors, ed. Michel Mazzaoui (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 32. 6  Hamid Algar, “Sunni claims to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq,” in Fortresses of the Intellect: Ismaili and Other Islamic Studies in Honour of Farhad Daftary, ed. Omar Ali-de-Unzaga (London: Tauris, 2011), 77–101. 7  Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 28–31.

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adherents went into exile, and notable tombs including that of Jāmī were desecrated.8 Two later sixteenth-century sources from opposite sides attest to the attack upon the Naqshbandīs: Mīrzā Makhdūm Sharīfī (d. 994/1586), a prominent Sunni theologian and descendant of Sharīf ʿAlī al-Jurjānī who fled in 986/1577 to the Ottoman court and author of al-Nawāqiḍ li-bunyān alrawāfiḍ (Critiques of the Foundations of the Rejectors), and the Shiʿi theologian who responded to Sharīfī’s polemics, Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (d. 1019/1610), who was himself executed for heresy at the court of Jahangir in India, partly because of his engaging in polemic such as his response to Sharīfī entitled Maṣāʾib al-nawāṣib (The Calumnies of those who hate the Shiʿa).9 The antipathy to the Naqshbandīs in Shiʿi circles was such that even a philo-Sufi figure such as Shūshtarī, who often appropriated Sunni Sufis within his account of the “believers” of the past, did not make any attempt to include Naqshbandīs, 8  Būdāq Munshī Qazvīnī, Javāhir al-akhbār, ed. Muḥsin Bahrāmnizhād (Tehran: Āyīna-yi mīrāth, 1379 Sh/2000), 130; ʿAbdī-Bēg Shīrāzī, Takmilat al-akhbār, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī (Tehran: Nashr-i nay, 1368 Sh/1990), 52; Muḥammad Yūsuf Vālih-i Iṣfahānī, Khuld-i barīn, ed. Mīr Hāshim Muḥaddith (Tehran: Bunyād-i mawqūfāt-i duktūr Maḥmūd Afshār Yazdī, 1372 Sh/1993), 311–12; Zayn al-Dīn Vāṣifī, Badāyiʾ al-vaqāyiʿ, ed. Alexandar Boldryev (reprint, Tehran: Intishārāt-i bunyād-i farhang-i Īrān, 1349 Sh/1970), II, 250; Hamid Algar, “The Naqshbandī order: A preliminary survey of its history and significance,” Studia Islamica 44 (1976): 142; Jaʿfarīyān, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār, I, 112 citing Aḥkām al-dīnīya fī takfīr Qizilbāsh of Ḥusayn Shīrvānī ( fl. 947/1540–41) from MS Marʿashī 2386; Colin Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion, and Rhetoric (London: Tauris, 2012), 28; Najīb Māyil Hiravi, Jāmī (Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i naw, 1377 Sh/1998), 295–97. Mitchell also points out that the Safavids did not have a uniform approach to Jāmī and the more ecumenically minded vazīr under Shah Tahmasp, Qāḍī-yi Jahān Qazvīnī, had the tomb reconstructed—see The Practice of Politics, 89, 233. 9  Mīrzā Makhdūm Sharīfī, al-Nawāqiḍ li-bunyān al-rawāfiḍ, MS British Library Or 7991, fol. 96r, cited in Algar, “Naqshbandīs and Safavids,” 27; on Sharīfī and on this text of his, see Iskandar Bēg Munshī, ʿĀlam-ārā-yi ʿAbbāsī, ed. Īraj Afshār (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1350 Sh/1971), I: 148–49; Muḥammad Qazwīnī, “Sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Mīrzā Makhdūm Sharīfī,” Farhang-i Īrān-zamīn I (1332 Sh/1953): 58–69; Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, “Sunni survival in Safavid Iran: Anti-Sunni activities during the reign of Tahmasp I,” Iranian Studies 27/1–4 (1994): 123–33; Shohreh Golsorskhi, “Ismail II and Mirza Makhdum Sharifi: An interlude in Safavid history,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1994): 477–88. Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī, Maṣāʾib al-nawāṣib fī al-radd ʿalā Nawāqiḍ al-rawāfiḍ, ed. Qays al-ʿAṭṭār (Qum: Dalīl-i mā, 1426/2005), I: 59–62; cf. Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 113, 297; ʿAlī Yazdī, “Nāgufta-hā’ī az Māṣāʾib al-nawāṣib,” Kitāb-i māh: dīn 114–26 (farvardīn 1386 Sh/2007): 50–55. See also my “Shiʿi Polemics at the Mughal Court: The Case of Qāżī Nūrullāh Shūshtarī”, Studies in People’s History 4.1 (2017), 53–67. On the wider context of these Safavid-Ottoman religious polemics, see Elke Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik gegen die Safawiden im 16 Jahrhundert nach arabischen Handschriften (Freiburg: Schwarz, 1970); Rasūl Jaʿfarīyān, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār, I, 79–99.

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while condemning as a forgery the purported lineage of the order that traced its origins to Abū Bakr. However, the relationship of the Naqshbandīs with the enemies of the Safavids—the Ottomans and the Uzbeks and later the Mughals—probably has more to do with the hostility to the order.10 At the same time, one should try to avoid projecting onto the Safavid-Ottoman conflict some of the sectarian polemics and discourses of the present.11 Algar discusses Jāmī’s particular hatred of Shiʿi Islam. He argues that since Herat was becoming a scene of Sunni-Shiʿi conflict in the Timurid period, Jāmī was a major defender of Sunni orthodoxy, dissuading Bāyqarā’s Shiʿi tendencies. In a mathnavī in praise of Bāyqarā completed in 875/1470 compiled in Silsilat al-dhahab, he attacked the evil of rafḍ, of attacking the companions of the prophet and the worthless nature of such people.12 Jāmī’s biographer ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Bākharzī (d. 903/1497) also cites a number of examples of his vehement condemnation of Shiʿi Islam.13 One key incident is the set piece disputation with Shāh Qāsim Fayḍbakhsh (d. 919/1513) who had been invited to court. Bākharzī has Jāmī defeat him in argument, although there were accusations that Qāsim was Shiʿi, Bākharzī, surprisingly, does not make an issue of it beyond mentioning that he espoused “heresy”; Shūshtarī, who himself was associated with the Nūrbakhshī Sufi order, has Qāsim vanquish the Sunni bigot blinded by his

10  On the Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman lands, see Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (London: Routledge, 2007), 44–47, 73–78, and Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism; on the Ottoman-Safavid context, see Jaʿfarīyān, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār, 1:29–44; on the Uzbek context, see Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “La naqshbandiyya sous les premiers Sheybanides,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 3–4 (1997): 69–90. This does not mean that Safavid Iran remained closed to Naqshbandī travellers and even pilgrims to shrines such as those at Mashha—see Robert McChesney, “Barrier of heterodoxy? Rethinking ties between Iran and Central Asia in the Seventeenth century,” in Safavid Iran, ed. Charles Melville (London: Tauris, 1996), 231–67. 11  For a nuanced approach to Sunni-Shiʿi relations in Herat that questions that assumption of rigid boundaries even in the period of the conflict between the Uzbeks and the Safavids, see Maria Szuppe, Entre Timourides, Uzbeks et Safavides (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 1992), 121–42; cf. Martin Dickson, “Shāh Ṭahmāsb and the Uzbeks: The Duel for Khurāsān with ʿUbayd Khān” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1958), 42–43, 148, 191–92, 241–42. 12  Silsilat al-dhahab, in Mathnavī-yi Haft Awrang, ed. Murtaḍā Mudarris Gīlānī (Tehran: Saʿdī, 1361 Sh/1982), 146–47, cited in Algar, “Naqshbandīs and Safavids,” 29; Jāmī, Silsilat al-dhahab, in Haft awrang, ed. Jābalqā-dād ʿAlī-Shāh et al. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999), 1:210. 13  ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī: gūsha-hā-yi tārīkh-i farhangī u ijtimāʾī-yi Khurāsān dar ʿaṣr-i Taymūrīyān, ed. Najīb Māyil Hiravī (Tehran: Nashr-i nay, 1371 Sh/1992), 155–58.

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own ignorance.14 One cannot necessarily see the encounter purely in sectarian terms, since Fayḍbakhsh was well received at the Aqqoyunlu court in Tabriz and was also associated with the poet laureate there, Shahīdī Qummī, who also frequented Jāmī (despite perhaps having been Shiʿi himself as suggested in the negative notice on him in ʿAlī-Shīr Navāʾī and as positively affirmed by Shūshtarī).15 Jāmī’s antipathy to the Nūrbakhshī messianism extended to neglecting Sayyid Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh (d. 869/1464) from his biography of Sufis, Nafaḥāt al-uns; he also denied messianic claims by arguing that it was in fact Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā whose exercise of justice was like that of the Mahdī.16 As such, Jāmī is not only denying the messianic claims of philo-Shiʿi Sufis of his time, but also acknowledging, on the contrary, the messianic claims of spiritual kingship by the Timurids. In another panegyric, he compares the courage and generosity of Bāyqarā to ʿAlī.17 One should not preclude the importance of the rivalry between different Sufi lineages and affiliations in this period that could be extremely vehement and hostile. Jāmī’s self-conscious fashioning of the Sufi tradition was exclusive—his discussion of walāya in 14  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 188–94; Hiravī, Jāmī, 236–40; Shahzad Bashir, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nūrbakhshīya between Medieval and Modern Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003, 178–84). Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, eds. Ibrāhīm ʿArab-pūr et al. (Mashhad: Bunyād-i pazhūhish-hā-yi islāmī, Muʾassasa-yi chāp va intishārāt-i Āstān-i quds-i raḍavī, 1392 Sh/2013), 4:385–88, represents the encounter in a different manner upholding the victory of what he considers the Shiʿi side. Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414–1492): His biography and intellectual influence in Herat” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 288–96 examines the accounts and how Bākharzī and Shūshtarī sectarianise the encounter, but also wonders whether they are talking about the same event. 15  ʿAlī-Shīr Navāʾī, Tadhkira-yi Majālis al-nafāyis, ed. ʿAlī-Aṣghar Ḥikmat (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Manūchihrī, 1363 Sh/1984), 296–97; Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 2:167; Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 25–26; idem, “Shahīdī Qummī: Poet laureate of the Āqqoyunlū court,” in History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, eds. Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh Quinn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 282–301; Chad Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salamān va Absāl (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 114–15. 16  chūn bar āmad ba ʿadl u jūd-ash nām/chashm dāram ki dar hamīn ayyām. gīrad az yumni ṭāliʿ-i masʿūd/hama ʿālam chū mahdī-yi mawʿūd. Jāmī, Silsilat al-dhahab, in Mathnavīyi Haft awrang, 1:73; see Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414–1492),” 282. Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i iṭṭilāʿāt, 1375 Sh/1996), 422–59 recognises an alternative, non-messianic and non-Shiʿi lineage of the Kubravī order instead of Nūrbakhsh. See Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 191–92. 17  Jāmī, Dīvān: Fātiḥat al-shabāb, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999), 1:113–18.

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Nafaḥāt al-uns deliberately avoided the debates on the question of the seal that arose in the school of Ibn ʿArabī and ignored the Shiʿi lineages of the Kubrawī order.18 He also wrote a number of panegyrics for other Sunni rulers of his time including the Aq-Qoyunlu Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (d. 895/1490), the Timurid Abū Saʿīd (d. 873/1469), and the Ottomans Mehmet II (r. 855–886/1451–1481) and Bayezid II (r. 886–918/1481–1512).19 At the same time, it is quite clear from Bākharzī and other accounts that Jāmī was rather socially awkward and cantankerous. In his poetry, he is highly critical of the philosopher Avicenna (d. 428/1037), perhaps because of the rival approach of the Sufi theologian attempting to displace the philosophers from the centre of the learned culture of his time—an attempt that is clear in his Precious Pearl (al-Durra al-fākhira) on the nature of ontology penned in 886/1481.20 In one poem in Tuḥfat al-abrār of Haft awrang on the futility of learning that does not bear any fruit in practice, he criticises the whole of the philosophical and theological curriculum of his time, from the Avicennians to the Shiraz philosophers culminating in Davānī (d. 908/1502). As Jāmī puts it, Greek philosophy is merely the expressions of the passions of the self, while true wisdom comes from the teachings of the Prophet.21 Alongside this hostility is the act of appropriating the Imams and insisting they did not espouse Shiʿi beliefs. Bākharzī cites Jāmī as saying: We are firmly convinced that the Ahl al-Bayt of the Messenger, consisting of the Twelve Imams—may peace and blessings be upon him and upon them—never held this impure belief. By God Exalted and Almighty, if I were convinced that this was the creed and belief of the immaculate progeny of the Prophet, I would be the first to accept it.22 18  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 3–4, 15–16. On two significant figures with Shiʿi sympathies, Saʿd alDīn Ḥamūya and ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, Jāmī ignores that elements of their personality and thought—see Nafaḥāt al-uns, 431–32, 483–92. 19  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:119–22, 131–33, 170–72, 174–75, Dīvān: Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd, 2:53–57, Khātimat alḥayāt, 2:446–51, Haft awrang, 1:364; Hiravī, Jāmī, 78–81. See Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran, 81–110. 20  Jāmī, Haft awrang, I:369–70; Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 69; Jāmī, al-Durra al-fākhira, ed. Nicholas Heer (Tehran: McGill Institute of Islamic Studies, 1986), trans. Nicholas Heer as The Precious Pearl (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979). See Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran, 42. See Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 60–61, 68–69, 71 on his antipathy to philosophers and theologians especially his contemporary Davānī. 21  Jāmī, Haft awrang, I:525–27; Hiravī, Jāmī, 102–8. 22  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 157, cited and translated in Algar, “Naqshbandīs and Safavids,” 31.

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In Shawāhid al-nubūwa, he provides accounts of Imams, but uses Sunni honorifics, while arguing in Silsilat al-dhahab that love for the Imams is not rafḍ.23 Shawāhid is a good example of how the Imams are appropriated: the central Shiʿi tenet of the Twelfth Imam in occultation and being awaited is mocked; the account is immediately followed by those of some prominent companions.24 Even though he had visited the shrine of Imam ʿAlī in Najaf earlier (to which we will return), once the shrine at Mazār-i Sharīf was discovered in 885/1480, he enthusiastically supported it as the genuine one; histories of the shrine even cite a poem in its praise, even though it is not found in the compilations of Jāmī’s corpus.25 Bākharzī argues that this was in direct response to the proliferation of inauthentic Shiʿi imāmzāda shrines in the Herat area.26 Given the significance of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in the Khwājagānī genealogy, Jāmī stresses that he did not espouse his ideas, and in Shawāhid al-nubūwa stresses the maternal descent of al-Ṣādiq from Abū Bakr.27 The contestations of the sacred body, in the historical personage of the Imam and in his blood descendants who, as Sufi shaykhs, proliferated in Central Asia; and sacred spaces, such as the true shrine of ʿAlī and of the saints of ʿAlid lineage, suggest that the fluidity or lack of fixity of sectarian affiliations in this period needs to be tempered. So, given this context, and given that both sides of the argument have invoked the Naqshbandiyya, I want to consider further this Naqshbandī thinker on the cusp of the Safavid period—ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī—and, by examining 23  Jāmī, Shawāhid al-nubūwa (Istanbul: Hakikat kitabevi, 1995), 210–82; idem, Shawāhid al-nubūwa, ed. Ḥasan Amīn (Tehran: Mīr Kasrā, 1379 Sh/2000), 324–411; Jāmī, Silsilat aldhahab, in Haft awrang, 1:210. 24  Jāmī, Shawāhid, ed. Amīn, 411–27. 25  Robert McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 30; see Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414– 1492),” 184–87—although his argument that this demonstrates Jāmī’s attempt at ShiʿiSunni reconciliation is quite odd. 26  Dīvān, ed. Shams Barēlvī (Tehran: Hidāyat, 1362 Sh/1983), 25–26; Muʿīn al-Dīn Muḥammad Isfizārī, Rawḍāt al-jannāt fī awṣāf madīnat Harāt, ed. Sayyid Muḥammad Kāẓim Imām (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1959), 28; Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 157, 231–32. The main study of this shrine is McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia, esp. 27–36 on its origins. Jāmī’s disciple ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī wrote a short account of the shrine: Tārīkhcha-yi Mazār-i Sharīf, ed. N. Māyil Hiravī (Kabul: Anjuman-i tārīkh u adab, 1350 Sh/1971). For a discussion on this point, see Algar, Jami, 119–20. 27  Jāmī, Shawāhid al-nubūwa, 245. For a discussion of the increasing political significance of the Bakrī lineage of the Naqshbandīs, see Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism, 127–33. There were two other lineages which were through the Imams and were called the “golden chain” (silsilat al-dhahab)—see the famous work on the order by a leader of Kurdish origin in Damascus ʿAbd al-Majīd Muḥammad al-Khānī (d. 1901), al-Ḥadāʾiq al-wardīya fī ḥaqāʾiq ajillāʾ al-naqshbandīya (Irbil: Dār Ārās, 2002), 10; Algar, “The Naqshbandī order,” 129–30.

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his attitude towards the Imams and towards Shiʿi Islam expressed in his works (especially in his famous Ḥajj account and poetry that he wrote along the way), consider the question of sectarian identity in Timurid Iraq and Iran. Jāmī was quite unambiguous about his affiliation, and he did not share the form of philo-Imamism mentioned earlier because he was equally hostile to the practitioners of the occult.28 Let us first say a few words about Herat as a major cultural centre and especially as a centre for the Khwājagānī order. The court of the Timurid ruler Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (d. 912/1506) was a cultural and literary centre at which a number of literary figures gathered, including Jāmī.29 Similarly, ever since the establishment of Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī (d. 860/1456) as a teacher and spiritual master at the Madrasa-yi Ghiyāthīya, tending to his disciples at the Friday mosque, the order was prominent in the city. Jāmī himself became a disciple and was devoted to Kāshgharī, even if he did not intend to be his successor, instead promoting Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūjī (d. 904/1499).30 Jāmī’s family were originally from Dasht near Isfahan, but his father, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad, was appointed as a qāḍī in Jām, where ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was born in 817/1414 in the village of Kharjard.31 He trained in Samarqand, and after returning to Herat, affiliated himself with the Naqshbandī order, first following Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī whose grand-daughter (the daughter of Khwāja Kalān) he married, and then later ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār whom he visited in Merv and Samarqand. His training and tastes in hadith, poetry, philosophy, and mysticism were nurtured in Central Asia. Apart from his poetry, his works betray not only an affiliation to the Naqshbandī Sufi order, but also to the path of Ibn ʿArabī, with his two commentaries on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam cycle of texts. At the age of 60, Jāmī set out for the Ḥajj, stopping in Baghdad on the way for four months where the Shiʿa of the city criticised him vehemently for his enmity to the family of the Prophet—but this did not stop him proceeding to the shrine cities of Karbala 28  For example, according to Bākharzī, he expressed contempt for the lettrism of Nūrbakhsh and drew upon the expertise of the Shiʿi Sufi ʿAlī Lālā against lettrism—see Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 195. 29  ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb, “Jāmī: ʿārif-i Jām,” in Bā-kārvān-i Ḥilla (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Āryā, 1343/1964), 287–89; Maria Subtelny, “The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid, Sultan Ḥusayn Baiqara, and Its Political Significance” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1979); Szuppe, Entre Timourides, Uzbeks et Safavides. Another useful study is Mahdī Farhānī Munfarid, Payvand-i siyāsat va farhang dar ʿaṣr-i zavāl-i Taymūrīyān va ẓuhūr-i Ṣafavīyān (Tehran: Anjuman-i āsār va mafākhir-i farhangī, 1381 Sh/2003). 30  Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn Qazvīnī, Silsila-nāma-yi Khwājagān-i Naqshband, MS Bibliothèque Nationale, suppl. Persan 1418, fols. 14v–18r, cited in Algar, “Naqshbandīs and Safavids,” 24. 31  The best account of Jāmī’s life and intellectual and cultural significance is Najīb Māyil Hiravī, Jāmī; and Hamid Algar, Jami (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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and Najaf. On his return from the Ḥajj, he took the “safer” route through Syria, stopping in Damascus and Aleppo. In Aleppo, the Ottoman sultan sent a message inviting him to join the court in Istanbul, which he declined. His poetry was far superior to what one might expect from a mullah and a Sufi.32 It was his friend Mīr ʿAlī-Shīr Navāʾī who, late in his life, compiled his poetic output, following the model of Amīr Khusraw into three dīvāns —Fātiḥat al-shabāb on his juvenilia, Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd on his major oeuvre, and Khātimat al-ḥayāt on his late work. ʿAlī Aṣghar Ḥikmat discusses the issue of Jāmī and Shiʿi Islam partly because of the discomfort of Iranians who love his verse, but find his religious ideas problematic.33 His own assessment is that Jāmī, as is clear from Shawāhid alnubūwa, was a Sunni who was not prejudiced and had great devotion to the Imams, and may have been intellectually inclined towards Shiʿism even as he distanced himself from it.34 The question of the anxiety of influence that medieval thinkers felt may be relevant here. But despite the many poems in Silsilat al-dhahab (composed between 873/1468 and the accession of Bāyqarā and 877/1473 return from Ḥajj) and the masnavī Subḥat al-abrār (composed 887/1482), which were in praise of the Imams and the caliphs, it is difficult to argue that Jāmī was free of prejudice as he is quite firm in his condemnation of Shiʿi thinkers and practice. Jāmī’s own adherence to the Naqshbandī order is clear in a short work that he wrote entitled Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīqa-yi khwājagān.35 The text is brief, and in the introduction he makes it clear that the way of Naqshband and his successors is that of the salaf-i ṣāliḥ and enjoys the correct and proper doctrine, enjoining good works and forsaking evil deeds.36 He then sets out three ways for the adept to affiliate himself with the godly kingdom (dawlat) of the Naqshbandī way: (1) through the practice of invoking God and remembering him (dhikr)—and here he stresses the statement of faith (shahāda) and the need for proper discipline including breathing exercises in invocation (ḥabas-i nafas)—37 (2) through meditation and contemplation (murāqaba va tavajjuh) 32  Zarrīnkūb, Bā kārvān-i Ḥilla, 294. 33  ʿAlī-Aṣghar Ḥikmat, Jāmī (Tehran: Bank-i Millī, 1320 Sh/1941), 137–44. See also Paul Losensky’s chapter in the present volume. 34  Ḥikmat, Jāmī, 138. 35  The text has other titles as well—see a more recent edition by Jūyā Jahānbakhsh, ed., “Risāla dar murāqaba va ādāb-i dhikr,” in Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, eds. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad-Jān ʿUmarof and Abū Bakr Ẓuhūr al-Dīn (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1379 Sh/2000), 487–91. See also Algar, Jami, 87–107; Hiravī, Jāmī, 217–85. 36  Jāmī, Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīqa-yi khwājagān, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī (Kabul: Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343 Sh/1964), 12. 37  Jāmī, Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīqa-yi Khwājagān, 12–14.

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to train the heart to receive the divine,38 and (3) through contact and following a spiritual master (pīr) who assists in the disciplining of the soul and in whose absence the adept must concentrate on his mental image to receive the benefits of his spiritual guidance.39 These short sections are followed by advice for how to manage one’s time in company and in one’s privacy under the rubric of vuqūf-i zamānī. In the Bahāristān, Jāmī quotes a few anecdotes and sayings from the Ahl al-Bayt (but of a rather neutral nature).40 At the same time, he only includes three quotations from Abū Bakr and ʿUmar.41 In fact, there are more anecdotes cited from Muʿāwiya, but each of them serves to demonstrate his intimacy with some members of the Prophet’s clan, especially ʿAqīl b. Abī Ṭālib and ʿAbdullāh b. Jaʿfar b. Abī Ṭālib—significantly, Ṭālibids, and not ʿAlids—and this sort of appropriation of charisma away from the Ḥusaynid line that the Shiʿa stressed was prefigured even among the ʿAbbasids.42 The Khwājagānī order was sensitive to criticism of the companions of the Prophet from Shiʿi writers, and focused on the issue of sabb-i ṣaḥāba (abusing and denigrating the companions) to demonstrate the “evils” of rafḍ: Muʿāwiya was often at the centre of this, given his controversial nature, so Naqshbandīs felt the need to defend him. One such late work is al-Nāhiya ʿan ṭaʿn amīr al-muʾminīn Muʿāwiya by the Indian author ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Farhārvī (d. 1239/1824), which is often printed with the Radd-i rawāfiḍ of Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1034/1624).43 Jāmī’s own defense of the companions and the caliphs is clear. Bākharzī cites a number of examples of his rebuttal of Shiʿi positions at the court. A certain Sayyid Abū-l-Ḥasan Karbalāʾī and some other narrow-minded and bigoted individuals (kaj-naẓarān-i bī-baṣīrat) tried to have the names of the caliphs struck from the Friday sermon (khuṭba) and replaced with the names of the Twelve Imams.44 The Sultan, in his wisdom, consulted the court and the notables, including Jāmī, who encouraged the Sulṭān not to change the tradition of the forebears (besides, in “wa ālihi al-aṭhār” the Imams were included anyway). Bākharzī presents this as another 38  Ibid., 14–15. 39  Ibid., 15–16. 40  Jāmī, Bahāristān, 58, 66, 96–98. 41  Ibid., 60–61, 79. 42  Ibid., 56, 57, 70, 106. 43  The Naqshbandī press, Hakikat Kitabevi, in Istanbul continues to print offset copies of such anti-Shiʿi material written by authors of the order, and also published Shawāhid alnubūwa of Jāmī. 44  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 148. Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh Gunābādī (admittedly a late source) ascribes this to the influence of Astarābādī sayyids on Bāyqarā—see Gunābādī, Bayān alsaʿāda fī maqāmāt al-ʿibāda (Tehran lithograph, 1314/1897), 85, cited in Jaʿfarīyān, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār, 1:202. See Algar, Jami, 41–42.

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defeat for Shiʿi factions at court, since the Sultan expressed his “displeasure” and “anger” at them. Another example that immediately follows is the case of the bigoted Shiʿi Sayyid ʿAlī Vāḥid al-ʿAyn, whose hatred of Sunnis was extreme, according to Bākharzī.45 He casts aspersions on his character and his lineage as this “chap from Qāʾin” who had the audacity to be disruptive at court and to abuse the wife of the Prophet, ʿĀʾisha. Once again, the miscreant is defeated at court and becomes the recipient of the wrath of the Sultan. The section culminates with Jāmī’s assessment of the mischief of the Shiʿa of his time, and the Sultan’s request for him to judge.46 Jāmī’s response was to express surprise that the Shiʿa have become so bold and rude as to describe Sunnis as khārijī while at the same time claiming that they follow the doctrine and school of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq—yet he was nothing but a Sunni. Jāmī describes the Shiʿa as naïve and ignorant (nā-dān), mischievous and wretched (shardil u ahl-i shaqāvat), and ignorant of the reality of their forebears—both the fact that their ancestors were Sunni, and also that the claims of those among them to being Sayyids was dubious. Jāmī does not shy away from abusing the Shiʿa: the use of the term rawāfiḍ is common, as is “bastards” (awlād al-zināʾ). The fundamental theme is that the Shiʿa were misguided because of their abuse of the companions, and their claim to follow the family of the Prophet is erroneous because they were clearly Sunni. So, we can see both a virulent anti-Shiʿi sentiment, at a time when Shiʿi thinkers were capable of being present at court and having influence, and appropriating those that the Shiʿa considered to be foundational to their faith for the Sunni cause. Such set pieces are very much within the scope of hagiographical constructions of the lives of saints, in which it is not just the virtues and miraculous nature of the pious that needs to be emphasized, but also the perfidy and vice of their opponents, either in the guise of religious hypocrisy or heresy. Hagiographical narratives in particular are designed to impart a closed textual discourse with moral meaning, in that the sequence of events portrayed can be interpreted and assessed “in terms of their significance as elements of a moral drama.”47 Naturally, because of such narratives,

45  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 149–52. On these two incidents, see Ökten, “Jāmī (818– 898/1414–1492),” 136–40, and Algar, Jami, 120. 46  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 155–59. 47  Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 21. On the importance of such hagiographies as sources for historical analysis, see Jürgen Paul, “Au debut du genre hagiographique dans le Khurasan,” in Saints orientaux, ed. Denise Aigle (Paris: De Boccard, 1995), 15–38.

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it is therefore not surprising that in the Safavid period Jāmī was widely cited in anti-Sufi works as a Sunni bigot who deserved to be condemned.48 Jāmī’s first dīvān, Fātiḥat al-shabāb, contains some qaṣīdas in praise of Imāms ʿAlī, Ḥusayn and al-Riḍā.49 The honorifics given are: karama Allāhu wajhahu (may God ennoble his face) after the first, salām Allāhi ʿalayhi (peace of God be with him—usually for prophets in the Sunni tradition) after the second, and then the milder raḍiya Allāhu ʿanhumā (“may God be pleased with them,” usually used for companions of the Prophet and major saints in the Sunni tradition) after the name of the third (reflecting both him and his father Imam Kāẓim). This first qaṣīda begins: qad bada‌ʾ mashhadu mawlāya anīkhū jamalī ki mashāhid shud az ān mashhadam anvār-i jalī rūyash ān maẓhar-i ṣāfī’st ki bar ṣūrat-i aṣl āshkār ast dar ū ʿaks-i jamāl-i azalī chashm az partaw-i rūyash ba khudā bīnā shud jāy-i ān dārad agar kūr shavad muʿtazilī The mausoleum of my Lord has appeared so make my camel kneel, so that from my vision I may see the bright lights. His countenance is that pure theophany that is in the form of the original, apparent in him is the reflection of the beauty of the divine. Through the ray of his countenance can the eye see God, if the Muʿtazilī reached this station, he would be blind!50 Alongside the devotion, one notes a critique of the Shiʿa in this poem: daʿvāyi ʿishq u tavallā makun ay sīrat-i tū/naqṣ-i arbāb-i dil az bī-khiradī u daghalī (Don’t profess love and devotion, you who fall short of love in unreason and deceit). Imām ʿAlī is praised with the allusion to the idea of him as the countenance of the divine (ʿaks-i jamāl-i azalī) and one who attracts love; this is consistent with Shiʿi notions of the Imam as the face of God. He ends with a maqṭaʿ that if someone asks Jāmī what path he pursues (which caravan he has boarded and who is its leader), then he can but say: ʿAlī ( Jāmī az qāfila sālār-i rah-i ʿishq turā, gar bapursand ki ān kī’st ʿAlī gūʾī ʿAlī).

48  Jaʿfarīyān, Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār, 1:792, 807. 49  Jāmī, Dīvān: Fātiḥat al-shabāb, 1:180–82. 50  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:180–81.

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The poem in praise of Imam Ḥusayn was composed in Karbala. The date often given for the first completion of this Dīvān is 880/1475, after the return from his Hajj and pilgrimages in Iraq. Karbala is the Kaʿba of the religion of love, and it is incumbent on lovers to visit it and to circumambulate the tomb. In the maqṭaʿ, he urges himself to be a devotee of the Imam so that any punishment or wrath of the divine will be substituted with pleasure and union. In many ways, the praise of Imam Riḍā is most interesting given the rivalry of the shrines in Khorasan and the Timurid patronage of Mashhad, and Jāmī’s own espousal of Mazār-i Sharīf (although it is clear that the panegyric was written before the discovery of that shrine): salām ʿalá āli Ṭāhā wa-Yāsīn salām ʿalá āli khayr al-anbiyāʾ Blessings upon the progeny of Ṭāhā and Yāsīn! Blessings upon the progeny of the best of prophets! Blessings upon the tomb in which resides the Imam who bestows power and faith. The true Imam, the absolute Shah, to the threshold of whose sanctuary even Sultans come The Shah of the palace of gnosis, rose of the garden of virtue, pearl of creation, the wine that gives contentment. ʿAlī son of Mūsā al-Riḍā, who from God received the name Riḍā (pleasant) because his nature was pleasant. His nobility and grace is clear to see in the world, for if he were not, the eyes of the world would be deprived. These poems demonstrate the license and poetic hyperbole common to the stylistics of the genre, and should not be taken at face value as expressions of Shiʿi inclination, not least because of his snipes at the Shiʿa. Similarly, in Subḥat al-abrār in his Haft awrang, Jāmī has a poem in praise of Imam Ḥasan: Ḥasan ān sibṭ-i nabī sirr-i valī/ṭalʿat-ash maṭlaʿ-yi anvār-i jalī— but this comes after another poem praising the “pious” Umayyad caliph ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz.51 The Imams are thus praised and woven into the fabric of the righteous forebears of the Sunni tradition. Earlier in Silsilat al-dhahab, he cites in poetic form the encounter of the Umayyad caliph Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik with the fourth Shiʿi Imam ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn during the Ḥajj season, and the subsequent verses in his praise by Farazdaq: pūr-i ʿAbd al-Malik 51  Jāmī, Subḥat al-abrār, in Haft awrang, 1:690–91, 683–84.

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ba nām-i Hishām, dar ḥaram būd bā ahālī-yi shām (The son of ʿAbd al-Malik by the name of Hishām, was in the holy precinct with the people of Syria).52 Because of the crowds, Hishām cannot reach the black stone but then sees that the crowds part for one man—so he asks the people who he is. It is Zayn alʿĀbidīn. Jāmī cites verses of praise for him: qurrat al-ʿayn-i sayyid al-shuhadāʾst/ghuncha-yi shākh dawḥa-yi Zahrā-st. mīva-yi bāgh-i Aḥmad-i mukhtār/ lāla-yi rāgh-i Ḥaydar-i karrār (The delight of the Lord of martyrs, blossom of the branch of the tree of Zahrā, fruit of the garden of Aḥmad—meaning the Prophet—and tulip of the fields of the ever-advancing Ḥaydar). Praise of the Ahl al-Bayt transforms the panegyrist into one of them. As Jāmī says, Lover of the prophet and his family am I, enemy of the wicked enemy of them am I. My gem comes from their mine, my possessions come from their shop. Like Salman I have become of their house, my lamp lighted from their oil. I am their devotee and the devotee of the people, I am of them and I fear not blame. The lovers are always intoxicated with love, they do not fear the blame of the blamers. Since I rehearse the love of the truthful ones, what fear have I for the wiles of the hypocrites? This is not rafḍ but pure faith it is, the well-known habit of the gnostics it is. If the love of the family of the prophet is rafḍ, then incumbent upon every wise man and fool is this rafḍ.53 Once again, these verses are followed by a proper explanation of what is meant by rafḍ. He begins by citing and translating some famous verses of the Sunni jurist al-Shāfiʿī:

52  Ibid., 205–9. 53  dūstdār-i rasūl u āl-i vay-am/dushman-i khaṣm-i bad-khiṣāl-i vay-am. jawhar-i man zi kān-i īshān ast/rakht-i man az dukān-i īshān ast. hamchū Salmān shudam zi ahl al-bayt/gasht rawshan chirāgh-i man zi ān zayt. anā mawlā lahum wa-mawlā al-qawm/kāna minhum wa-lā akhāfu al-lawm. mast-i ʿishq-and ʿāshiqān dāyim/lā yakhāfūna lawmat al-lāʾim. chūn buvad ʿishq-i ṣādiqān dars-am/kay zi kayd-i munāfiqān tarsam. īn na rafḍ ast mahḍ īmān ast/rasm-i maʿrūf-i ahl-i ʿirfān ast. rafḍ agar hast ḥubb-i āl-i nabī/rafḍ farḍ ast bar dhakī u ghabī. Jāmī, Silsilat al-dhahab, in Haft awrang, 1:209–10.

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gar buvad rafḍ ḥubb-i āl-i rasūl/yā tavallā ba khāndān-i batūl gū guvā bash ādamī u parī/ki shudam man zi ghayr-i rafḍ barī kīsh-i man rafḍ u dīn-i man rafḍ ast/rafʿ-i man u mā baqā khafḍ ast.54 If rafḍ connotes love for the family of the Prophet, it is incumbent on all, on every wise man and fool (rafḍ farḍ ast bar dhakī u ghabī). But, of course, for Jāmī, rafḍ entails the rejection of the caliphs and the Sunni tradition. He follows with verses on the need to honour the companions alongside the family of the Prophet: the one who professes rafḍ is therefore indeed worthless and without character. Love for the family of the prophet is Sunni orthodoxy, while attacking the companions does not follow from that love. Three additional poems complete the argument. The first is an explanation of the famous verse of purification in honour of the family of the Prophet, asserted as Sunni doctrine. Second, he cites the practice—seemingly alluding to Shiʿi claimants, perhaps especially on the messianic fringes—of those who claim to be descendants of the Prophet, sayyids, but whose claim is false and sinful. They are described as ignorant status-seekers who exaggerate in seeking the highest lineage ( jāhilān-i jāh-ṭalab ki ghulūv karda dar ʿulūv-nasab).55 Third, he expands on this point by mocking those who ascribe things to the Prophet wrongly and make claims of loving the Prophet but fail to follow him correctly (alluding to the Quranic verse).56 Thus, we see an attempt to appropriate the family of the Prophet for the Sunni tradition and to delegitimize rival claims—from Sufis, messianic figures, wandering figures claiming the charisma of prophetic descent, and the Shiʿa who do not conform to Jāmī’s definition of orthodoxy. The final element that I wish to cite here is his Sunni Ashʿarī profession of faith (iʿtiqād-nāma) that comes at the end of the first daftar of Silsilat aldhahab.57 Within this section, he argues that the community of the Prophet is superior to others because it honours both the companions and the Ahl al-Bayt.58 He asserts the order of the caliphs, and condemns strongly the practice of mocking and cursing anyone. This is immediately followed by a condemnation of anathemising (takfīr) any Muslim (ahl-i qibla), a position common at least since al-Ghazālī famously proposed it in his Fayṣal al-tafriqa

54  Ibid., 210. 55  Ibid., 211–14. 56  Ibid., 214–16. 57  Ibid., 234–46. 58  Ibid., 242–43.

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bayn al-Islām wa al-zandaqa.59 Elsewhere, he condemns much of the Shiʿi theological and juristic tradition; when asked about the many great jurists of the Shiʿa, he scoffs and says that apart from al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044) and Ibn al-Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī (d. 725/1325), none of them deserve the title.60 Jāmī’s Hajj and pilgrimage in Iraq is one important account by which to gauge his relationship to Shiʿi Islam.61 Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī provides in his Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt the first complete account quoting Jāmī of his pilgrimage with the following chronology.62 On 16 Rabīʿ al-awwal 877/21 August 1472, he left Herat, passing through Nīshāpūr, Sabzavār, Basṭām, Dāmghān, Simnān, Qazvīn and Hamadān, whose governor Manūchihr received his company well and provided an escort further into Iraq. During Jumāda II/November 1472, he arrived in Baghdad, and a few days later left for Karbala, returning to Baghdad. In Shawwāl/March 1473 he was staying by the Tigris; an epistle of his places him in Baghdad on 2 Ramaḍān/31 January 1473.63 On 25 Shawwāl/25 March he left Baghdad for Najaf. On 1 Dhū-l-Qaʿda/30 March 1473, he left Najaf for the Ḥijāz. On 22 or 23 Dhū-l-Qaʿda/20 or 21 April 1473, he arrived in Medina, then in Dhūl-Ḥijja/May he proceeded to Mecca for Ḥajj. On 15 Dhū-l-Ḥijja/13 May he left Mecca to return to Herat. On 25 Dhū-l-Ḥijja/23 May, he arrived in Medina. On 27 Dhū-l-Ḥijja/25 May, he left Medina for Syria. On 25 Muḥarram 878/22 June, he arrived in Damascus. On 4 Rabīʿ al-awwal 878/30 July 1473, he left Damascus. On 16 Rabīʿ al-awwal/10 August, he arrived in Aleppo. On 59  See Sherman Jackson’s discussion and translation: Tolerance in Islam: Abū Ḥāmid alGhazālī’s Fayṣal al-tafriqa (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002), and also Frank Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 60  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 158. 61  In the secondary literature, Ḥikmat, Jāmī, 82–86 merely quotes the account in Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt; Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va barrasī-yi āthār va aḥvāl-i Jāmī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999), 132 just mentions his journey in passing without noting any of the controversies; Hiravī, Jāmī, 43–52 gives quite a full account based on different sources and considers the poetic expressions of the controversies, as does Algar, Jami, 48–57. Ṭālib Hāshimī, Tadhkira-yi Mawlānā Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (Lahore: al-Qamar, 1995), 34–41, is a modern Urdu account which is highly sectarian. Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414– 1492),” 151–59 argues that one ought to see the issues in Iraq within a wider context and be sceptical about elements of the Sunni account in Bākharzī since that source was written in 1490 when the Safavids were on the rise. 62  Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt (Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1911), 150–51; idem, Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī-Aṣghar Muʿīnīyān (Tehran: Intishārāt-i bunyād-i nīkūkārī-yi nūriyānī, 2536/1977), 2:264. Most account follow it including Abū al-Muḥsin Muḥammad Bāqir bin Muḥammad ʿAlī ( fl. 947/1540), Tārīkh-i gharība, MS India Office Islamic (British Library) 1426, fols. 164r–167v. 63  Letter no. 280 in Nāma-hā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, eds. ʿIṣām al-Dīn Ūrūnbāyif and Asrār Raḥmānof (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999), 191.

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20 Rabīʿ al-thānī/14 August 1473, he left Aleppo. On 24 Jumāda I/14 October 1473 [Rashaḥāt says Jumāda II, which is clearly a mistake], he arrived in Tabriz. On 6 Jumāda II/29 October, he left Tabriz. On 1 Rajab/22 November, he arrived in Rayy. On 18 Shaʿbān 878/7 January 1474, he finally arrived in Herat. Bākharzī stresses that Jāmī began his preparation early in 877/1472 and was given a great deal of assistance for his pilgrimage from the Sultan.64 The point he wishes to make is that Jāmī was a special recipient of the Sultan’s patronage and favour. Soon after arriving in Baghdad, he set out for Karbala where he composed the qaṣīda in praise of Imam Ḥusayn that is in his first Dīvān: kardam zi dīda pā-yi sūy-i mashhad-i Ḥusayn hast īn safar ba madhhab-i ʿushshāq farḍ-i ʿayn khuddām-i marqad-ash ba sar-am gar nihand pāy-ī ḥaqqā ki bigudharad sar-am az farq-i farqadayn Kaʿba ba gird-i rawḍa-yi ū mī-kunad ṭavāf rakbu al-ḥajīj ayna tarūḥūna ayna ayn I made of my eye a foot to carry me to the mausoleum of Ḥusayn, this journey is in the religion of lovers a duty for everyone. If the servitors of the shrine should place their feet on my head, it would proudly ascend beyond the stars of Ursa Minor. The Kaʿba itself circumambulates his tomb, O caravan of hajj pilgrims, where are you headed, where?65 Devotion to Ḥusayn as a divine mediator seems genuine, and is consistent with his Sufi path, even the maqṭaʿ that proclaims: Jāmī gadāʾ-yi haḍrat-i ū bāsh tā shavad/bā rāḥat-i viṣāl mubaddal ʿadhāb bīn (Jāmī, become a slave of him so that you may see your punishment substituted by the pleasure of union). Along the way, Bākharzī cites a meeting with an ignorant Shiʿi commentator on the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam of Ibn ʿArabī in Ḥilla—the point being that the Shiʿa are ignorant of the law and the faith as well as mystical insight, a theme that recurs in the disputation in Baghdad.66 There, ignorant rawāfiḍ wished to dispute with him, even though they had no understanding of the rules of disputation because of the verses which he had written in Silsilat al-dhahab following the position of ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī on the imamate: shīʿī-yi pīsh-i sunnī-yi 64  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 160–62. 65  Jāmī, Dīvān, 181–82. See Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt, 145–46; idem, Rashaḥāt, ed. Muʿīnīyān, 2:255–56; Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 174; Hiravi, Jāmī, 45; Algar, Jami, 50–51. 66  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 173–74. See Algar, Jami, 50.

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fāḍil guft: ki-ay dar ʿulūm-i dīn kāmil, bāz-gū ramz-i ʿAlī-yi valī ki turā yāftam valī-yi ʿAlī.67 These verses assert the Sunni order of succession, and assert that cursing the caliphs is the same as cursing ʿAlī—hence the verses were vehement in condemning the rawāfiḍ. Further verses clarified the Sunni position on the “verse of purification” (āyat-i taṭhīr). Both Ṣafī and Bākharzī report that a gathering was convened at a madrasa on the banks of the Tigris in the presence of the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī muftis and the Aq Qoyunlu governor of Baghdad Maqṣūḍ Bēg (d. 883/1478), son of Ūzūn Ḥasan (d. 882/1478).68 Jāmī complained that he thought the verses in Silsilat al-dhahab in praise of the Imams would get him into trouble with Sunnis of Khorasan, but instead he was facing the wrath of ignorant rawāfiḍ in Baghdad. The Shiʿi masses brought forth their own disputant—Niʿmat Ḥaydarī (whose historical veracity is debatable), a Shiʿi Sufi, indicated by his long moustache, which Jāmī criticises as against the law of God. His name suggests an association with the militant (probably Turkmen) Shiʿi order established by Mīr Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar of Tabriz (d. ca. 829/1426).69 Bākharzī is excessively abusive about him, which is consistent not only with his attitude to the Shiʿa, but also the attempts at othering mystics and antinomians associated with Shiʿi Islam in the period.70 The disputation is settled in Jāmī’s favour, and the fitna subsides: Niʿmat had his moustache hacked off, and, forced to wear a takhtakulāh (a wooden board over the head as a sort of stock), he was paraded sitting backwards on a donkey. Bākharzī says that it is not difficult to see how the matter would have been settled for Jāmī, as rāfiḍī means rafḍ-i khirad (denial of reason).71 Later, Jāmī would complain about the Baghdadis in a ghazal in his Dīvān: bugushāy sāqīyā ba lab shaṭṭ-i sar-i sabūʾī/va zi khāṭir-am kudūrat-i baghdādīyān bashūy (Approach, Saqi, and bring an edge of the head of the flask to the lip, so that my mind might erase the malice of the Baghdadis).72 The maqṭaʿ makes his feelings about Baghdad clear: Jāmī maqām-i rāstravān nīst īn zamīn/bar-khīz tā nihīm ba khāk-i ḥijāz rūy (Jāmī, this place is not for the righteous, rise up and head for the dust of the Hijaz). The governor provided 67  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 166–68; Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt, 146–48; idem, Rashaḥāt, ed. Muʿīnīyān, 2:256–59; Hiravī, Jāmī, 46–47. 68  Algar, Jami, 51–53. 69  See John Perry, “Ḥaydari and Neʿmati,” Encyclopedia Iranica, online. Most work on the order has tended to focus on the conflict between rivals in Iranian cities during commemorations. 70  On the process of the heretication of Shiʿi and philo-Shiʿi groups in this period and especially in the Ottoman realm, see Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanli Toplumunda Zindiklar ve Mülhidler (15.–17. Yüzyillar) (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998). 71  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 172. 72  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:778–79.

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an escort to protect him as he headed to Najaf and then Hijaz—this could be, as Bākharzi cites, because there were rumours of attempts to kill Jāmī. In Najaf, he composed the famous qaṣīda: asbaḥtu zāʾiran laka yā shaḥnat al-najaf bahr-i nithār-i marqad-i tū naqd-i jān ba-kaf tū qibla-yi duʿāʾ-ī u ahl-i niyāz-rā rūy-i umīd sūy-i tū bāshad zi har ṭaraf I have become your pilgrim, oh one borne by Najaf, your tomb brings my life to completion. You are the qibla of my prayers and of all those in need who come in hope to you from every direction.73 However, it seems this did not placate those familiar with the controversy. Jāmī wrote: mī-busam āstanā-yi qaṣr-i jalāl-i tū/dar dīda ashk-i ʿudhr zi taqṣīr-i mā salaf.74 One of his companions was abused in Najaf as a khārijī. Jāmī’s contacts with Aq Qoyunlu notables and local sayyids, which Bākharzī stresses, including Sayyid Sharaf al-Dīn Naqīb (indicating his leadership of the descendants of the Prophet?) leads to the release of the companion from his difficulty.75 Bākharzī barely mentions the actual Hajj and period in Medina, apart from stressing the importance of Jāmī and his reception.76 The remainder of the journey through Syria, Tabriz, and the return is used by Bākharzī to signal the relationship of Jāmī to the Aq Qoyunlu and to the Ottomans: while in Damascus, the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II sends a message urging him to come to court, but Jāmī turns down the request.77

73  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:54–56; Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 178–79; Hiravī, Jāmī, 49. Rather oddly, Sayyid Muḥammad Shafīʿ Ḥusaynī-yi ʿĀmilī in his continuation of Shūshtarī’s Majālis entitled Maḥāfil al-muʾminīn fī dhayl Majālis al-muʾminīn, eds. Ibrāhīm ʿArabpūr and Manṣūr Jaghaṭāyī (Mashhad: Bunyād-i pazhūhish-hā-yi islāmī, Āstān-i quds-i raḍavī, 1383 Sh/2004), 310 claims that the first hemestich is grammatically incorrect. This, however, is not the case and perhaps it is a mistake on the part of the editor and demonstrates the continuing antipathy towards Jāmī in modern Shiʿi circles. 74  Hiravī, Jāmī, 50. 75  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 179–80; Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt, 148; idem, Rashaḥāt, ed. Muʿīnīyān, 2:260. 76  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 181–82; Ṣafī, Rashāḥāt, 149; idem, Rashaḥāt, ed. Muʿīnīyān, 2:261–62; Hiravī, Jāmī, 50–52. 77  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 183–85; Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt, ed. Muʿīnīyān, 2:262; Algar, Jami, 55–56; Lingwood, Politics, Poetry and Sufism in Medieval Iran, 42.

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In many ways, the travel narrative exemplifies elements of Jāmī’s personality. He could not fail to be controversial, just as he remained after his death. But he followed a clear line that was inclined neither towards Shiʿi Islam nor was Shiʿi in itself, but was concerned with separating the Shiʿa from the Imams and love of the family of the prophet that they professed. Conclusion Sectarianism is a political problem and a symptom of political dissonances that arises out of contexts in which religious affiliations, identities, and demands within traditions are exploited for gains in power relationships. One cannot ignore the political context of the Timurid and later Safavid periods. The significance of Jāmī as a political player, eminent at the Timurid court (even if Bākharzī and his other biographers may exaggerate his position within a hagiographical trope of the significance of the Sufi) and courted by the Turkmen Aq Qoyunlu, Qara Qoyunlu and the Ottomans, should be taken into consideration when examining his views on religion.78 It may well be the case that times of convergence and even syncreticism, of a blurring of Sunni and Shiʿi identities, may coincide with a greater desire to differentiate, objectify, and other. After the rise of the Safavids and the role of the Naqshbandiyya as upholders of Sunni orthodoxy, Jāmī was seen as part of this glorious history of defending the faith—even when most of the Central Asian and Indian Mujaddidī branches of the order broadly ignored his historical and political role. Jāmī is consistently portrayed in Bākharzī and Ṣafī as defending Sunni positions at court and attempting to deflect Shiʿi influence: even in Iraq, his problems may have been more symptomatic of the power differentials and tensions between a Sunni Aq Qoyunlu leadership and Shiʿi populaces and local elites in Baghdad and the shrine cities.79 Similarly, since the previous generation under Shahrukh, the “Shiʿi” threat was associated with messianic movements that were chiliastic, made political claims, and represented a threat to the social order. Jāmī’s response, as others at the Timurid court, was thus a continuation 78  Ertuğrul Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414–1492)”—his neglect of the sectarian politics of the period is a reflection of his position that seeing the period before the Safavids through the Sunni-Shiʿi lens is unfruitful. However, it is difficult to argue that such dynamics were entirely absent in that period or to point to the Khwājagānī-Naqshbandī role in it. Jürgen Paul, Die politische und soziale Bedeutung der Naqšbandiyya in Mittelasien im 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991). 79  Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414–1492),” 26–29 is a good assessment of Bākharzī and its problems as a source.

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of an earlier policy of re-affirming the fight against heterodoxy as a means for establishing the legitimacy of the Timurid polity.80 To take one important polemical source that appropriates Sunni figures into a Shiʿi narrative, the Majālis al-muʾminīn of Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (d. 1019/1610), it is striking that he embraces many figures from the Timurids, but not Jāmī, and singles him and the Naqshbandī order out for opprobrium.81 Thus he has little doubt that Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 910/1505), the author of the martyrology of Karbala that was so successful in Safavid Iran, Rawḍat alshuhadāʾ, was Shiʿi not least because he came from the Shiʿi city of Sabzavar (dalīl bar ṣiḥḥat-i ʿaqīda-yi khwūd dārand).82 He even expresses pity for Kāshifī for having suffered the “torment” of the company of the Naqshbandīs, and for having been related by marriage (dāmādī) to Jāmī.83 Similarly the Timurid man of letters, Mīr Ḥusayn Maybudī (d. 910/1504) is often cited as a Shiʿi authority, often from his commentary on the Dīvān attributed to ʿAlī, citing him as the “commentator on the Dīvān of Murtaḍā” (shāriḥ-i dīvān-i murtaḍavī).84 He even cites the following quatrain, supposedly of Maybudī, in condemnation of Jāmī as a bigoted enemy of the Ahl al-Bayt: ān imām ba ḥaqq valī-yi khudā/asadullāh ghālib-ash nāmī dū kas ū-rā ba jān biyāzardand/yakī az abhalī yak az khāmī har dū-rā nām-i ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ast/īn yakī Muljam va digar Jāmī

80  See Maria Subtelny, “The cult of ʿAbdullāh Anṣārī under the Timurids,” in Gott ist schön und Er liebt die Schönheit, eds. A. Giese and J. Ch. Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 377–406. 81  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 4:15. A broadly contemporaneous source which stresses the valiant efforts of Sunni Sufis to resist Shiʿi influence and the Safavids is the Menākib-i Ibrāhīm-i Gülşenī of Muḥyī Gulshanī (d. 1026/1617), an Ottoman hagiography about Ibrāhīm Gulshanī (d. 940/1534)—ed. Tahsin Yazıcı (Ankara: Turk Tarih kurumu Basımevi, 1982). 82  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 4:322, 548–49. 83  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 4:321. 84  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 2:15, 44, 96, 399, 3:164, 4:71, 112, 224. In the edition of the Sharḥ-i dīvān mansūb bih Amīr al-muʾminīn, eds. Ḥasan Raḥmātī and Sayyid Ibrāhīm Ashk-shirīn (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1379 Sh/2000), xxxi, the editors affirm that he was a Sunni Shāfiʿī although they do say that later authors did see him as Shiʿi. The modern study of Alexandra Dunietz locates the question of Maybudī’s theological affiliation within the paradigm of ʿAlid loyalism in the Timurid period and suggests that the reason why Maybudī does not express any anti-Shiʿi sentiment is because he did not consider the Shiʿa to pose any threat—see The Cosmic Perils of Qadi Ḥusayn Maybudī in FifteenthCentury Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 3–4 passim.

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As for that Imam, the true Friend of God, whose name is the victorious Lion of God, two men brought injury to his life, one by his ignorance and one through his shortcoming. Each of the two bore the name ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, one [Ibn] Muljam, the other Jāmī.85 Even the philosopher Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 908/1503) is considered to be Shiʿi—without even citing the Nūr al-hidāya, which was written hastily in anticipation of the Safavid conquest of Shiraz.86 For Shūshtarī, Jāmī represents the ignorant Sunni bigot par excellence, attacking a Shiʿi sayyid from Astarābād as being kāfir-i muṭlaq, for ignoring some of the great Sufis from his biographical dictionary Nafaḥāt al-uns for their supposed rafḍ, and for disputing with the great Sufis of the school of Ibn ʿArabī on the nature of the Pole of the cosmos being the Mahdī.87 The main reason, perhaps, for Shūshtarī’s unfavorable assessment might be Jāmī’s attack on Sayyid Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh, whom he systematically praises as the “Succour of the theosis-minded” (ghawth almuta‌ʾallihīn), his son Shāh Qāsim and the Nūrbakhshī Sufis.88 Shūshtarī makes clear his own affiliation to this order, to Sayyid Muḥammad and the Kubrawī lineage stemming from Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī (d. 786/1385), who is equally a Shiʿi in his eyes.89 This may also be a reason for his favour of Kāshifī, who is described by some as a Nūrbakhshī Sufi as well; it is also the case that he cites Maybudī’s praise for Nūrbakhshī figures such as Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Lāhījī (d. 912/1506).90 We do know that Jāmī did not necessarily have a problem with Shiʿi Sufis, especially those affiliated to the school of Ibn ʿArabī, who did not pose any political threat. He sat at the feet of the Shiʿi Kubravī Sufi Sayyid Aḥmad Lālāʾī Darbandī (d. 912/1506) in Tabriz in 878/1473 because he was a renowned 85  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 4:352; Hiravī, Jāmī, 288. 86  Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 4:542–58. 87  Ibid., 1:279, 306, 4:15, 36, 54, 62, 67, 80, 349–50, 385–88, 497–98, 502–3. 88  Ibid., 4:396, 548, 89  Ibid., 4:15–18, 363–74, 374–85. Molé, “Les Kubrawiya entre Sunnisme et Shiisme,” 110–21, and Jamal Elias, “The second ʿAlī: the making of Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī in popular imagination,” Muslim World 90/3–4 (2000): 395–419 are both quite clear that Hamadānī was a Sunni with strong Shiʿi tendencies albeit perhaps because he was himself an ʿAlid. 90  Ibid., 4:391, citing Munsha‌ʾāt-i Maybudī, ed. Nuṣratullāh Farūhar (Tehran: Intishārāt-i nuqṭa, 1376 Sh/1997), 82. On Kāshifī as a Nūrbakhshī, see the discussion in Babak Rahimi, Theatre State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies in Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 273ff.

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teacher of the Fuṣūṣ, and spent time at his khānaqāh in Darvīshābād.91 Later, when he was writing his own commentary on the Fuṣūṣ, he had hoped to show it to Aḥmad Lālāʾī for his approval, but never did (or perhaps never had the opportunity). It could be that he did not necessarily recognize Lālāʾī as Shiʿi; the Safavid chronicler Ibn al-Karbalāʾī (d. 997/1589) notes the ecumenical nature of his khānaqāh and the presence of a number of Sunni Naqshbandīs passing through it.92 At the same time, Jāmī’s rather prickly and anti-social personality is mentioned in the sources and may account for some of the polemics both in Herat and in Iraq.93 While it is difficult to see Jāmī as a reconciler of Shiʿa and Sunni in the period, one can also perhaps exaggerate his anti-Shiʿism (for which there is plenty of evidence, some of which I have presented here) outside of a political context. It is important to be wary of projecting the concerns of the present on the early modern period—and this applies as much to the Safavid-Ottoman period as to the Timurid one before then. But it is also highly problematic to argue that there were not important notions of Sunni and Shiʿi identity that were distinct at elite and scholarly levels before 1500. Jāmī is a good case of an unapologetic and triumphalist Sunni identity affirming the legitimacy of the Timurid polity, not least by delegitimizing rival claims that came from a Shiʿi or Shiʿi-messianic perspective through acts of appropriating for the Sunni imperial traditions the very figures and symbols that defined Shiʿi identity: the Imams. Bibliography Abū-l-Muḥsin Muḥammad Bāqir bin Muḥammad ʿAlī. Tārīkh-i gharība. MS India Office Islamic (British Library) 1426. Afṣaḥzād, Aʿlākhān. Naqd va barrasī-yi āthār va aḥvāl-i Jāmī. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999. 91  Najīb Māyil Hiravī, “Jāmī va mashāyikh-i Shīʿī,” Nāma-yi Nigāristān 2/5 (spring 1375 Sh/1996): 65–70; idem, Jāmī, 271–72; Ibn al-Karbalāʾī, Rawḍāt al-jinān wa-jannāt al-jinān, ed. J. Sulṭān al-Qurrāʾī (Tehran: Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1349 Sh/1970), II, 110, 151. Lālāʾī was a disciple of Sayyid ʿAbd Allāh Barzishābādī (d. 872/1468) who had contested the Kubravī mantle of Khwāja Isḥāq Kuttalānī with the messianic Sayyid Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh (d. 869/1464) and had signaled the Dhahabi Shiʿi turn in the Kubravī lineage—see Bashir, Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions, 47–55. 92  Ibn al-Karbalāʾī, Rawḍāt al-jinān va jannāt al-janān, I, 151, as cited in Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran, 97. 93  Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, 52–54; Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt, 238; see Ökten, “Jāmī (818–898/1414– 1492),” 69; Algar, Jami, 109–17.

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Norman Itzkowitz, edited by Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir, 51–62. Madison: Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, 2007. Golsorkhi, Shohreh. “Ismail II and Mirza Makhdum Sharifi: An interlude in Safavid history.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1994): 477–88. Griffel, Frank. Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Gulshanī, Muḥyī. Menākib-i Ibrāhīm-i Gülşenī. Edited by Tahsin Yazıcı. Ankara: Turk Tarih kurumu Basımevi, 1982. Hāshimī, Ṭālib. Tadhkira-yi Mawlānā Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī. Lahore: al-Qamar, 1995. Ḥikmat, ʿAlī-Aṣghar Jāmī. Tehran: Bank-i Millī, 1320 Sh/1941. Hiravī, Najīb Māyil. Jāmī. Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i naw, 1377 Sh/1998. Hiravī, Najīb Māyil. “Jāmī va mashāyikh-i Shīʿī.” Nāma-yi Nigāristān 2/5 (spring 1375 Sh/1996): 65–70. Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974. Ḥusaynī-yi ʿĀmilī. Sayyid Muḥammad Shafīʿ. Maḥāfil al-muʾminīn fī dhayl Majālis almuʾminīn. Edited by Ibrāhīm ʿArabpūr and Manṣūr Jaghaṭāyī. Mashhad: Bunyād-i pazhūhish-hā-yi islāmī, Āstān-i quds-i raḍavī, 1383 Sh/2004. Ibn al-Karbalāʾī. Rawḍāt al-jinān wa-jannāt al-jinān. Edited by J. Sulṭān al-Qurrāʾī. Tehran: Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1349 Sh/1970. Isfizārī, Muʿīn al-Dīn Muḥammad. Rawḍāt al-jannāt fī awṣāf madīnat Harāt. Edited by Sayyid Muḥammad Kāẓim Imām. Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1959. Iskandar Bēg Munshī. ʿĀlam-ārā-yi ʿAbbāsī. Edited by Īraj Afshār. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1350 Sh/1971. Jacobs, Adam. “Sunnî and Shîʿî Perceptions, Boundaries, and Affiliations in Late Timurid and Early Ṣafawid Persia: An Examination of Historical and Quasi-historical Narratives.” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1999. Jackson, Sherman. Tolerance in Islam: Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Fayṣal al-tafriqa. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jaʿfarīyān, Rasūl. Tārīkh-i tashayyuʿ dar Īrān. Qum: Anṣārīyān, 1387 Sh/2008. Jaʿfarīyān, Rasūl. Siyāsat va farhang-i rūzgār-i ṣafavī. Tehran: Nashr-i ʿilm, 1388 Sh/2009. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīqa-yi khwājagān. Edited by ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī. Kabul: Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343 Sh/1964. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. al-Durra al-fākhira. Edited by Nicholas Heer. Tehran: McGill Institute of Islamic Studies, 1986. Translated by Nicholas Heer as The Precious Pearl. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Nafaḥāt al-uns. Edited by Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i iṭṭilāʿāt, 1375 Sh/1996. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Haft awrang. Edited by Jābalqā-dād ʿAlī-Shāh et al. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999.

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Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Dīvān. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afṣahzād. 2 vols. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Nāma-hā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī. Edited by ʿIṣām al-Dīn Ūrūnbāyif and Asrār Raḥmānof. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378 Sh/1999. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Shawāhid al-nubūwa. Edited by Ḥasan Amīn. Tehran: Mīr Kasrā, 1379 Sh/2000. Also ed. Istanbul: Hakikat kitabevi, 1995. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad-Jān ʿUmarof and Abū Bakr Ẓahūr al-Dīn. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1379 Sh/2000. al-Khānī, ʿAbd al-Majīd Muḥammad. al-Ḥadāʾiq al-wardīya fī ḥaqāʾiq ajillāʾ alnaqshbandīya. Irbil: Dār Ārās, 2002. Lārī, ʿAbd al-Ghafūr. Tārīkhcha-yi Mazār-i Sharīf. Edited by N. Māyil Hiravī. Kabul: Anjuman-i tārīkh u adab, 1350 Sh/1971. Le Gall, Dina. A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. Lingwood, Chad. Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salamān va Absāl. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Losensky, Paul. Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the SafavidMughal Ghazal. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998. Losensky, Paul. “Shahīdī Qummī: Poet laureate of the Āqqoyunlū court.” In History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, 282–301. Edited by Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh Quinn. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006. Maḥjūb, Muḥammad Jaʿfar. “Az faḍāʾil va manāqib-khwānī tā rawḍa-khwānī.” Īrānnāmeh 2/3 (1984): 402–31. Masad, Mohammad. “The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition: Divination, Prophecy, and the End of Time in the 13th Century Eastern Mediterranean.” PhD diss., Washington University, 2008. Maybudī, Mīr Ḥusayn. Sharḥ-i dīvān mansūb ba Amīr al-muʾminīn. Edited by Ḥasan Raḥmātī and Sayyid Ibrāhīm Ashk-shirīn. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1379 Sh/2000. McChesney, Robert. Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. McChesney, Robert. “Barrier of heterodoxy? Rethinking ties between Iran and Central Asia in the Seventeenth century.” In Safavid Iran. Edited by Charles Melville, 231–67. London: Tauris, 1996. Melvin-Koushki, Matt. “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2012. Mitchell, Colin. The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion, and Rhetoric. London: Tauris, 2012.

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Vālih-i Iṣfahānī, Muḥammad Yūsuf. Khuld-i barīn. Edited Mīr Hāshim Muḥaddis. Tehran: Bunyād-i mawqūfāt-i duktūr Maḥmūd Afshār Yazdī, 1372 Sh/1993. Vāṣifī, Zayn al-Din. Badāyiʾ al-vaqāyiʿ. Edited Alexandar Boldryev. Tehran: Intishārāt-i bunyād-i farhang-i Īrān, 1349 Sh/1970. Weismann, Itzchak. The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition. London: Routledge, 2007. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Yazdī, ʿAlī. “Nāgufta-hā-yi az Māṣāʾib al-nawāṣib.” Kitāb-i māh: dīn 114–26 (farvardīn 1386 Sh/2007): 50–55. Zarrīnkūb, ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn. Bā-kārvān-i Ḥilla. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Āryā, 1343/1964.

chapter 8

Trading Pearls for Beads

Jāmī’s Qaṣīdas in Praise of Sulṭān Yaʿqūb and Their Significance to Āq Quyūnlū History Chad G. Lingwood The medieval Persian panegyric qaṣīda, or mono-rhyme praise poem— especially the post-Mongol variety—is a relatively understudied genre in comparison to the medieval Persian ghazal and mathnavī.1 Indicative of this dearth of scholarship is the fact that modern specialists of classical Persian poetry have largely ignored the nearly seventy qaṣīdas attributed to Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), favoring instead his compendium of long mathnavīs, known collectively as Haft awrang.2 As a consequence, there have been no definitive attempts to situate Jāmī’s qaṣīdas within the larger tradition of Persian panegyric poetry; nor has any effort been made to determine the extent to which Jāmī’s qaṣīdas—especially those he addressed to Muslim rulers—can be considered historical writings. In other words, notwithstanding his well-known autobiographical qaṣīda, entitled Rashḥ-i bāl bi-sharḥ-i ḥāl, little work has been done to better understand the degree to which Jāmī’s qaṣīdas can inform us about the poet, his patrons, and his times.3 With this lacuna in mind, the present essay, though limited specifically to two qaṣīdas that Jāmī addressed to Abū al-Muẓaffar Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan, or Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (d. 896/1491), leader of the Āq Quyūnlū confederation of 1  A notable exception, which also addresses the tendency of modern scholarship to dismiss the Persian qaṣīda, especially its panegyric variety, as insincere and historically insignificant, is Michael Glünz, “Poetic Tradition and Social Change: The Persian Qasida in Post-Mongol Iran,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa. Vol. 1, Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (Leiden, New York: E.J. Brill, 1996), 183‒203. 2  Further illustrating the absence of scholarship on Jāmī’s qaṣīdas is the fact that Naqd va bar rasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī, the most comprehensive modern study of Jāmī and his works, contains relatively little information on Jāmī’s qaṣīdas; instead, the bulk of the volume examines Jāmī’s ghazals and his iteration of Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. See, Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar rasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1999), 206‒7. 3  For a very brief exception to this lacuna, one directly relevant to Jāmī and Yaʿqūb, see Najīb Māyil Haravī, Jāmī (Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1377/1998), 78‒79. See also, Charles Frank Vittor Jr., The Herat School: Persian Poetry in the Timurid Period (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 771‒80.

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Türkmen tribes, suggests that Jāmī’s panegyrics are not historically insignificant. Indeed, it would appear that beneath their encomiastic veneer, the two qaṣīdas (henceforth referred to as Q1 and Q2)4 that Jāmī addressed to Yaʿqūb affirm the ruler’s image—including Yaʿqūb’s reputation as an inebriate—as it is presented in the contemporary Persian sources, while also affirming the curious influence of two of his courtiers, Qāḍī Ṣafī al-Dīn ʿĪsā Sāvajī (d. 896/1491) and Shaykh Najm al-Dīn Masʿūd Sāvajī (d. ca. 898/1493), on not just Āq Quyūnlū policies, but Yaʿqūb’s morality too. Also discernable is Jāmī’s use of terminology significant to Sufis—Naqshbandīs in particular—which affirms Jāmī’s propensity to suffuse his poetry with Sufi themes, but which also suggests an effort to acquaint his audience with aspects of (Naqshbandī) Sufism.5 1

Literary and Personal Connections between Jāmī and the Āq Quyūnlū

The association of Jāmī, the preeminent Naqshbandī man-of-letters in Timurid Herat, with Āq Quyūnlū rulers, who, when not on campaign, presided over their dominion from Tabriz, predates (by over one decade) his composition of qaṣīdas to Yaʿqūb. In fact, Jāmī composed at least one letter of correspondence to Yaʿqūb’s father, Ūzūn Ḥasan (d. 882/1478), a self-ascribed sulṭān, during whose twenty-one year reign (861–82/1457–78) the Āq Quyūnlū confederate empire reached its zenith, claiming sovereignty over most of the terrain between the Euphrates and Khorasan.6 More significantly, when, in 878/1473, Jāmī traversed this region after visiting Mecca and performing the Hajj pilgrimage, Ūzūn Ḥasan feted the poet, even inviting Jāmī to establish his residence in Tabriz.7 Though he declined the invitation, Jāmī rekindled his ties to the Āq Quyūnlū court after Yaʿqūb—having defeated his half-brother and heirdesignate, Sulṭān Khalīl (d. 883/1478)—acceded to the throne (883/1478) and, in 886/1481, assumed total control of the empire. For example, according to 4  The two qaṣīdas are translated into English in Appendix A and B. 5  On the prevalence of Sufi themes and terminology significant to Naqshbandīs in Salāmān va Absāl, a didactic mathnavī that Jāmī addressed to Yaʿqūb, see Chad G. Lingwood, “ ‘The qebla of Jāmi is None Other than Tabriz’: ʿAbd al-Rahmān Jāmi and Naqshbandi Sufism at the Aq Qoyunlu Royal Court,” Journal of Persianate Studies 4, no. 2 (2011): 239‒41. 6  ʿAsam al-Din Urunbaev and Asrar Rahmanov, eds., Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999), 239‒40 (letter no. 385). See also ʿAlī Aṣghar Ḥikmat, Jāmī: Mutaḍammin-i taḥqīqāt dar tārīkh-i aḥvāl va āthār-i manẓūm va nushūr-i khātim al-shuʿarā (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Bānk-i Millī-yi Īrān, 1321/1942), 36‒37. 7  [Fakhr al-Dīn] ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn [Vāʿiẓ] Kāshifī Ṣafī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīniyān, 2 vols. (Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūriyānī, 1356/1977), 1:263.

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his Dīvān, Jāmī addressed four qaṣīdas to Yaʿqūb in addition to Q1 and Q2.8 More auspiciously, between 893/1488 and 895/1490 Jāmī composed Salāmān va Absāl, an allegorical and didactic mathnavī, the narrative of which concerns spiritual purification, and dedicated it to Yaʿqūb in order to commemorate his public repentance from wine-drinking. Another instance of linkages between Jāmī and Yaʿqūb, and indeed other Āq Quyūnlū notables, namely Qāḍī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn, is evinced in Jāmī’s letters of personal correspondence. One of the epistles—Jāmī’s reply to an earlier letter from Yaʿqūb—is especially significant, for it suggests that the rapport between Jāmī and Yaʿqūb was akin to the bond between a Sufi spiritual master and his disciple.9 That Yaʿqūb continually sought Jāmī’s spiritual guidance, poetry, and especially his blessings (barakāt), is apparent in the official chronicle of Yaʿqūb’s reign, Tārīkh-i ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī (completed before 898/1493), which, in a notice for the year 892/1487, refers to Jāmī’s qaṣīdas praising Yaʿqūb, and which states that the ruler, anxious to solicit Jāmī’s himmat (spiritual energy), sent the poet 10,000 shāhrukhī coins in order to secure his prayers (duʿāʾ).10 Lastly, in addition to these direct connections between Jāmī and the Āq Quyūnlū—especially Yaʿqūb—it is important to note indirect linkages, such as Jāmī’s nephew, ʿAbd Allāh Ḥātifī (d. 927/1520), himself an accomplished versifier and Sufi, who composed poetry at Yaʿqūb’s court from 890–95/1485–90. Another indirect connection is Shahīdī Qumī (d. 935/1528– 29), who, prior to becoming Yaʿqūb’s poet laureate (malik al-shuʿarā), and thus a potentially influential figure at court, visited Herat where Jāmī, contrary to his customary aversion to accepting Sufi disciples, initiated Shahīdī into the Naqshbandī order.11 Considered together, these linkages between Jāmī and the Āq Quyūnlū indicate that beyond (merely) praising the ruler, Jāmī’s qaṣīdas betray a certain familiarity with Yaʿqūb—particularly his licentiousness and subsequent repentance—and that as such, Q1 and Q2 are historically (and politically) significant, as they affirm impressions of Yaʿqūb and his courtiers, 8   See Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999), 1:119‒23, 2:57‒58, 2:441‒44, 2:451‒53. 9   Urunbaev and Rahmanov, eds., Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, 281. See also Lingwood, “‘The qebla of Jāmi is None Other than Tabriz,’” 241‒42. 10  Faḍlallāh b. Rūzbihān Khunjī-Iṣfahānī, Tārīkh-i ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī, Persian Text Edited by John E. Woods, with the Abridged English Translation by Vladimir Minorsky, Persia in A.D. 1478–1490 [= Turkmenica, 12], ed. John E. Woods (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1992), 324–25. 11  For Shahīdī Qumī, see Paul E. Losensky, “Shahīdī Qumī: Poet Laureate at the Aqquyūnlū Court,” in History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, ed. Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh A. Quinn, in collaboration with Ernest Tucker (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 282‒300.

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Qāḍī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn, that are contained in other, traditional sources for Āq Quyūnlu history; at the same time, however, because of Jāmī’s rapport with Yaʿqūb, Q1 and Q2 deepen these impressions, especially as they attest to Jāmī’s interest in refining Yaʿqūb’s morality and, it would appear, the nature of his rule. 2

Literary Connections between Jāmī and other Muslim Rulers

Before analyzing Q1 and Q2, it is important to note that Yaʿqūb was not the only Muslim leader to whom Jāmī addressed panegyric qaṣīdas; he composed qaṣīdas in the name of the Timurid ruler, Sulṭān-Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (d. 911/1506), the Ottoman Sultan, Selīm I (d. 926/1520), and the Naqshbandī shaykh, Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490).12 That Jāmī addressed panegyric qaṣīdas to Muslim rulers is not at all surprising given the (many) mathnavīs and works of prose and prosopography that he addressed to royal patrons, including: al-Durra al-fākhira (for the Ottoman Sultan, Meḥmed II [d. 886/1481]); Khiradnāmayi Iskandarī (for Sulṭān-Ḥusayn Bāyqarā); Laylī va Majnūn (for Sulṭān-Ḥusayn Bāyqarā); Lavāʾiḥ (for the Qarā Quyūnlū ruler, Jahānshāh [d. 872/1467]); Salāmān va Absāl (for Yaʿqūb); (the third daftar of) Silsilat al-dhahab (for the Ottoman Sultan, Bāyezīd II [918/1512]); and Subḥat al-abrār (for SulṭānḤusayn Bāyqarā). Furthermore, when such works are considered alongside the letters of correspondence that he exchanged with these (and other) rulers, it would appear that Jāmī—in accordance with the hallmark activism of his Naqshbandī brethren, especially Khwāja Ạhrār—sought to enlighten Muslim rulers, first, as a safeguard against tyranny, and second, to convince them of the personal benefits of asceticism.13 The extent to which Q1 and Q2 reflect these concerns, and the implications of such reflections on Āq Quyūnlū historiography, especially in terms of Yaʿqūb and his reign, will now be discussed.

12  See Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 1:97‒118, 2:58‒59, 2:64‒69, 2:454‒61, 2:444‒51. 13  For the origins of Khwājagānī (later Naqshbandī) political activism, especially as it was practiced by Khwāja Aḥrār, see Jürgen Paul, “The Khwājagān at Herat during Shāhrukh’s Reign,” in Horizons of the World: Festschrift for İsenbike Togan, ed. İlker Evrim Binbaş and Nurten Kılıç-Schubel (Istanbul: İthaki, 2011), 217‒50.

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Analysis of Qaṣīda 1 (Q1)

To begin, the main theme of Q1, especially as it is evinced in the exordium (nasīb), is repentance for the commission of sin(s). The theme of repentance— a favorite topic of Sufi writers—is nevertheless significant here; for although the exact date of composition of Q1 is unknown—the qaṣīda, according to critical editions of Jāmī’s Dīvān, is contained in the third (or final) section of the Dīvān, entitled Khātimat al-ḥayāt, which was compiled between 895– 97/1490–92, and is thus among the very last qaṣīdas that Jāmī composed—its contents indicate that Jāmī addressed Q1 to Yaʿqūb with full knowledge of the latter’s public repentance for wine-drinking in 893/1488.14 Jāmī, it would therefore appear, composed Q1 in commemoration of the event. In this respect, Q1 is similar to Salāmān va Absāl, in that the primary concern of both poems is repentance, specifically Yaʿqūb’s; but whereas in Salāmān va Absāl, the heroprince, Salāmān, is an allegorical representation of Yaʿqūb, in Q1, especially its nasīb (lines 1–39), it is Jāmī—by way of the narrative of his own repentance at the hands of a (Sufi) saint—who stands as the figure through whom Yaʿqūb was to recognize the benefits of his repentance.15 What is more, in addition to casting himself as the needful penitent, and thus alluding to the necessity of his patron Yaʿqūb’s repentance, Jāmī indirectly assumes the role of the (Sufi) saint in the nasīb (lines 6–31). In other words, after the identification of Yaʿqūb with Jāmī (qua penitent) is made, the (Sufi) saint comes to stand for Jāmī qua Naqshbandī, whose qaṣīda—much like the saint’s admonitions it contains— communicates to Yaʿqūb the salvific function of repentance.16 The clearest indication that the nasīb in Q1, in addition to its narrative, the overt imagery of which depicts Resurrection (yawm al-qiyāma), addresses Yaʿqūb’s wine-drinking and repentance is the (Sufi) saint’s admonition, within which Jāmī—again, taken here as an indirect reference to Yaʿqūb—is admonished for being “drunk” and “witless.”17 In a more specific sense, the admonition, especially lines 10–16, is relevant to earthly rulers, and is therefore directed at Yaʿqūb, whose carnality, it is implied in Q1, weakens traditional religion (Islam), which Jāmī personifies as those who proclaim the shahāda and finger prayer beads.18 This part of the nasīb thus calls to mind the medieval 14  For a description of the ceremony at which Yaʿqūb repented, see Khunjī-Iṣfahānī, ʿĀlamārā-yi amīnī, 332–35. 15  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:435. 16  On the frequency with which Jāmī relates counsel imparted to him by Sufi saints, who often take the form of angels in his qaṣīdas, see Vittor, The Herat School, 772. 17  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:435‒38. In Persian: mast u bīkhabar. 18  See n. 55 below.

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Perso-Islamic literature on statecraft, or so-called “mirrors for princes,” areas of which emphasize the pivotal role of the Muslim ruler in upholding orthodox Islam, usually through his vigorous application of religious law (sharīʿa).19 Less oblique is line 17, in which the (Sufi) saint, after describing the outcome of lust—the metaphorical subtext of which is unmistakably erotic—warns Jāmī (i.e., Yaʿqūb): “Do not be an addict, who unceasingly consumes wine!”20 Far from its typical, metaphorical meaning, including its use by Sufi poets as a symbol of the material world and its earthly beloveds, the wine referred to here (line 17) is literally, “[that] disgusting grape concoction.”21 Jāmī’s emphasis on the wicked effects of temporal wine is thus another, less subtle indication that Q1—though meaningful in a mystical sense as a pronouncement of asceticism—is (ultimately) concerned with Yaʿqūb and his wine-drinking. Before turning to the encomium, or madḥ (also madīḥ), it is important to note that the rhyming element (qāfiya) of Q1—“ūr”—itself reinforces the poem’s overall theme of wine and repentance from wine-drinking.22 In its Arabic format, “ūr” is the plural of “uwār,” which, in addition to “blaze” or “heat,” means “thirst.” In this regard, the qāfiya in Q1, especially in the nasīb, reminds its audience, which is to say Yaʿqūb, of the evils of earthly desires, especially wine. In addition to repenting, Yaʿqūb must replace such yearnings, or “thirsts,” with aims of becoming the perfect Muslim ruler—a description of which Jāmī presents to Yaʿqūb in the madḥ. In a series of studies on pre-Mongol Persian panegyric poetry, Jerome Clinton and Julie Scott Meisami questioned earlier scholarship on the Persian qaṣīda—the tendency of which was to regard the madḥ, that is, the section of a panegyric qaṣīda in which poets praise their patrons, as (mere) rhetorical procedures concerned (only) with flattery—by arguing that the encomium is a critical element of the qaṣīda’s overall significance.23 As Clinton and Meisami 19  The salience of Islamic law, or sharīʿa, to Muslim kingship—as it is evinced in PersoIslamic mirrors for princes—is reflected in circular formulations of the ideal medieval Islamic state, several of which present sharīʿa as a prerequisite of just rule. For an example that is relevant to the Āq Quyūnlū, as it was addressed to Ūzūn Ḥasan and Sulṭān Khalīl, see Jalāl al-Dīn [Muḥammad b. Asʿad] Davānī, Akhlāq-i Jalālī, ed. ʿAbdallāh Masʿūdī Ārānī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1391/2012), 301. 20  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:436. In Persian: bi sharb-i bāda chi chaspīda‌ʾī mudām mashū! 21  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:436. In Persian: shalāyīn shīra-yi angūr! 22  Like most of Jāmī’s qaṣīdas, neither Q1 nor Q2 have a radīf (refrain). 23  See Jerome W. Clinton, “Myth and History,” (paper delivered at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Seattle, Washington, November 1981) cited in Julie Scott Meisami, “Ghaznavid Panegyrics: Some Political Implications,” Iran 28 (1990): 32; and Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 24‒27.

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have shown, the madḥ, which, on the face of it, presents the ruler’s nature, attributes, and deeds as faultless and thus perfect, is more a presentation of the ideal of Muslim kingship than a fulsome, inaccurate depiction of the reigning monarch.24 By implication, then, the madḥ provides its royal addressee with a model to emulate. Though composed centuries later than the poetry examined by Clinton and Meisami, the madḥ in both Q1 and Q2 fits this pattern. In other words, Jāmī’s verses in praise of Yaʿqūb present certain elements of the archetypal Muslim ruler, which is to say, God’s vicegerent (khalīfa) or shadow on earth, against which Yaʿqūb was to be measured, either by himself, his courtiers, or by history itself. It is here, then, in the madḥ, that Persian panegyric qaṣīdas—including Q1 and Q2—most resemble Perso-Islamic treatises on kingship, or mirrors-forprinces, a primary function of which was to guide the ruler to the realization of perfect Muslim sovereignty.25 Indeed, Q1 contains several didactic elements rooted in Perso-Islamic, and even Sufi conceptions of kingship. For example, after the transition (gurīzgāh) from nasīb to madḥ, in which Jāmī alludes to Yaʿqūb by way of the ruler’s kunya or sobriquet, Muẓaffar (the Victorious), specifically one line after invoking Yaʿqūb by way of his ism, or proper name, and his nasab, or patronym, Jāmī likens his patron to the Sasanian emperor Khusraw Anūshīrvān (d. 579), who, on account of his just rule, was regarded as a model of kingship in Iran.26 Two lines later, in a literal reference to the planet Mars (bahrām) and to the grave (gūr), Jāmī alludes to Bahrām Gūr (d. 439), a Sasanian king whose prowess at hunting and turn toward asceticism was immortalized in Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma, and in so doing reinforces a motif in Q1—Jāmī’s implicit advice to Yaʿqūb that he adopt ascetic practices. Alternating between admonishment and praise, the next line—though ostensibly a claim by Jāmī that (the many) songs praising Yaʿqūb, like David’s voice in the pronouncement of psalms, are sweet to the ear—is significant in the context of Yaʿqūb and Muslim kingship. David (or Dāʿūd), it is important to note, is not just the biblical king-cum-Muslim prophet and archetypal ruler—hence 24  An observation (first) noted for the Arabic tradition of panegyric qaṣīdas by Stefan Sperl, “Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century,” Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977): 34. 25  On the similarities between Perso-Islamic mirrors for princes and Persian panegyric qaṣīdas, see Julie Scott Meisami, “Medieval Persian Panegyric: Ethical Values and Rhetorical Strategies,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context. Proceedings of the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, the Netherlands, 9–16 August, 1986, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), 442. 26  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:437.

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his Quranic appellation, khalīfat fī-l-arḍ (vicegerent [of God] on earth)— he is also primarily remembered in the Quran for his act of repentance.27 Jāmī’s reference to David, especially here in the madḥ, thus not only reminds his patron, Yaʿqūb, of an important model of kingship, it reinforces (to him)—albeit indirectly—the poem’s theme, repentance, by further associating it with perfect Muslim rule. Though not related to repentance, a curious allusion that is historically significant occurs two lines later, in which Jāmī invokes character names from Khusraw va Shīrīn, a classical Persian romance, the greatest rendition of which is the mathnavī composed by Niẓāmī (d. 605/1209). “The bride of kingship” (ʿarūs-i mulk), Jāmī states, is comparable to Shīrīn, the heroine of Niẓāmī’s tale, who, among other exploits, rejected her lover, king Khusraw Parvīz, partly on account of his drunkenness.28 But just as Shīrīn eventually married Khusraw—a union facilitated by Khusraw’s friend and advisor, Shāpūr—(the bride of) kingship came to Yaʿqūb by way of his own “Shāpūr.” Though he does not identify the advisor by name, Jāmī does nevertheless suggest that Yaʿqūb’s “Shāpūr,” much like Shāpūr in Khusraw va Shīrīn, does not himself covet Shīrīn, meaning (Yaʿqūb’s) kingship. The implication, then, is that the individual most responsible for the establishment and maintenance of Yaʿqūb’s kingship—a figure historical sources indicate was his vazīr and chief magistrate, Qaḍī ʿĪsā— is indeed loyal to the Āq Quyūnlū ruler.29 It is important to note that the allusion to the fealty of the vazīr, that is, Qāḍī ʿĪsā, especially in the madḥ, where in praising his patron a poet can simultaneously present (to the ruler) the ideal, and thus the goal, of perfect Muslim kingship, is a frequent theme in medieval Perso-Islamic works of political advice; its appearance here is thus another indication that Persian qaṣīdas, particularly those with didactic elements, like Q1, have political implications, in that they convey advice, explicitly or implicitly, to the royal patron, in this case Yaʿqūb, on how to perfect his rule.30 An important measure of the perfectly just ruler, according to Perso-Islamic mirrors for princes, especially advice manuals written in the ninth/fifteenth

27  Quran 38:24. 28  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:439. 29  Notwithstanding Qāḍī ʿĪsā’s preoccupation with poetry, which, according to Faḍlallāh b. Rūzbihān Khunjī-Iṣfahānī (d. 927/1524), author of the official chronicle of Yaʿqūb’s reign, caused him to neglect affairs of state. See Khunjī-Iṣfahānī, ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī, 352. 30  For examples, see [Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan Ṭūsī] Khwāja Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk (Siyāsatnāma), ed. Hubert Darke (Tehran: Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1340/1962), 30‒38; and [Abū Ḥāmid] Muḥammad Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ed. Jalāl Humāʾī (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār-i Millī, 1351/1972), 155‒56.

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century, was the extent of his himmat.31 Though typically associated with mere “ambition” and “intention,” himmat, as it is discussed in the advice literature, signifies the ruler’s capacity to effect changes—especially ones beneficial to himself or his subject population—(purely) through the mental power of his own determination or high-mindedness. Leaving aside its theological and philosophical implications, this particular meaning of himmat, and the political significance it entails, appears in the madḥ of Q1. Jāmī states that Yaʿqūb’s himmat, which, he claims, stretches from horizon to horizon, is much sought after, and that “there is nothing to it,” other than (pure and simple) benevolence.32 It is here, in this section of the madḥ, that Jāmī, using stock images and metaphors to describe the mass appeal of Yaʿqūb, makes several allusions, the most notable (and ironic) of which is Jāmī’s indication that the Āq Quyūnlū court or household was blighted by jealousy and discord. The possible existence of palace intrigue, even plots and snares between Yaʿqūb and his younger brother, Yamīn al-Dīn Abū al-ʿIzz Yūṣuf (d. 895/1490), is indicated in other, contemporary Persian sources; but here, Jāmī goes so far as to imply that lives, including perhaps Yaʿqūb’s, were at stake.33 Fittingly, the poem transitions to the duʿāʾ, or invocation, which, in this case, is a prayer for Yaʿqūb, the preamble of which—as well as the duʿāʾ itself—is significant in light of Jāmī’s affiliation with the Naqshbandī order and Sufi conceptions of Muslim kingship. Jāmī justifies the invocation in two ways: first, he states that it is the duty of (Sufi) sages (pīrān) to pray for the young ruler (shāh), as these prayers will benefit the masses of people; second, Jāmī introduces the duʿāʾ with the clarification that, in fact, praising Yaʿqūb is “not to applaud the work of mankind,” since (he claims) humanity, and thus earthly rulers, are invariably guided by avarice and lust.34 It is for this reason, Jāmī adds, (true) affection originates “from the unseen realm [through His] envoys and leaders.”35 The first statement, though an expression of the ancient (and thus not originally Islamic) idea that dynastic fortune is determined by the invocations of priests or holy men, is nevertheless notable: it reflects a doctrine 31  See Ḥusayn [b. ʿAlī] Vāʿiẓ [Kāshifī], Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī, 22nd lithog. ed. (Lucknow: Maṭbaʿayi Tīj Kumār, 1377/1957), 24‒26. 32  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:440. In Persian: bijuz karam nabuvad muqtaḍā-yi himmat-i ū. 33  See Sām Mīrzā Ṣafavī, Tadhkīra-yi tuḥfa-yi Sāmī, ed. Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp va Intishārāt-i Kutūb-i Īrān, 1315/1936), 24; and [Amīr] Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzurgāhī, Majālis al-ʿushshāq: tazkīra-yi ʿurafāʾ, ed. Ghulāmriḍā Ṭabāṭabāʾī Majd (Tehran: Zarrīn, 1375/1996), 323. 34  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:440. In Persian: na dast shughl zadan dar madīḥ-i ū zi-insān, ki hast dastkhūsh-i ḥirṣ u āz-rā dastūr. 35  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:440. In Persian: vufūd ghayb zi āmad shadd-i vadūd u ṣudūr.

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endorsed by some Naqshbandīs, including Jāmī, which maintains that praying for Muslim rulers, or associating with them, begets pious leadership and just societies.36 The second statement, also reflective of ancient beliefs, attests to the necessity of earthly rulers, in this case a sultan, who, Jāmī indicates, is the locus of God’s manifestation, as in the personification of divine Names or attributes like affection and mercy, as well as the instrument through which God regulates His creatures. The connection between God and king—as well as the role of sages, like Jāmī, in sustaining this link—is reinforced, by way of implication, in the final distich of Q1, which serves as the duʿāʾ proper. In his invocation, Jāmī uses derivations of two divine Names, al-ʿAzīz (the Mighty) and al-Jalīl (the Majestic), and prays that the throne of Yaʿqūb become the abode of ʿizz (might) and jalālatī (majesty).37 That said, the good fortune that comes with being “mighty” and “majestic,” and thus the ruler’s realization of these and other Names or divine attributes, is not a given. Rather, Jāmī insinuates that the ruler, in this case Yaʿqūb, must fulfill certain obligations, the most important of which, given the theme of Q1 and its historical context, is to repent from the commission of sin(s). 4

Analysis of Qaṣīda 2 (Q2)

Like Q1, Q2 conveys an overall theme and contains allusions that are historically significant; but whereas the theme of Q1 is repentance, the theme of Q2 is kinship or kinsfolk. This theme, reflected in both the content of Q2, especially its madḥ (lines 21–41), and the qāfiya—“āl” (family, kin)—relates most directly to the Sāvajī statesmen, Qāḍī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn, and their complementary roles in the maintenance of Yaʿqūb’s kingship, but also to the implied rapport between Yaʿqūb and Jāmī. Q2, which, like Q1, indicates that Jāmī was familiar with key personalities at Yaʿqūb’s royal court, is contained in the second

36  See the following studies by Jo-Ann Gross: “Multiple Roles and Perceptions of a Sufi Shaikh: Symbolic Statements of Political and Religious Authority,” in Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman/Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order, Actes de la Table Ronde de Sèvres/Proceedings of the Sèvres Round Table 2–4 mai/2–4 May 1985, ed. Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone eds (Istanbul: Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1990), 109; and “Authority and Miraculous Behavior: Reflections on Karāmāt Stories of Khwāja ‘Ubaydullāh Aḥrār,” in The Heritage of Sufism. Vol. 2, The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150–1500), ed. Leonard Lewisohn (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 163. 37  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:441.

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(or middle) section of the Dīvān, entitled Wāṣitat al-ʿiqd, which was compiled ca. 894/1489—making Q2 an earlier poem than Q1.38 Before discussing the significance of Jāmī’s familiarity with Yaʿqūb and the Sāvajīs, it is important to note that the theme of kinship is most apparent in the nasīb (line 7) where Jāmī, after equating Q2 to a musk-pouch, vanity tray, marriage-bed, and a beautiful bride, alludes to Yaʿqūb and his courtiers— referred to here as “lovers of that lofty heaven (bihisht),” as in the Hasht Bihisht palace-garden in Tabriz—and states that Q2 conveys to them “ties of kinship” (ʿuqūd-i li-āl).39 It is here that Q2 shifts to a discussion of the beloved, whom, Jāmī states, he will describe by way of “similitude” (mithāl), but whose identity—indicated in subsequent lines by references to feasts, the sun, and polo-playing—is that of an earthly ruler. It is tempting, then, to speculate that the beloved/ruler is in fact Yaʿqūb and that the union mentioned here, which, Jāmī states, is achievable through “imagination” (khiyāl), is an allusion to the Naqshbandī technique of taṣavvur, that is, the televisual bond between a master and his disciple, in this case Jāmī and Yaʿqūb, the establishment of which facilitates the transference of mystical knowledge.40 Such allusions, after all, exist in other compositions that Jāmī addressed to Yaʿqūb.41 Their likelihood here, however, is doubtful given the gurīzgāh (lines 19–20), within which Jāmī warns his beloved that should he neglect his lover’s glances, Jāmī will take his complaint to Yaʿqūb, whom Jāmī describes as “the shāh of good qualities—he who gives aid to religion and kingship.”42 It is interesting to note that, in addition to differentiating the beloved from Yaʿqūb, the gurīzgāh communicates a key principle of Perso-Islamic governance (which, as stated above, appears in the nasīb of Q1)—the vital role of the ruler in the promotion of orthodox Islam (dīn) and thus the survival of his dynastic fortune (dawlat), the interdependence of which is encapsulated by a maxim (found in many works on 38  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:53‒57. 39  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:53. In Persian: bi ʿāshiqān-i bihisht-i barīn ʿuqūd-i li-āl. For references to descriptions of the Hasht Bihisht palace-garden, see John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1999), 272n53. 40  For a detailed study of taṣavvur (or taṣavvur-i shaykh), also referred to as rābiṭa (or rābiṭa-yi shaykh) by Naqshbandī writers, see Fritz Meier, Zwei Abhandlungen über die Naqšbandiyya. I. Die Herzensbindung an den Meister. II. Kraftakt und Faustrecht des Heiligen (Istanbul: Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1994), esp. 146‒47. 41  For example, see Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Ẓāhir Aḥrārī, Jābilqā Dād ʿAlīshāh, Aṣghar Jānfidāh, and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Tarbiyat, 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1376–78/1997–98), 1:442. 42  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:55. In Persian: shāh-i nīk-khiṣāl—mughīth dawlat u dīn shahr-yār rū-yi zamīn.

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statecraft) that characterizes religion and kingship as [twin] brothers.43 In other words, the distichs immediately preceding the madḥ, and thus the formal invocation of the ruler’s name, correlate arguably the most capital idea in classical Perso-Islamic political thought with Yaʿqūb. Though encomiastic, the connection, no doubt, also served a didactic end by reminding the Āq Quyūnlū ruler of his chief responsibilities as sultan. Adhering to convention, Jāmī begins the madḥ of Q2 with the invocation of Yaʿqūb, referred to here by his nasab, “son (bin) of Ḥasan,” as in Ūzūn Ḥasan, whom, it is worth repeating, received Jāmī with abundant pomp when the poet, having performed the Hajj pilgrimage, alighted at Tabriz in 878/1473, and with whom Jāmī exchanged letters of correspondence. Also conventional is Jāmī’s praise of Yaʿqūb’s munificence, the value of which, in terms of gold and silver, Jāmī states, is weightier than heaven and earth. Aside from its rhetorical significance, the reference to Yaʿqūb’s generosity may allude to the monetary offering he sent to Jāmī in 892/1487, the total amount of which, according to Tārīkh-i ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī, was 10,000 (shāhrukhī) dīnārs.44 Within the discussion of munificence, amongst a series of distichs crediting Yaʿqūb for the existence of sundry natural phenomena, Jāmī repeats a statement in Q1 alluding to Qāḍī ʿĪsā. After declaring that Yaʿqūb’s fury challenges his authority, Jāmī states that Yaʿqūb’s kingdom is free of counselors (mushīr) and vazīrs possessed of any covetousness.45 Given the association of Shāpūr with Qāḍī ʿĪsā in Q1, the faithful vazīr mentioned by Jāmī in Q2, is, no doubt, Qāḍī ʿĪsa, and the loyal mushīr is none other than Najm al-Dīn. This conclusion is supported four distichs later, in a line that not only affirms the indispensability of the two Sāvajī statesmen to Yaʿqūb’s rule, but that also points to the ruler’s own benightedness and susceptibility to impiety. The distich, in which Jāmī alludes to Qāḍī ʿĪsā by way of Jesus (ʿĪsā), his namesake, and the latter’s vivification of clay birds, and to Najm al-Dīn, by way of the North Star (najm), reads: bi naqṣ-i jahl kujā dil nihad ki kard khudā, bi sīna az dam-i ʿīsāsh nafkh-i ʿilm u kamāl?

43  The maxim, which is attributed to the Sasanian king Ardashīr (d. 241), appears in the following: Naṣīḥat al-muluk, Siyar al-mulūk (Siyāsat-nāma), Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, and Akhlāq-i Jalālī. See Chad G. Lingwood, “Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl: Political Statements and Mystical Advice Addressed to the Āq Quyūnlū Court of Sulṭān Ya‘qūb (d. 896/1490),” Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 182n33. 44  Khunjī-Iṣfahānī, ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī, 251. 45  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:55.

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chigūna rāh-i ḍalālat ravad ki īzad azū bi nūr-i najm-i hadī kard rajm dīv-i ḍalāl? How could sheer ignorance take root in [Yaʿqūb’s] heart, since God filled His breast with inspirations of knowledge and perfection through the breath of ʿĪsā? How could [Yaʿqūb] tread the path of sin, since God, through [ʿĪsā], Stoned the demon of going astray with the light of the North Star?46 In other words, it is on account of Qāḍī ʿĪsā, who, in his capacity as vazīr, advises Yaʿqūb in matters of statecraft, especially within the framework of PersoIslamic traditions of kingship, that Yaʿqūb is ever mindful of his responsibilities as Āq Quyūnlū sultan. In the same way, Yaʿqūb’s muqarrab (intimate), Najm al-Dīn, a figure associated with Sufism, dissuades the ruler from indulging his carnal urges in his role as Yaʿqūb’s confidant.47 It is at this point (line 35) in Q2 that Jāmī begins to address Yaʿqūb directly. In the process, Jāmī acknowledges the reception of Yaʿqūb’s epistolary correspondence (murāsala‌ʾī)—a letter of such beauty and elegance, Jāmī hyperbolizes, that compared to Yaʿqūb’s “string of pearls” (ʿiqd-i guhar), his Q2 is nothing but “mere beads” (muhrihhā-yi safāl).48 The letter, later (line 37) referred to by Jāmī as a reply ( javāb), suggests that he and Yaʿqūb carried on a written dialogue. This suggestion finds support in an edited collection of Jāmī’s letters, the contents of which include four missives addressed to him by Yaʿqūb (as well as one from Jāmī to Yaʿqūb).49 This portion of Q2, aside from its conventions, such as Jāmī’s (feigned) concern that Yaʿqūb will reject his poem, thus adds a layer of context to their literary exchanges. What follows is the duʿāʾ (lines 42–44), the final distich of which, in addition to requesting that divine Decree always be in Yaʿqūb’s favor, contains Quranic phrases, the scriptural context of which is significant in terms of Muslim kingship, and thus Yaʿqūb. In this connection, the first hemistich states: “[May] divine Decree assist you at sunset and at sunrise” (qaḍā muʿāvin-i tū bi-l-ʿashiyī wa-l-ʿishrāq).50 The Arabic phrase, bi-l-ʿashiyī wa-l-ʿishrāqī, appears in 38:18 46  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:56. 47  On the tendency of the sources to associate Najm al-Dīn with Sufism, see Chad G. Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 125. 48  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:56. 49  Urunbaev and Rahmanov, eds., Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, 281 (letter no. 422) and 302‒7 (letters no. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18). 50  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:57.

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and relates to the Commandment that believers remember David—the archetypal (Muslim) ruler, or khalīfat Allāh, whom, it bears repeating, especially as it pertains to Yaʿqūb, repented for his sins. The second hemistich ends with the Arabic phrase, bi-l-ghuduwwī wa-l-aṣāl, which, among other instances in the Quran, appears in 13:15, the broader context of which is the Quranic belief that all created beings submit to God, “as do their shadows” (wa ẓilāluhum)—taken here to imply temporal rulers, who, according to medieval Perso-Islamic conceptions of kingship, exist as God’s shadow on earth (ẓill Allāh fī-l-arḍ).51 Q2, then, much like Q1, was intended to flatter, but also edify its royal patron, Yaʿqūb. Significantly, this edification, portions of which resemble Perso-Islamic mirrors for princes, was presented to Yaʿqūb within the framework of kinship—literally, in the form of the Sāvajīs, whose influences Yaʿqūb is told to accept, and figuratively, in the form of Jāmī, whose familiarity with Yaʿqūb enabled him to address a qaṣīda highly relevant to Yaʿqūb and his moral wellbeing. 5 Conclusion The present study, though narrow in scope, as it is focused on just two of Jāmī’s qaṣīdas, does nevertheless lead us to several conclusions about Jāmī, his patron, Yaʿqūb, and a pair of Yaʿqub’s closest advisors. In large part, these conclusions are based on our determination that the two qaṣīdas examined here, Q1 and Q2, when situated within their historical context, yield information that is useful to historians of Iran and scholars of classical Persian literature, especially those interested in Jāmī’s literary interactions with rulers. Stated more specifically, Q1 and Q2 are indicative of Jāmī’s abiding interest in proffering moral and spiritual advice to Muslim rulers other than just the Timurids— in this case the Āq Quyūnlū sultan, Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan. What is more, the contents of Q1 and Q2 imply that Jāmī was well aware of the Sāvajī statesmen, Qāḍī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn, and their complementary roles in refining Yaʿqūb’s character and prolonging his reign.52 These conclusions hold even more significance if we consider that medieval Persian qaṣīdas, especially panegyric ones, were traditionally recited on ceremonial occasions in the presence of the royal court.53 It is therefore likely that 51  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:57. 52  This familiarity is also evinced the personal letters that Jāmī exchanged with Qāḍī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn. See Urunbaev and Rahmanov, eds., Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī, 286‒87 (letters no. 426, 427, 428) and 311‒12 (letters no. 22 and 23). 53  Meisami, “Medieval Persian Panegyric,” 442.

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Q1—with its theme of repentance—was recited to an assembly of Āq Quyūnlū notables, as it offered them the opportunity to commemorate Yaʿqūb’s renunciation of wine. Even more likely is the ceremonial recitation of Q2, which, on account of its theme of kinship (and loyalty), functioned to reaffirm the legitimacy of Yaʿqūb’s rule and the indispensability of the Sāvajīs to those present. In a more general sense, and by way of concluding the present essay, the recitation at court of Q1 and Q2 enabled Yaʿqūb to burnish his reputation as a cultured sultan and patron of Persian belles-lettres. After all, Jāmī was the greatest Persian poet of his generation, and the qaṣīdas he addressed to Yaʿqūb, in addition to praising the Āq Quyūnlū ruler, clearly demonstrate that Jāmī— though far away in Timurid Herat—took an interest in Yaʿqūb’s ability to govern and the nature of his character. Bibliography Afṣaḥzād, Aʿlākhān. Naqd va bar rasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī. Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī, no. 17. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999. Davānī, Jalāl al-Dīn [Muḥammad b. Asʿad]. Akhlāq-i Jalālī. Edited by ʿAbdallāh Masʿūdī Ārānī. Muʾassasa-yi Iṭṭilāʿāt. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1391/2012. Gāzurgāhī, [Amīr] Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn. Majālis al-ʿushshāq: tazkīra-yi ʿurafāʾ. Edited by Ghulāmriḍā Ṭabāṭabāʾī Majd. Tehran: Zarrīn, 1375/1996. Ghazālī, [Abū Ḥāmid] Muḥammad. Naṣīḥat al-mulūk. Edited by Jalāl Humāʾī. Silsila-yi Intishārāt-i Āthār-i Millī, no. 90. Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār-i Millī, 1351/1972. Glünz, Michael. “Poetic Tradition and Social Change: The Persian Qasida in PostMongol Iran.” In Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa. Vol. 1, Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings, edited by Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, 183‒203. Leiden, New York: E. J. Brill, 1996. Gross, Jo-Ann. “Authority and Miraculous Behavior: Reflections on Karāmāt Stories of Khwāja ‘Ubaydullāh Aḥrār.” In The Heritage of Sufism. Vol. 2, The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150–1500), edited by Leonard Lewisohn, 159‒72. Oxford: Oneworld, 1999. Gross, Jo-Ann. “Multiple Roles and Perceptions of a Sufi Shaikh: Symbolic Statements of Political and Religious Authority.” In Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman/Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order, Actes de la Table Ronde de Sèvres/Proceedings of the Sèvres Round Table 2–4 mai/2–4 May 1985, edited by Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone, 109‒22. Istanbul: Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1990. Ḥikmat, ʿAlī Aṣghar. Jāmī: Mutaḍammin-i taḥqīqāt dar tārīkh-i aḥvāl va āthār-i manẓūm va nushūr-i khātim al-shuʿarā. Tehran: Chāpkhānay-i Bānk-i Millī-yi Īrān, 1321/1942.

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Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad. Dīvān-i Jāmī. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād. 2 vols. Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī, no. 14.Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad. Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Ẓāhir Aḥrārī, Jābilqā Dād ʿAlīshāh, Aṣghar Jānfidāh, and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Tarbiyat. 2 vols. Mīrāth-i Maktūb, no. 15. Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī, no. 58. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1376–78/1997–98. Kāshifī Ṣafī, [Fakhr al-Dīn] ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn [Vāʿiẓ]. Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt. Edited by ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīniyān. 2 vols. Silsila-yi Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūriyānī, no. 15. Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūriyānī, 1356/1977. [Kāshifī], Ḥusayn [b. ʿAlī] Vāʿiẓ. Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī. 22nd lithog. ed. Lucknow: Maṭbaʿa-yi Tīj Kumār, 1377/1957. Khunjī-Iṣfahānī, Faḍlallāh b. Rūzbihān. Tārīkh-i ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī, Persian Text Edited by John E. Woods, with the Abridged English Translation by Vladimir Minorsky, Persia in A.D. 1478–1490 [= Turkmenica, 12]. Edited by John E. Woods. Oriental Translation Fund, n.s., vol. 46. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1992. Lingwood, Chad G. “Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl: Political Statements and Mystical Advice Addressed to the Āq Quyūnlū Court of Sulṭān Ya‘qūb (d. 896/1490).” Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 175‒91. Lingwood, Chad G. Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl. Studies in Persianate Cutlural History, vol. 5. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Lingwood, Chad G. “‘The qebla of Jāmi is None Other than Tabriz’: ʿAbd al-Rahmān Jāmi and Naqshbandi Sufism at the Aq Qoyunlu Royal Court.” Journal of Persianate Studies 4, no. 2 (2011): 233‒45. Losensky, Paul E. “Shahīdī Qumī: Poet Laureate at the Aqquyūnlū Court.” In History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, edited by Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh A. Quinn, in collaboration with Ernest Tucker, 282‒300. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Māyil Haravī, Najīb. Jāmī. Bunyānguzarān-i Farhang-i Imrūz, no. 45. Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1377/1998. Meier, Fritz. Zwei Abhandlungen über die Naqšbandiyya. I. Die Herzensbindung an den Meister. II. Kraftakt und Faustrecht des Heiligen. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 58. Istanbul: Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1994. Meisami, Julie Scott. “Ghaznavid Panegyrics: Some Political Implications,” Iran 28 (1990): 31‒44. Meisami, Julie Scott. Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Meisami, Julie Scott. “Medieval Persian Panegyric: Ethical Values and Rhetorical Strategies.” In Courtly Literature: Culture and Context. Proceedings of the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Dalfsen, the Netherlands, 9–16 August, 1986, edited by Keith Busby and Erik Kooper, 439‒58. Utrecht Publications

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in General and Comparative Literature, vol. 25. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. Niẓām al-Mulk, [Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan Ṭūsī] Khwāja. Siyar al-mulūk (Siyāsat-nāma). Edited by Hubert Darke. Majmūʿa-yi Mutūn-i Fārsī, no. 8. Tehran: Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1340/1962. Paul, Jürgen. “The Khwājagān at Herat during Shāhrukh’s Reign.” In Horizons of the World: Festschrift for İsenbike Togan, edited by İlker Evrim Binbaş and Nurten KılıçSchubel, 217‒50. Istanbul: İthaki, 2011. Sām Mīrzā Ṣafavī. Tazkīra-yi tuḥfa-yi Sāmī. Edited by Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh. Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp va Intishārāt-i Kutūb-i Īrān, 1315/1936. Sperl, Stefan. “Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry in the Early 9th Century.” Journal of Arabic Literature 8 (1977): 20‒35. Urunbaev, ʿAsam al-Din and Asrar Rahmanov, eds. Nāmahā va munsha‌ʾāt-i Jāmī. Mīrāth-i Maktūb, no. 70. Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī, no. 16. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999. Vittor Jr., Charles Frank. “The Herat School: Persian Poetry in the Timurid Period.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978. Woods, John E. The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire. Rev. ed. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1999.



Appendix A: Translation of qaṣīda 1 (Q1)54 When, at the dawn of resurrection, morning’s light inflamed my heart, I heard, on account of the breath of [Isrāfīl’s] horn, the sound of people crying. The wailing roused me from sleep, and, upon awakening, I went forth, collapsing at the tent of those [who were] resurrected. I saw, seated together, a group of sanctified ones— Free from the constraints of matter and far from the confinement of form. They were not at all wearied from praising God, Weakness did not impede them on the path of their sanctification.

54  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:435‒41. The poem was written according to the metre: mujtathth muthamman makhbūn maḥdhūf/aṣlam.

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In amongst them, I saw a distinguished one, From whom all mankind and jinn sought the effusion of light. He said [to me]: “Jāmī, what has befallen you? When did you, on account of pride’s wine-cup, become drunk and witless? Be good! Do not always contemplate the pleasures of intoxication, Since he who becomes drunk ultimately lapses into a hangover. Escape from the dangers of this world! But never Spare a thought for the perils of that world. I shall see [to it that] you yourself visualize that [world], since the garden of eternity Has all that is necessary to safeguard you from ruination and sin.

10

Root out false visualizations of this [world] from your heart [And] toil not in work from which hirelings earn wages, [For, ] your lofty himmat will be like a soaring palace, The reward of your good deeds will be the image of the maiden of Paradise. Because of you—namely, your deeds and amusements—there is affliction, Because of you—that is, your hideous nature—there is fear, Because of you, wild animals cannot graze on mountains, Because of you, birds cannot fly by way of wing and feather, Because of your clutches, anything lofty and crescent-like lays low, Because of your snares, anything that swims [beneath] the seas takes flight.55

15

In order to sweeten your mouth, you go about pillaging The provisions that bees stash for the sake of winter.

55  If rendered muhallilān and musabbiḥān, the distich reads: Because of your thumb [ring], everyone who proclaims the shahāda is fearful, because of your aim(s), everyone who glorifies God (i.e., fingers prayer beads) is a fugitive.

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[Wanting] to be mournful is a better intention than that [intention] of the faculty of lust, [Which] draws forth cruelty from the brain to the head of the ruler. Do not be an addict,56 who unceasingly consumes wine— [That] disgusting grape concoction—in this place of resort! Be happy! For I will tell you an allusion by way of the song of the lute, So that by listening to it your funeral will turn into a feast: Your body is like a lute, its jugular vein is the string; This string of yours quickly becomes part of the lute, 20

Other than practicing poetry and knowledge of verse, You are no stranger to all of this, since Each day that you draw head to chest, in order to contemplate rhyme, You make that day a dark night on account of blackness. In order to praise, you sometimes describe the manners of Ḥātim [al-Ṭāʾī], Sometimes, out of ignorance, you invoke the name of some lowly Chinese emperor, [And] sometimes, out of the concealment of non-existence, you imagine a heart-ravisher, The perception of whose being is hidden from view. You give his beauty fame by means of [your] nonsensical talk, You invoke his name by means of [your] love-play.57

25

You make known his comeliness by explicating [your] love for him With two hundred ghazals on the tongue of the singer and story-teller. There is no lover, no beloved in this conversation, There is no beholder, no beheld in this pursuit,

56  chaspīda‌ʾī. 57  ʿishq-bāzī.

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You assert that this false imagination is true, You maintain that this perverse imagination is pardonable. The weakness of old age has seized you, head to the toe; How? On account of the power and vigor of a haughty youth,58 A passion for the company of youths59 and affection for the faces of idols Was not—like a hair anointed with camphor—cold to your heart. 30

Astonishingly, a lifetime passed and your heart, which is like a dirham, Was not worn down on account of the compounding months and years. What benefit is there if the face [of your heart] is not increasing [in value] In accordance with this prolonged age and stretch of time?” When my ear was filled with these pearls of wisdom, I became the treasurer of a trove of occult secrets. A window opened in my heart unto the meadow of truth; The darkness of [this] world of deception changed to light. On account of that ray of light, the pages of my life appeared [With all its] endless evils and innumerable sins,

35

Such that on account of my abject and shameful affairs— No atom of which, according to [Quran] commentaries, was [not] decreed to me— Shamefulness and baseness left me [with] this Broken heart, wounded body, and afflicted mind. At the moment, I do not know the remedy of my affliction other than The One who pardons sinners and [who] acknowledges shortcomings.

58  javānī-yi maghrūr. 59  javānān (and thus javānī-yi maghrūr), though an androgynous term, usually implies males.

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I go [and seek] refuge at the court of God, the Munificent, For He is verily merciful and forgiving of the faithful servant.60 When, on account of [His] everlasting grace, [this] good thought fell into my heart, All my sinful deeds were forgiven. 40

Free of worries, I [now] undertake the duty at hand— A prayer for the good fortune of a king, a triumphant conqueror Who has reached the ranks of heaven, Yaʿqūb bin Ūzūn Ḥasan, for, upon him Are reserved the marks of kingship and vestiges of the sultanate— A king of kings, who, like Nūshīrvān, [during] his turn [in power] The world of ruin is cultivated by the right hand of [his] justice. A scrap [of verse] is a carpet, full of delights, at the spread of his assemblies, A nook is an inn, full of joy, on account of the palace of his society. For how long will planet Mars be seen within his lasso? [So long as] he buries every desire of the hunting ground [of this world] in the grave.

45

To the ear, songs praising him are not diminished by time, [They are] as sweet as David’s voice in the pronouncement of psalms. In the way of [good] guidance, his results are laudable, In the path of religion, his efforts are worthy of gratitude. In the commission of illustrious acts, his character is innate, In the acquisition of glories, his disposition is natural. The bride of kingship, like Shīrīn, arrived at his side; Like Khusraw, his Shāpūr does not [himself] hope to join [her].

60  In Arabic: fa-ʾinnahu la-ra‌ʾūf wa-li-l-ʿibādi ghafūr.

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The measure of his himmat is [on par] with the circumference of the celestial sphere, And [yet] the expanse of the king’s dominion [has, for him, the] narrowness of an ant’s eye. 50

Indeed! His governance is not [executed] in accordance with the laws of nature, For it preserves the fire of Sinai from [any] loss of smoke. The beautiful ones gird their loins in service to him— An effect that is manifested among [both] females and males. One envious of him is wounded on account of unrestrained mourning, There is a danger to his life because of this suppurate wound. Other than benevolence, there is nothing [to] his sought after himmat— You might say that the choice of benevolence is [in fact] no choice [at all]. Inasmuch as tomorrow, [when] forms of practice and belief Raise the heads of those lying in graves above ground,

55

[There is] nothing not begotten on account of his love of all humanity; [Thus,] it will not be strange if demons and wild beasts are assembled [too]. Although many rulers came before this, Praise of [this] Khusraw-like [king] lines the ledger-book of my discourse. The faculty of youthful nature left me today, The intellect of a sage commands that I [compose] an encomium for you. Like arranged jewels [of poetry] my might does not remain; I scattered [it about], out of habitual shame, [like] strewn pearls. The duty of the sages is to pray for the young shāh, For the welfare of kingship, and for the benefit of the masses of people.

60

Praising him is not to applaud the work of mankind, Since the ridiculousness of avarice and lust is the norm [for them].

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So long as they always run amok in the parade ground [of this world], The force of affection comes from the unseen realm [through His] envoys and leaders. May it be that your throne is the abode of might and majesty, For, at every moment, a new fortune arrives by way of its manifestation!

Appendix B: Translation of qaṣīda 2 (Q2)61 May God bless this bird of august augury To whom a letter of good fortune was happily bound to feather and wing. Nay, it is no mere letter, but a pouch brimming with the whitest musk; Nay, not even a musk-bag, but a vanity tray heaped high with perfumes most pure— A marriage-bed sprinkled with camphor, and upon it There are gorgeous brides, clad in ambergris garments. Nay, it is a beauty that nine bride-dressers, with their reedy finger-tips And by way of letters and points, anointed facial down and moles onto its cheeks.

5

It knits day and night together, warp and woof, Wondrously in this manner, like a woven wheel. Atop its white tablet are lines of chains That made roiling winds appear from a limpid stream. From its very first couplet, it conveys the maidens of Paradise And ties of kinship to lovers of that lofty heaven. Tell me the entire story, [oh] scribe of the ruler of the world! Write, by way of similitude, about “taking the hand” of the afflicted ones!

61  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, 2:53‒57. The poem was written according to the metre: mujtathth muthamman makhbūn maḥzūf/aṣlam.

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It is the distillations of the sea of His grace and mercy That bestow the properties of purified water unto those with parched lips. 10

Come forth out of the garden of delicateness, for your stature is that of a fresh sapling; From your ruby mouth, the tongue of eloquence discloses secrets. Day and night I envision your waist, slender as a hair, Since it is through imagination that I make good the fortune of joining you. Give me my heart’s desire—your ruby lips—and do not ask! For there is no question that your speech is that [thing] which slays love. Though there is a place for me wherever you host a gathering, I weep from being without you, like a reed without its riverbank. Place me on a path that leads in your direction—this is sufficient, Then I shall pass into the hearts of the intimate ones at the banquet of union.

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On account of that experience, which attaches my face—like a stirrup— to your foot, The two eyes [of the stirrup leather] bind the blood of my heart to [your] face. During convivial gatherings at which you, like the sun, appear highest, Faces with crescent-eyebrows are arranged, like horseshoes, in neat rows. May it be that the palm of ease never rests atop my head, because this ball— On account of your polo-playing—is accustomed to always being in goal. By way of this glance, the forlorn heart flees toward you, [But] it will not reach the fawn quickly. [When it does] make good its properties, otherwise I will carry This lamentation from you to the court of the shāh of good qualities—

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He who gives aid to religion and kingship, the prince of the earth, The celestial sphere of generosity and munificence, the sun of power and magnificence: Yaʿqūb bin [Ūzūn] Ḥasan, whose lofty rank, In terms of station and majesty, is comparable to Joseph of Canaan— A king of kings, the aroma of whose virtues, On account of his embrace of good qualities and the open collar of his character, is full of ambergris. By dint of his triumphs, the army is like a mount, Since fortune bound the horseshoe of the moon to the Rakhsh of the celestial sphere. The enormity of the parasol of heaven is on account of his loftiness, Indeed, its fringes became circular by way of the most excellent of forms.62

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The world is more capacious on account of the courtyard of his generosity, For it became a halting place for roaming caravans of hope. [Indeed] if gold and silver were measured according to the value of his munificence, The breadth of heaven and earth would [then] need to be measured against it. When the jealous ones saw the fury of his power, it emptied [Their] hearts of vainglorious fantasies and [their] heads of insidious thoughts. The kingdom is free of counselors and vazīrs possessed of any covetousness— His mind is completely removed from this concern. The slopes of mountains and the pitch of the earth are made firm on account of him, [For whom] all of the immovable mountains amount to just one mithqāl [coin].

62  In Arabic: bi-ʾafḍali l-ashkāl.

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The bodies of his enemies were bent over, like [the letter] dāl, and his spear[-like body] Took its place in the same way the [letter] ālif is in the middle of dāl. His bounty was never denied to the unfortunate ones, For that reason, the voice of beneficence [itself] is never far from that place. How could sheer ignorance take root in [Yaʿqūb’s] heart, since God filled His breast with inspirations of knowledge and perfection through the breath of ʿĪsā? How could [Yaʿqūb] tread the path of sin, since God, through [ʿĪsā], Stoned the demon of going astray with the light of the North Star? Oh rulers, for the people of the king[dom] and religion, Your door is the qibla of good fortune and the kaʿba of hopes.

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You are a sun, and [you] have sent an epistolary correspondence, replete with affection, In the direction of [this] insignificant mote. A page that, like the musky down of the sweet-lipped one, Seized my consciousness, on account of the beauty of its script and the elegance of its speech. Oh how that response was beyond the limits of my intellect! In comparison with [that] string of pearls, [this] is an exhibition of lowly beads— Broken [as it is]—I have directed to you a composition That presents before you, in this moment of strength, [a request for] forgiveness. On account of the qualities of your generosity, I am maintaining All hope that, based on good fortune, it will indeed be accepted.

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I am inclined to say that I have surpassed the limit of that composition; I am afraid That the brow of your acceptance has fallen down, weary and wrinkled.

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Thus, I utter a prayer for your rank, which, though it has not yet reached the heavens, Will [nevertheless] be met with an answer: So long as unceasing incidents occur within this inn of sorrow, [And] the cycle of months and years turns by way of the travels of moon and sun, [And] ever rising, the luminosity of your good fortune resides atop the zenith of nobility, May the sun, undiminished from declension, further increase! [May] divine Decree assist you at sunset and at sunrise!63 [May] divine Mandate favor you in the mornings and in the evenings!64

63  In Arabic: bi-l-ʿashiyī wa-l-ʿishrāq. 64  In Arabic: bi-l-ghuduwwī wa-l-āṣāl.

chapter 9

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and the Ottoman Linguistic Tradition Philosophy of Language and ʿIlm al-Waḍʿ Ertuğrul Ökten To the Western mind, schooled by modern linguistics and philosophy of language, the outlook exhibited in the ʿilm al-waḍʿ literature will perhaps appear strange or even bizarre. It is therefore crucially important, if we are to gain a genuine appreciation for what the ʿilm al-waḍʿ scholars were attempting to do, that we place their work in the context of a religious and cultural tradition that had a large stake in the posited character of language and in the constancy of meaning.1

⸪ Jāmī lived between 1414 and 1492 and was a prolific writer in Persian. He produced many works in several fields: religious history, grammar, literature, doctrinal texts on waḥdat al-wujūd, philosophy, and even music. He continues to be revered as an artistically and intellectually towering figure. For some, he represents the last of the seven classical Persian poets, and of them, the one who wrote the best Yūsuf u Zulaykha epic poem (mathnavī) ever. Those of a more intellectual bent recognize him as an expert in waḥdat al-wujūd thought, who made Ibn al-ʿArabī a main intellectual and spiritual pillar in the Persophone world. He wrote one of the most incontrovertibly influential grammar books of Arabic, al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, the popularity of which matched that of Ibn Muʿṭī’s (d. 628/1231) al-Alfiyya and Ibn al-Ḥājib’s (d. 646/1249) al-Kāfiya, 1  Bernard George Weiss, “ʿIlm al-waḍ‘: An Introductory Account of a Later Muslim Philological Science,” Arabica 34/3 (1987): 356. This article could never come into being without the expert guidance of Maşuk Yamaç in the intricacies of ʿilm al-waḍʿ. I benefited greatly from Nadia Bou Ali’s questions and comments. I also appreciate Maruf Toprak’s generosity in sharing his expertise and manuscripts. Mehmetcan Akpınar’s comments on the final were invaluable. I am indebted to all of them and the organizers of the Jāmī conference in 2012 in Paris, for giving me the opportunity to finish this article.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_011

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the two standard-setting grammar books that have been in use in the Islamic world for centuries.2 Although studies on Jāmī have recently increased, developing a deeper understanding of Jāmī’s multi-faceted philosophical thought remains a major problem. So far, the existing scholarship has been mostly descriptive and thin. One way to proceed is by examining Jāmī’s notion of language, specifically within the context of ʿilm al-waḍʿ, one of the Arabic-Islamic grammatical sciences that discusses the relationship between meaning and language (what we might refer to as semantics).3 The aim of this exploratory article is to elucidate the relationship between the philosophical components of Jāmī’s thought and this tradition of linguistics, suggesting that Jāmī’s engagement with the philosophy of language had implications for his later intellectual development. I will limit the discussion to two works: Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya, a commentary on ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s (d. 755/1355) treatise on waḍʿ attributed to Jāmī, though not without controversy, and al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, his immensely popular work on Arabic grammar. Assuming that Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya belongs to him, these two works of Jāmī are those in which one finds a significant level of thinking (“philosophy”) about language.4 I have not been able to find any other works or passages of Jāmī through which one can

2  Ibn Muʿṭī’s al-Alfiyya was the first one in the series of thousand-couplet long versified Arabic grammar works. al-Kāfiya is Ibn al-Ḥājib’s mukhtaṣar (abridged version) on Arabic grammar (naḥw). This was the last one among three foundational texts on Arabic grammar. The first of these was Sibawayhī’s al-Kitāb that examined morphology and syntax (ṣarf and naḥw) with plenty of examples but unsystematically. It was Zamakhsharī’s (d. 539/1144) al-Mufaṣṣal that summarized and systematized the topics in al-Kitāb. In writing al-Kāfiya Ibn al- Ḥājib focused on the naḥw related sections of al-Mufaṣṣal and gave a more concise treatment of those. Thus, al-Mufaṣṣal was the main source for al-Kāfiya. He wrote another work based on al-Mufaṣṣal, al-Shāfiya, by examining morphology related sections of al-Mufaṣṣal. Nevzat H. Yanık, “İbn Muʿtī,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi (Hereafter TDVIA). Hulusi Kılıç, “el-Kāfiye,” TDVIA. See also Abdülbaki Turan, “Elfiyye,” TDVIA. One cannot assess the influence of al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya without taking into consideration Timurid impact in the curriculum of Central Asia and the Ottoman world in the later centuries, a topic for further research. For an insightful, brief initiation confined to Central Asia see Robert D. McChesney, “Islamic Culture and the Chinggisid Restoration: Central Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, eds. David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3:239‒65, 246‒47. 3  Notwithstanding his fame, there has been a tendency to depict Jāmī as an unoriginal writer and poet. Understanding Jāmī as an intellectual might provide a different insight. 4  Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya, Süleymaniye Library, M. Hilmi, F. Fehmi, 201, fols. 48a– 55b. An alternative title for the treatise is Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya.

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examine his conception of language. While his Risāla fī al-ṣarf is another treatise about language, it appears to be written merely for grammar instruction.5 By philosophy of language, I understand a conception of language that goes beyond its immediate structure and rules, and attempts at either re-defining/ creating linguistic categories or relationships between its constituents: an intellectual activity that is not normally required for the ordinary usage of language. I will first provide a background forʿilm al-waḍʿ. Then I will introduce the problem al-Ījī attempted to solve and discuss his treatise, followed by a summary of Jāmī’s commentary on the treatise. It is difficult to discuss these two works separately, since Jāmī’s commentary follows al-Ījī’s treatise very closely, as we might expect from a work produced in the sharḥ tradition. Next, I will discuss the controversy concerning Jāmī’s authorship of the commentary, which will lead to an elaboration of Jāmī’s place in the Ottoman linguistic tradition. A discussion of his seminal grammar work al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya will follow. I will show that the concept of waḍʿ was a conceptual tool Jāmī employed in that work. In order to assess the significance of these two works, I will also explore issues related to their perception and reproduction. 1

The Background of ʿilm al-waḍʿ

According to the theory of waḍʿ, there are three indispensible components of language: vocables (vocal combinations, lafẓ, technically mawḍūʿ), meanings (maʿnā, -technically mawḍūʿ lahu-) and a decision maker or positer (wāḍiʿ). Meanings are ideas in the mind, humans produce vocables, and a decisionmaker decides which vocables match with which particular meanings.6 Thus, language is nothing but a mental, fixed relationship between two sets of independent entities—vocables and meanings, or alfāẓ and maʿānī—constructed by human beings. The idea that the relationship between meaning and vocables was a matter of convention came into being quite early among Muslim scholars, especially

5  Jāmī, Risāla fī al-ṣarf, in Kulliyāt-i Jāmī, Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine 672, fols. 374a–379b. 6  The givenness or independent existence of ideas was accepted a priori. Also, waḍʿ was in fact used not only for establishing a relationship between vocables and meanings, but it was used to define more complicated linguistic rules such as the relationship of parts of a sentence. One can plausibly say that everything pertaining to language could be a matter of waḍʿ/ positing.

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in the Muʿtazili circles.7 The earliest Muslim thinker who proffered the idea that language had its origin in human convention was Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 321/933), a Muʿtazili.8 Among the early philosophers, al-Fārābī (d. 339/950) also used the term waḍʿ in explaining how rules of mutual understanding were made in society, which illustrates the mainstay of philosophers’ approach to waḍʿ, i.e. explaining how individuals understood one another. Another group, the jurists, naturally had a different take: their main focus was to derive rules from texts. Thus, their interest was in explicating meaning so that legal conclusions could be made. In the approach of early grammarians, waḍʿ was embedded in their exposition of their field even if the concept itself did not come under close scrutiny.9 It was al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229), the renowned scholar of rhetoric (balāgha) in the Mongol ruler Jaghatai’s retinue, who defined waḍʿ and used it as a term for the first time before it became an independent discipline.10 However, it is al-Ījī, the renowned theologian of the fourteenth century whose al-Mawāqif is considered to be the pinnacle of systemized theological thought, who is credited with the creation of ʿilm al-waḍʿ as a distinct linguistic sub-field. His motivation seems to have been the re-interpretation and reconstruction of the field of linguistics through ʿilm al-waḍʿ.11 His thoughts on waḍʿ are stated in a concise treatise entitled (al-Risāla) al-Waḍʿiyya or sometimes al-Risāla al-ʿaḍudiyya.12 Why does one observe this interest in ʿilm al-waḍʿ ? A straightforward answer is that as scholars examined language, it became necessary to examine its foundation.13 After all, the development of ʿilm al-waḍʿ took place within 7   Bernard Weiss, “Waḍʿ al-Luġa,” Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. Brill Online, 2015. Accessed 04 May 2018 . 8   The term in use was tawāḍuʿ, muwāḍaʿa or iṣṭilāḥ. Sophia Vasalou, “ ‘Their Intention Was Shown by Their Bodily Movements’: The Baṣran Muʿtazilites on the Institution of Language,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47/2 (2009): 202. 9   İbrahim Özdemir, İslam Düşüncesinde Dil ile Varlık: Vaz İlminin Temel Meseleleri (Istanbul: İz Yayıncılık, 2006), 138‒57. 10  A. Cüneyd Köksal, Fıkıh Usūlünün Mahiyeti ve Gayesi (Istanbul: İSAM, 2008), 123. It is one of the important disciplines for supplying information for usūl-i fiqh, for further relationship with fıqh see ibid., 123. İsmail Durmuş, “Sekkākī Ebū Yaʿkūb,” TDVIA. For the tradition that descends down from al-Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm, to al-Taftāzānī and al-Jurjānī see William Smyth, “Controversy in a Tradition of Commentary: The Academic Legacy of AlSakkākī’s Miftāḥ Al-ʿUlūm,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112/4 (1992): 594‒97. 11  Tahsin Görgün, “Īcī, Adudüddin,” TDVIA. Görgün says that in this manner al-Ījī was addressing hitherto unsolved problems, and that he equated language with logic as the basis of ʿilm al-waḍʿ. 12  ʿAḍud al-Dīn al- Ījī, al-ʿAḍudiyya, Süleymaniye Library, Fatih, 4719, fol. 2a‒b. 13  Ömer Türker, “Seyyid Şerīf Cürcanī’nin Tevīl Anlayışı: Yorumun Metafizik, Mantıkī ve Dilbilimsel Temelleri” (PhD diss., Marmara University, 2006), 139.

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a framework that rendered language as central. Language was the tool with which to understand the divine text, and extracting meaning(s) was possible only through language. To do that, and therefore to be able to function in the highly ordered (and technical) world of legal theory, it was necessary to know not only the meaning of words, but also the “principle features of language.”14 To historically contextualize this interest in waḍʿ, one can note that in the intellectual life of the Islamic world, al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) constituted not only a dividing line, but also—especially in the muta‌ʾakhkhirūn period (later generations, post-al-Rāzī)—a particular way of thinking departing from the mutaqaddimūn period (earlier generations, pre-al-Rāzī). The basis of this new way of thinking was logic, linguistic sciences and a concern for sound methodology (usūl).15 At this point, it may not be too far-fetched to also mention the Ilkhanid impact on the scholarly world, which stimulated theology, philosophy and their basis, that is, rational thinking. Al-Ījī worked as a qadi in Sultaniyya during the reign of Oljeitu (r. 704/1304–716/1316) and was a protégé of Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl Allāh (d. 718/1318) and then his son Ghiyāth al-Dīn.16 Within this particular framework, the development of further inquiry into the foundations of language—one of the basic tools of the processes of understanding and meaning-creation—makes sense.17 2

Emergence of the Problem (the Novel Category of waḍʿ)

For a greater understanding of ʿilm al-waḍʿ one needs to look at a series of classifications (parts of waḍʿ, or aqsām al-waḍʿ). These classifications are in terms of the positor, vocables, signification, and meaning. The positor can posit a vocable to a meaning in common usage of the language (lughawī), as a discipline-specific term (iṣṭilāḥī), in customary usage (ʿurfī), or as a religious term 14  Bernard Weiss, “Language in Orthodox Muslim Thought: A Study of “Wad’ al-Lughah” and its Development” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1966), 59. “[…] Both language and the divine nature are given the status of timeless realities, the knowledge of which is fundamental to legal theory.” Idem. On the other hand, it also seems feasible to think that after a certain point, study of language constituted an independent discourse. Those who studied language did not necessarily think about the sacred/religious connotations of it. 15  Türker, “Seyyid Şerīf Cürcanī’nin Tevīl Anlayışı,” 6. 16  Görgün, “Īcī, Adudüddin.” 17  Apparently, the concept of waḍʿ was somehow a well-recognized one in the learned circles. A century prior to Jāmī, almost the same time al-Ījī was writing, Mahmūd Shabistarī (d. 740/1320), mentioned waḍʿ, dalālat, and lafẓ in his soon to be popular poem Gulshan-i rāz. Saʿd al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shabistarī, Gulshan-i Rāz, ed. Edward H. Whinfield (London: Trübner & Co., 1880), 43 (pagination in Arabic numerals).

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(sharʿī).18 In terms of vocables (lafẓ) there are two types: shakhṣī (specific) and nawʿī (generic). Shakhsī waḍʿ occurs when the form of the lafẓ or “word” has no functionality/use in referring to the meaning. That is, “tree” could actually mean something other than that huge plant with a hard stem and lots of branches. There is nothing inherent in the combination “t,” “r,” “e,” “e” to make that combination refer to its posited meaning. As another example, the same holds for the name “J,” “o,” “h,” “n.” Nawʿī waḍʿ is when the form of the vocable determines the meaning. For example, adding the suffix -er to a verb stem produces a new word with a new meaning, i.e. the doer of that action. In terms of signification/referring (dalālat), there are again two types: taḥqīqī, in which referring to the meaning does not require any interpretation, and ta‌ʾwīlī, in which getting at the meaning requires interpretation (using “bahr” (ocean) instead of “ʿālim” to refer to a knowledgeable person, for instance). Finally, in terms of meaning there are two types: juzʾī, particular (for example, “John”), or kullī, universal (for example, “man”). In terms of the discipline of semantics or waḍʿ, al-Ījī became the dividing line between the mutaqaddimūn and the muta‌ʾakhkhirūn and the great controversy between them was centered on the positing of the shakhṣī (specific) vocables. Earlier (muta‌ʾakhkhirūn) scholars claimed that when shakhṣī (specific) vocables were involved there could be two types of waḍʿ : 1) A vocable conceived as a conceptual representation of a general entity, posited on an unspecified thing in the outside world. This was technically called mawḍūʿ ʿāmm—mawḍūʿ lahu ʿāmm, and common nouns would come under this category. Thus, one can conceive an object with four tires and a gas engine and posit the vocable “car” to all cars in the world. 2) A vocable conceived as a representation of a specific entity (geographical locations, countries, and quite often specific people, etc.), posited on that specific entity in the outside world. This was technically called mawḍūʿ khāṣṣ—mawḍūʿ lahu khāṣṣ, and proper nouns (as well as ʿalam al-jins) came under this category. Thus, “John” would refer to a specific person and not to a class of people whose names are John. Al-Ījī raised an objection to this two-fold categorization. He claimed that there were certain types of shakhṣī vocables that could not be grouped under any of the two categories. These problematic groups of vocables comprised pronouns and particles, that is, personal pronouns (ḍamīr), anā, huwa, etc., demonstrative pronouns (ism al-ishāra), hādhā, tilka, etc., relative pronouns (ism al-mawṣūl), alladhī, allatī, etc., and particles (ḥarf ), fī, min, etc.19 18  This is in fact the same as iṣṭilāḥī usage, but is mentioned separately because of the exceptionally high status of the Sharia. 19  Weiss, “Language in Orthodox Muslim Thought,” 95‒96.

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To clarify, let us take the third person singular pronoun “he” (huwa) as an example. According to the earlier linguists, the definition (or meaning) of “he” was a singular, male entity mentioned in a speech situation but not present in it. Thus, the definition applied to all males in the world who were not present in a speech situation.20 As such, according to the earlier linguists, “he” was a general entity (vocable), or it defined a class of individuals, and therefore had to be subsumed under the first category mentioned above, that is, a (general) vocable representing a general entity in mind being posited on an unspecified thing in the outside world (mawḍūʿ ʿāmm—mawḍūʿ lahu ʿāmm). The problem was obvious, and both the mutaqaddimūn and al-Ījī noticed it: “he,” in practice, was never posited on an unspecified entity in the outside world, but always referred to a specific entity/person. “He” referring to John was always a particular person. Earlier linguists proposed that although expressions such as “he” were established for general ideas, it was imperative that in actual speech situations they be used for particulars.21 After all, by using “he” for a particular person, the earlier linguists were using the concept outside of its primary meaning, that is, a male person who is mentioned in a speech situation but is not present in it. A concept used outside of its primary meaning in this manner would be a metaphor, a legitimate linguistic device. Al-Ījī objected to this solution by saying that the definition of metaphor required the existence of a real situation in the world in which the metaphor existed/was used in its primary meaning. For example, in order to be able to use “lion” as a metaphor for a brave person, a real lion had to exist in the world. Applied to our discussion, there should be at least one usage of “he” in which people using “he” really meant “a male person who is being mentioned in a current speech situation but is not present in it.” This was never the case, not even once. A specific person was always meant. Thus, according to al-Ījī, explaining “he”—and similarly all of the four categories mentioned above—as metaphor was wrong-headed. Al-Ījī’s solution was to propose a new conceptual tool, that is, ālat al-waḍʿ (tool of positing). The superiority of ālat al-waḍʿ was in emphasizing the thought process in mind. Looking at the thought process in mind at the time of waḍʿ, al-Ījī noticed that one could define a class of individuals (ālat al-waḍʿ ʿāmm) but then focus on individual members of that class and posit a vocable to denote an individual member (mawḍūʿ lahu khāṣṣ).22 This also meant the 20  Ibid., 101. 21  Ibid., 102. 22  To approach it from a different angle, in the case of proper nouns or common nouns the reality that exists in the world matches with a definition in mind smoothly without any

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introduction of a third category of waḍʿ for the shakhṣī vocables, that is, general positing to specific meaning (al-waḍʿ al-ʿāmm/mawḍūʿ lahu khāṣṣ or ālat al-waḍʿ al-ʿāmm/mawḍūʿ lahu khāṣṣ). Thus, “he” was posited through, not for, a general (universal) concept (single, male person who is mentioned but not present in a speech situation) for each individual under that class. It was this new conceptual tool that allowed one to use a general term to refer to a particular person. It was especially handy to have a tool like this, because one could not know every particular, i.e. every “he” in the world, but with such a tool one acquired the ability to refer to them in language. This contribution of al-Ījī became an important area of debate.23 3 Waḍʿ Leading to a Difference of Interpretation? The earlier scholars considered pronouns and particles to be universal and al-Ījī and the later scholars took them as particular. Did this difference lead to major differences in interpretation and understanding of language/texts? This is not a subject covered by ʿilm al-waḍʿ treatises. Still, it is necessary to note that in the battle between the more religiously bent (theologians and others) and the philosophers, a good deal of the controversy revolved around the knowledge of particulars, which the former group deemed as the highest knowledge.24 If there was disagreement on the status of a very basic linguistic element such as “he,” it is not hard to imagine how the meaning derived from it in several different linguistic situations, including the interpretation of texts, could be affected. 3.1 Al-Risāla al-ʿaḍudiyya and Jāmī’s Commentary Al-Risāla al-ʿaḍudiyya (also known as al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya) is a short work, less than a folio long. As suggested by the discussion above, it is not a general introduction to waḍʿ, but rather a concise piece almost as brief as a reminder problems. With the above mentioned four types of vocables the situation is different. For example, when one says “I” that particular entity in reality is meant to correspond to match a universal meaning in mind, that is, “the person who is doing the talking.” In order for a particular reality to match a universal idea one needs a tool (a thought process) to gather all those particulars (talking people) under a category, that is, the category of “person who is doing the talking”. This tool is ālat al-waḍʿ. It is a conceptual tool, or thought process. I am indebted to Abdullah Yıldırım for clarifying this issue in our discussion. 23  Özdemir, İslam Düşüncesinde Dil ile Varlık, 87‒96. Abdullah Yıldırım, “Vaz Ilmi ve Unkūdu’z-Zevāhir/Ali Kuşçu (İnceleme, Değerlendirme)” (M.A. thesis, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2007), 41. 24  Weiss, “Language in Orthodox Muslim Thought,” 99.

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note. This concise and highly technical nature of the work indicates that there was already a well-established discourse on this subject, and that the terms of discussion were well-known by the parties involved. In fact, this must have been one of the reasons why commentaries were later written on it: without a commentary, it would probably remain incomprehensible for readers save those who were experts. Al-Ījī achieved three critical things in this treatise: 1. He defined his subject matter as a distinct field of science in the Aristotelian sense. One can see this from the organization of the treatise. He divided the treatise into three parts: introduction (muqaddima), classification (taqsīm) and conclusion (khātima). This structure followed the Aristotelian definition of science (any science must have three components: a subject matter, theorems, premises) and indicates that al-Ījī conceived of this field as a linguistic science.25 2. As mentioned above, he introduced the concept of ālat al-waḍʿ (tool of waḍʿ), which had not existed beforehand. 3. In relation to that, he introduced the category of general positing-specific meaning (ālat al-waḍʿ al-ʿāmm/mawḍūʿ lahu khāṣṣ). This is the main reason why al-Ījī was considered to be the dividing line between the earlier generation(s) of linguists (mutaqaddimūn) and later generations (muta‌ʾakhkhirūn). Another major achievement of al-Ījī, which he did not state as explicitly as the above three points but nevertheless emerges from his treatise, is that he distinguished clearly between particles (ḥarf ) and nouns (ism). He distinguished the two by saying that if a vocable was independent (mustaqil) in terms of meaning, that is, it did not require another vocable (/word) to express a meaning), then it was a noun (ism). If it required another vocable to express a meaning, then it was a particle (ḥarf ).26 3.2 Jāmī’s Commentary on/Explanation of al-Ījī’s al-Risāla al-ʿaḍudiyya Below is a comprehensible presentation of Jāmī’s commentary on al-Ījī’s treatise. Although in the discussion below I refer to al-Ījī exclusively, it must be

25  Ibid., 57. In contrast, Abdullah Yıldırım thinks that Al-Ījī did not establish ʿilm al-waḍʿ as a science, what he did was only founding the theory of waḍʿ for particular cases (as opposed to universal cases), and it fell on ʿAlī Qushji (d. 879/1474) to transform waḍʿ into ʿilm al-waḍʿ and change the framework established by al-Ījī in a substantial manner. Yıldırım, “Vaz Ilmi ve Unkūdu’z-Zevāhir,” 48‒50. 26  The independent vocables (words) are in fact in two categories: those that don’t have time aspect in them, and those that have time aspect. Those with time aspect are verbs.

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remembered that the explanation of al-Ījī’s points in fact comes from Jāmī’s commentary. Naturally, references given will be to Jāmī’s work. In the introduction, Jāmī presents al-Ījī’s premise that a vocable is sometimes attached to a meaning as it is, or sometimes attached to a meaning by applying a rule that systematically produces vocables for certain meanings.27 Then he proceeds to the elaboration of al-Ījī’s specific problem, i.e. the general positing-specific meaning pair. How can a general vocable refer to a particular meaning? According to Jāmī, this is because a common quality is conceived among particulars that are subsumed under a general class. Then, this vocable (that corresponds to/expresses that common quality) is used for one of those particulars in such a way that from that vocable only one of those particulars (and none other) is understood. Furthermore, that common quality does not invoke other particulars in the same class. As such, the process of common quality invoking one particular member of class is ālat al-waḍʿ. It is not “meaning” (mawḍūʿ lahu)—because meaning denotes an entire class.28 If the vocable (waḍʿ) is universal and meaning is particular, that is, the case of the demonstrative pronoun (hādhā), the vocable (mawḍūʿhu) is particular (mushakhkhaṣ) and does not accept commonness (lā yuqbal al-shirka). This comes with a warning: vocables of this type cannot assume the sense of particularity outside of a context (qarīna) because without context a particular vocable (i.e. a pronoun) is equally distant to other possible particular meanings, making signification impossible.29 In the classification section, he classifies vocables in terms of their meanings. The meanings of vocables are either universal or particular (mushakhkhaṣ). If the meaning is universal, the vocable referring to it can be either an essence (dhāt), which is called a general noun (ism al-jins); a happening (ḥadath), in which case it is maṣdar; or relationship (nisba) between the two (essence and happening, i.e. a verb).30 If the meaning of a vocable is particular (mushakhkhas) then it can be i) a proper noun, ii) a particle (ḥarf ) whose meaning is in another word, iii) a pronoun whose meaning is understood through the context of interlocution (al-qarīna al-khiṭābiyya), iv) a demonstrative pronoun whose meaning is understood through sensory evidence (al-qarīna al-ḥissiyya) or v) a relative 27  As mentioned above, for example, adding the suffix -er for making active participles from verbs. 28  Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya, Süleymaniye Library, M. Hilimi, F. Fehmi, 201, fols. 48a–55b, fol. 49b. 29  Ibid., fols. 50a–b. 30  Ibid., fol. 50a.

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pronoun whose meaning is understood through rational evidence/inference (al-qarīna al-ʿaqliyya).31 The novel category of general vocable-particular meaning produced new issues in the exploration of word categories and meaning. Al-Ījī dedicated the conclusion of his treatise to the exploration of twelve such points, which he calls warnings (tanbīhāt). Jāmī explains most of these in detail:32 1. How is ḥarf different from the other three? In the case of pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and relative pronouns, the words themselves are meaningful (the meaning of these words are found in the words themselves as opposed to particles, which need words other than themselves to express their meaning). A further implication of this is that, since the meaning of pronouns (personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and relative pronouns) is independent (of other words), they can function as subject or predicate.33 2. How do personal, demonstrative, and relative pronouns differ from each other? In the case of relative pronouns rational inference (al-ishāra al-ʿaqliyya) does not imply particularity (of meaning). Let us take the example of “the man who came (is John).” In this example, neither “the man” nor “who” is particular, and therefore, using these two in conjunction cannot produce a particular meaning. What makes the meaning really particular in this case is evidence (context) based on reason (al-qarīna al-ʿaqliyya). For relative pronouns, particular meanings are produced by evidence based on reason. This is different for demonstrative pronouns, for which particular meanings come from sensory perception (al-qarīna al-ḥissiyya). Without seeing that one points at a particular pencil, the statement “give me that pencil!” would be meaningless. It is also different from personal pronouns, because these require interlocutionary evidence (al-qarīna al-khiṭābiyya): in any speech situation the event of interlocution shows who the addresser is (I, we), the addressed (you) or the one being talked about (he, she, it).34 3. What is the difference between proper nouns and personal pronouns? This is an issue that requires clarification, because in usage both have a common point in referring to individuals. The difference is that with proper nouns there is one waḍʿ process and one particular individual to whom a meaning is attached; however, in the case of pronouns one waḍʿ process attaches

31  Ibid., fol. 51a. 32  Ibid., fol. 52b. 33  Ibid., fol. 52b. 34  Ibid., fol. 52a–b.

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a meaning to multiple individuals (i.e. maʿnā mutaʿaddid: there are multiple meanings).35 4. How do particles (ḥarf ) differ from nouns and verbs in terms of their ability to express a meaning? Particles signify a meaning, yet that meaning becomes manifest only when the particle gets attached to another word. Nouns and verbs are different in this sense: they can express a meaning by themselves without the need to be used together with another word.36 5. This point concerns aspects of verbs and the functions they can/cannot assume in accordance with those aspects. Verbs have two main aspects: essence (dhāt)37 and happening (ḥadath). A third aspect of verbs is nisba, that is, a relationship established between the essence and the happening. The two main aspects of verbs are used to explain why verbs can be the predicate but not the subject in a sentence. The reason given is that the “happening” aspect of verbs is independent (if there is no happening or motion, there is no doer), therefore, it can serve as predicate. The essence aspect of verbs is dependent (on the happenings) and this prohibits verbs from serving as the subject. In comparison with these two, particles have no independence (of meaning) so they can be neither predicate nor subject. The two aspects of verbs also help explain the difference between verbs and words derived from root letters (mushtaqq): in verbs, happening (ḥadath) precedes essence (dhāt); in derived words, essence precedes happening.38 6. The difference between common nouns (ism al-jins), referring to a class of unspecified members, and ʿalam al-jins, a special category of nouns in which a distinguishing characteristic is primary in usage. For example, the use of the common noun “animal” may mean any member of that group. However, when one says usāma (predator) only those animals that hunt their prey come to mind, since that is their distinguishing characteristic.39 Another significant difference between the two is that the process of waḍʿ does not ascribe a sense of definiteness to common nouns, and therefore they take the particle “al-” before them to become definite. ʿAlam al-jins have an inherent sense of definiteness.40

35  Ibid., fols. 52a, 53b. 36  Ibid., fol. 53b. 37  One expects to see “doer” as one of the two aspects of verbs (dhāt), yet, it is more than that: it can be doer (active participle), done (passive participle), the place where something is done (noun of place), etc., that is, the part of the verb that corresponds to the non-action side of it. 38  Ibid., fol. 53ab. 39  The word has acquired the meaning of “lion.” 40  Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya, fol. 53a.

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In items 7 and 8 the discussion is based on the premise that certain vocables require attachment to/inclusion of an extra element: 7. The difference between particles (ḥarf ) and relative pronouns (ism almawṣūl) in terms of requiring an extra element. Both require an additional element after them to express a meaning. In case of particles, the additional element used after ḥarf is where the meaning is formed. With relative pronouns, the extra element has a meaning—a particular—however, that meaning is hidden until the additional element that follows the relative pronoun discloses it.41 8. Similarly, verbs and particles have a common point in that the formation of meaning with these two requires an additional element. In the case of verbs, that is the essence (dhāt) as mentioned above. Since both require that additional element to express a meaning, they cannot serve as the subject in a sentence.42 9. Comparing the status of particles and verbs in terms of particularity/ universality and dependence/independence of their meanings and functions they assume in sentence in accordance with that status. Verbs are accepted to have universal meanings because action they express is universal. The meaning that pertains to an action is also independent, it exists independent of anything else. The essence part (dhāt) of verbs is particular43 and it is also dependent on the action. It cannot exist without the action. One qualifies verb as universal by looking at the happening part, i.e. the part that is universal. Since the happening part of verbs is universal, they can act as the predicate. Since the essence part (of verbs) (dhāt) is particular and dependent, a verb cannot function as the subject. The ḥarf, on the other hand, is entirely particular and has no independence whatsoever. Therefore, ḥarf can serve as neither subject nor predicate.44 10. Further controversy about particularity or universality of the third person personal pronoun: if it refers to a particular, say, “John,” then it is accepted without controversy as particular. Yet, if its reference is to a universal, e.g. “humanity,” then some say the personal pronoun is universal and others say it is particular.45 11. Particle-like nouns such as dhū (possessor) and fawq (above): The similarity stems from the fact that these, like particles, must be followed by nouns. The meanings of these are universal, yet in terms of usage they can be used 41  Ibid., fols. 53a, 54b. 42  Ibid., fols. 54a–b. 43  In fact, the essence is universal but the ascription of it to the happening is particular. 44  Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya, fol. 54a. 45  Ibid., fol. 54a.

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only as particulars because they are always used in genitive constructions (iḍāfa)—and genitive constructions always express particular meanings. The fact that their usage requires them to express particular meanings does not itself make them particular, because in the original waḍʿ process they are ascribed to a universal meaning.46 12. Occasional employment of a vocable with universal meaning in place of a particular meaning. An example would be when one says “(the) possessor of knowledge came” ( jāʾa dhū ʿilmin). When vocables differ in universality or particularity, or are used in place of one another, one needs to examine the original waḍʿ process in order to judge the universality or particularity of that vocable.47 4

Jāmī in the Ottoman Linguistic Tradition and the Authorship Issue

There are around thirty copies that constitute the reproduction history of the Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya.48 Except for one (MS Süleymaniye Library, Kasidecizade 558), all of these copies are in collections (majmūʿa). These collections are sometimes specifically dedicated to the subject of waḍʿ, sometimes on language, and occasionally contain works on logic. The earliest copy is in a majmūʿa on waḍʿ from the mid-sixteenth century.49 Jāmī’s treatise is undated, but the last treatise in the collection (the commentary of ʿAlī Qushji on al-Ījī’s treatise) is dated 959/1551–52. Two other treatises in the collection are dated 960/1552 and 970/1563, respectively. The first dated instance of Jāmī’s treatise is therefore from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, almost sixty years after Jāmī’s death. Thus, it is possible to think that if Jāmī really is the author of this work, it took around sixty years for it to become visible. Of course, some of the undated manuscripts may have been produced before this particular collection.50 A chronological assessment of the collections that contain Jāmī’s work shows that the majority of them were produced in the period between 46  Ibid., fols. 54a, 55b. 47  Ibid., fol. 55b. 48  I was able to find these in Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul. In contrast, al-Beruni Oriental Institute, Tashkent, has only one copy of the work. Apparently, there is also a copy in Cairo: Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Risāla al-ʿaḍudiyya fī al-waḍʿ, Wizarat al-Awqaf al-Maktabat alMarkaziyya li al-Makhtutat al-Islamiyya, 1256, fols. 125–28, which is significant for its relatively early date, 960/1552. 49  Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya, MS Süleymaniye Library, Laleli, 3021, fols. 74a–83b. 50  For example, the paper and hand in MS Süleymaniye, İbrahim Efendi, 873 suggests that it is another sixteenth century collection bringing together treatises on language and poetry but it is not possible to tell exactly whether it was produced before the above collection.

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1640 and 1718. One can date fifteen copies to this period, in which the longest time gap between two copies is a sixteen-year period. The fact that the treatise is found in collections of waḍʿ or language-related works by several prominent authors clearly shows that this treatise was regarded as a respectable work in the field. Two noteworthy examples would be MS Süleymaniye Library, Laleli 3021 and MS Atıf Efendi Library, 2420. The first of these collections, Laleli 3021, contains seven treatises on waḍʿ all by distinguished figures of the field such as al-Ījī himself, al-Jurjānī, ʿAlā alDīn al-Samarqandī, Jāmī and ʿAlī Qushji (two treatises). MS Atıf Efendi, 2420 contains twelve treatises on waḍʿ.51 This compilation has two points of emphasis: the waḍʿ treatise of ʿAlī Qushji and commentaries on it, and several works of al-Jurjānī on waḍʿ and language. Based on compilations like these, it is possible to propose that the compilers of such works, or their commissioners, knew what they were doing in selecting what to include in their compilations, thought that the treatise in question belonged to Jāmī, and accepted it as an important work in the field. Apparently, Jāmī’s treatise was a popular work. If the relatively large number of copies indicates a wide reception, the presence of extensive marginal notes on some of the copies suggests that the text was also studied.52 At this point it is necessary to state that Jāmī’s authorship of the work has not been unquestioned. The source of the controversy is the fact that the work does not appear in any of three lists of works of Jāmī prepared by individuals who knew Jāmī personally. These lists are those of ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī (44 works), who was Jāmī’s student and who became a famous scholar himself with expertise in language studies; the list of ʿAbd al-Wāsiʿ Bākharzī (39 works), the author of Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, the most extensive work on Jāmī’s life the first draft of which Jāmī saw; and the list(s) of ʿAlīshīr Nawā’ī (18 works in Nasāʾim al-maḥabba and 32 works in Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn), Jāmī’s close friend and intellectual and literary companion.53 All of these individuals were in the close circle of Jāmī and none of them mention a treatise dedicated to waḍʿ.

Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya, Süleymaniye Library, İbrahim Efendi, 873, fols. 18a–23a. 51  Jāmī, Sharḥ Risāla al-waḍʿ li al-ʿaḍud, Atıf Efendi Library, 2420, fols. 135–41. 52  For example, Jāmī, Sharḥ al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya, Süleymaniye Library, Çelebi Abdullah, 388, fols. 7–12, and Sharḥ Risāla al-waḍʿ, Süleymaniye Library, Carullah, 1875, fols. 151b–158a. Still, I have not been able to find further commentaries based on Jāmī’s work. 53  In the following century Sām Mirzā also produced one of the most extensive list of works of Jāmī, 44 works, in Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī, however, his knowledge of Jāmī cannot be compared to that of the above three individuals.

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Therefore, the author of one of the most recent dissertations on the works of Jāmī, Kadir Turgut, claims that Jāmī is not the author of this work.54 How trustworthy is the tradition when it comes to this authorship problem? The compilers or copyists were not always absolutely uncompromising with the quality of the final product, which takes us to the second problematic issue pertaining to the treatise. In the sixth warning of the treatise, the title of a work is mentioned which reads as al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya in some manuscripts and al-Fawāʾid al-ghiyāthiyya in others.55 Since the subject matter where the title is mentioned (ism al-jins, ʿalam al-jins) can be located in the original text of al-Fawāʾid al-ghiyāthiyya and cannot be readily matched with a section in alFawā’id al-ḍiyāʾiyya, one can assume that in the autograph of the treatise the title must have actually been al-Fawāʾid al-ghiyāthiyya.56 It seems as though not all who engaged with this treatise had the expertise and competency to recognize and correct this mistake. Could they have even misidentified the author? There is another instance of a misattribution of authorship in this field, albeit from a much later period: a work with the title of al-Ḥāshiya al-jadīda ʿalā Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya by a certain Sayyid Ḥāfız al-Sirozī was attributed to ʿAlī Qushji.57 The same might have happened for this treatise, too. But, in the end, how important is the authorship issue? The existence of all the aforementioned collections and copies of the treatise in them show that, at least in the Ottoman linguistic tradition, Jāmī was seen as the author of a waḍʿ treatise. Even if there is not an unrefutable claim to be made that Jāmī was the author of this work at this stage, one cannot help but remember the Molla Malīhī anecdote mentioned by Taşköprülüzade in his al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya. Molla Malīhī, an ex-scholar-cum-heavy drinker who eventually preferred the 54  I am indebted to Dr. Turgut for drawing my attention to this point. He supports this idea by the fact that the work is mentioned neither in any of the lists of Jāmī’s works nor in collections of Jāmī’s works (Kulliyat-i Jāmī). Kadir Turgut, “Abdurrahman Cāmī, Hayatı, Eserleri ve Eserlerinin Türk Edebiyatına Etkisi” (PhD diss., İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2013), 54‒56, tables on pp. 28‒30. Özdemir does not question Jāmī’s authorship of this risāla. Özdemir, Dil ve Varlık, 205. He uses Sharḥ al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya, Nuruosmaniye, 4511. 55  Jāmī, M. Hilmi, F. Fehmi, 201, fol. 53a, reads al-Fawāʾid al-Ghiyāthiyya. Jāmī, Sharḥ Mullā Jāmī [Sharḥ Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya], Süleymaniye Library, Hamidiye 1449 has al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, fols. 232a–236a, fol. 235a. 56  I am indebted to Maruf Toprak for drawing my attention to this point and locating the issue in question in al-Fawāʾid al-ghiyāthiyya. Taşköprülüzade, Sharḥ al-Fawāʾid alghiyāthiyya min ʿilmay al-maʿānī wa-al-bayān, Dar Saadat [Istanbul]: Dār al-Tibāʿa alʿĀmira, [1312?], 55–57; p. 3 for attribution to ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī. 57  Özdemir, İslam Düşüncesinde Dil ve Varlık, 208. I was able to locate four copies of this work all dating from the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

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way to the winehouse over the path to knowledge, was Jāmī’s classmate when he was in Central Asia for study. Years later, Jāmī sent a work to his old friend. When the messenger found Molla Malīhī in a winehouse and wanted to hand over Jāmī’s gift, he refused, crying and telling the messenger to keep the work since he was not worthy of a such gift.58 Unfortunately, Taşköprülüzade does not supply any information about the title of the work, when this incident took place, and what happened to this treatise. What is significant for us is that no sources about Jāmī mention this anecdote. Could it be that this treatise that Jāmī sent to his friend in the Ottoman lands was in fact the waḍʿ treatise under discussion here, and it made its first appearance at some point in the sixteenth century? Of course, it could be a copy of another work of Jāmī. Still, there are periods in Jāmī’s life when he would not have been monitored by the authors of the aforementioned main sources about him—such as his Samarqand years, in probably the latter half of the 1430s, and his pilgrimage between 1472 and 1474—but this possibility remains largely speculative. 4.1 Al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya If the Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya attributed to Jāmī was a popular work about ʿilm al-waḍʿ, his al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, rich in references to waḍʿ, far surpassed it in popularity. Jāmī finished al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya in 897/1492, and it was one of his late works written for his son Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf months before his death.59 It turned into a standard textbook in Central Asia, South Asia, and the Ottoman madrasa system.60 In terms of Arabic grammar (nahw) 58  Taşköprülüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya, ed. Ahmed Subhi Furat (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1985), 217‒18. 59  Jāmī, al-Fawā’id al‑ḍiyā’iyya, al‑Beruni Oriental Institute, 8862 (autograph). Oral madrasa culture in present day Turkey has preserved the following anecdote about al-Fawā’id alḍiyā’iyya’s composition: One day Ḍiyā’ al-Dīn Yūsuf, Jāmī’s third son who was approximately fourteen years old then, returned home from his studies in the madrasa with his Arabic notes in his hand. At home he showed his notes to his father who found a mistake in them. Jāmī told his son that there was a mistake and Ḍiyā’ al-Dīn conveyed this to his teacher in the madrasa. His teacher insisted that he was right and said that Jāmī did not understand this issue. When Ḍiyā’ al-Dīn told Jāmī his teacher’s response Jāmī took up the challenge by saying “let me show what I understand from this issue” and he came up with al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya. I am indebted to Dr. Volkan Stodolsky for sharing this anecdote and his knowledge of the field of Arabic instruction in the madrasas with me. 60  In the instruction of Arabic two main tendencies emerged in madrasas. The Arabic world (especially Syria and Egypt) preferred the al-Alfiyya of Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274) whereas the Ottoman and the Eastern Islamic world preferred al-Kāfiya of Ibn al-Ḥājib. For how it was used in the Ottoman madrasa system see İclal Arslan, “Abdurrahman el-Cami ve el-Fevaidü’z-Ziyaiyye Adlı Eseri” (PhD diss., Dokuz Eylül University, 2008), 30‒32.

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instruction, it marked the final stage in one’s studies. As far as we know, the standard practice was to study it until the section of manṣūbāt.61 More specifically, al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya is an extensive commentary on Ibn al‑ Ḥājib’s grammar book al-Kāfiya, which is deemed difficult to use because of its extreme conciseness. There are several occasions where Jāmī directs the reader as to how to understand al-Kāfiya.62 Although written as a commentary on al-Kāfiya, al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya eventually acquired the status of a reference work in and of itself with a corpus of commentaries dedicated to it, the most well-known being those of ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī and ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm al-Siyalkutī. Jāmī starts his discussion by examining the etymology of the word kalām. Kalām comes from the infinitives (maṣdar) al-kalimatu and al-kalmu. Al-kalmu means to injure, and likewise words and speech (kalima, kalām) leave injuries on souls.63 After the initial discussion of kalima, Jāmī introduces the conceptual tool of waḍʿ, which he uses throughout al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. According to Jāmī, waḍʿ is ascribing (taʿyīn) one thing to another thing such that whenever one is said and comprehended (idrāk), the other one comes to mind. However, waḍʿ is to be distinguished from meaning: it is not simply meaning, but more precisely the process of the ascription of meaning.64 The section on waḍʿ in al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya is quite short—just a few lines—but the concept is foundational to Jāmī’s linguistic thought as attested by numerous references to it throughout the work. For example, the relationship between waḍʿ and dalālat (signification) is another foundational issue Jāmī dwells upon at the beginning. Waḍʿ requires dalālat because dalālat is a state in which when one thing is known, the other thing is (necessarily) known. However, dalālat does not require waḍʿ. A relatively detailed discussion of the concept of “starting” (ibtidāʾ) and the related particle min comes also at the beginning of the work. The positing of verbs (tense, the perfect tense, exclamatory verbs, verbs of praise, etc.) is another subject that draws attention. Similarly, there is a special focus on waḍʿ when personal pronouns are at stake. There is a multitude of examples.65 It is necessary to undertake a systematic study of the role of ʿilm al-waḍʿ in al-Fawāʾid 61  Arslan, “Abdurrahman el-Cami,” 24. 62  Jāmī, (El-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye) Molla Cāmi Tercümesi, trans. Ercan Elbinsoy (İstanbul: Yasin Yayınevi, 2005), 24. (Hereafter Jāmī, el-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye) 63  Jāmī, el-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye, 2; angels, genies, and God also have kalima on p. 3. 64  Jāmī, el-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye, 5. 65  For dalālat and waḍʿ Jāmī, el-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye, 8; concept of starting and min, p. 14; verbs and waḍʿ, pp. 19, 317, 428, 430, 470, 471, 480, 481, 490; personal pronouns and waḍʿ, pp. 286, 290, 291, 348. For waḍʿ in the context of definite nouns, p. 232; adjectives, pp. 254, 272;

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al-ḍiyāʾiyya, which could also clarify how Jāmī’s opinions on ʿilm al-waḍʿ were articulated in the linguistic tradition. Why did al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya turn into a popular textbook? One important reason is Jāmī’s preference for casual explanations of the rules of language, rather than simply conveying them as rules for memorization.66 In this way, the logical character of the language is emphasized. Additionally, one cannot help but wonder whether this approach was enhanced by the theoretical/ philosophical foundations of the work, that is, ʿilm al-waḍʿ. Where does Jāmī stand in the waḍʿ tradition? To answer that question, a systematic reading of the earlier material preceding Jāmī’s work and the later works that derived from it must be undertaken. In terms of earlier material, one needs to start with al-Ījī, who wrote the first work on waḍʿ, and then proceed to al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413) and ʿAlī Qushji who again wrote on the same subject. All of these individuals were significant figures for Jāmī’s scholarly training as well. In fifteenth-century Central Asia, it was impossible to engage in theological discussions without referring to al-Ījī’s al-Mawāqif, and Jāmī must have been involved in those discussions, especially in Samarqand. Jurjānī was one of Jāmī’s intellectual forefathers in the preceding generation, and he occasionally had debates with ʿAlī Qushji. As for the later commentaries, al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya prompted an almost immediate reaction, and two students of Jāmī, ʿIsām al-Dīn al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 944/1537) and ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī (d. 912/1506) wrote commentaries on it. In his commentary, ʿIsām al-Dīn al-Isfaraynī raised several objections to his teacher, and also to Lārī.67 Whether these objections were in any way pertinent to ʿilm al-waḍʿ is yet to be determined, but one can infer that ʿilm al-waḍʿ remained a significant issue for al-Isfaraynī from the fact that he later wrote a treatise on it. A seventeenth-century commentator of al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, Mollāzāda al-Kurdī (d. 1660), dedicated his short treatise to problematic issues he found in it and opened his discussion by claiming that Jāmī’s definition of waḍʿ was flawed.68 demonstrative pronouns, p. 302; adverbs, pp. 340, 344, 345; proper nouns, pp. 351, 352; active participle, pp. 392, 393, 397; passive participle, p. 399; particles, p. 501, etc. 66  For example, see Jāmī, el-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye, 26, where he explains why rafʿ is used for subject, and nasb for object in a sentence. 67  İsmail Durmuş, “İsferāyīnī İsāmüddin,” TDVIA. Allegedly, because of his refutations a conflict emerged between him and Lārī. In the sources about Jāmī Lārī is the better-known student and Isfarāʾīnī is unheard of. This is probably indicative of a censorship on him since from a scholarly point of view his fame and influence was no less than that of Lārī’s, if not more. 68  Mollazāda al-Kurdī, Taʿlīqa ʿalā al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya li al-Jāmī, Süleymaniye Library, Esad Efendi 3090, fols. 76–77. Al-Kurdī’s statement that he wrote this treatise for the benefit of

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The Reception of al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya

As mentioned above, there are quite a few copies of Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā alWaḍʿiyya, and it is plausible to claim that it was read and commented on for scholarly purposes, as indicated by the presence of marginal notes on the extant copies of the treatise. With al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya it is a different situation. The popularity of the text was such that it gained a social and occasionally personal significance, unexpected from a grammar text. In the Ottoman lands it became a tradition to go on jarr (cerre çıkmak) when one finished Molla Jāmī, an expression that became synonymous with al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya.69 This was the practice of advanced students visiting villages during the month of Ramadan and managing religious life there in return for material support from villagers. Students of Arabic were exposed to this text at the end of their study of grammar, suggesting that the study of this text corresponded to a certain stage of their life, possibly the late teens or early twenties. The following anecdote illustrates how the work could act as a time marker in one’s personal life, as well as its cultural pervasiveness. A certain scholar postponed marriage to his later ages, then eventually changed his mind after many years and got married to an attractive, younger lady at an advanced age. Past his prime, one day in the middle of conversation between the husband and wife, he looked at his wife with a trace of regret in his face and he said: Honey! I should have met you when I studied Molla Cami !70 A chronogram at the end of a certain commentary of al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya manuscript is also indicative: You have not seen a commentary composed like ʿIṣmat One that solves every difficulty of Molla Jāmī like ʿIsām Once God made its copying possible The “Brethren of Purity” said its date (as) ʿIṣmat 71 knowledgable ones and students in their study and in class gives us a glimpse of lively engagement with al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya that went on in the seventeenth century, fol. 76b. 69  The common name for Jāmī in the Ottoman context was Molla Jāmī. In the madrasa circles the name referred to not only the historical person but also to al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya. Thus, when one talks about “studying Molla Jāmī ” the text in question is al-Fawā’id alḍiyā’iyya. In fact, this is still the case in the madrasa circles of present day Turkey. 70  A language intensive standard madrasa training could easily take thirteen years according to a 19th century source. Arslan, “Abdurrahman el-Cami,” 26. I am indebted to Mahmut Kaya for sharing this anecdote. 71  Görmedin ʿİsmet gibi tedvin olunmuş haşiye/Ki ide Molla Cāmī’nin her müşkilin hal çün ʿİsām/İdicek Mevla müyesser bunun istinsahını/Dedi İhvān-ı Safā tarihin ʿİsmet tamam.

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The date of the manuscript is 1081/1670. What is intriguing in this chronogram is the phrase ikhwān-i ṣafāʾ and its implications for the intellectual environment. This is surely not the well-known Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ of the tenthcentury Abbasid times. One can trace this term in the correspondence of certain fifteenth-century intellectuals and scholars, and the occurrences of the term lead one to think that we are dealing with a certain network of individuals who crossed disciplines intellectually and spiritually, and attempted a new classification or synthesis of knowledge.72 If the person who wrote the above chronogram used this term deliberately, then this may situate al-Fawāʾid alḍiyāʾiyya in a particular intellectual environment in the late seventeenth century that deserves further research. 6

Reproduction History

As aforementioned, the first dated manifestation of Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā alwaḍʿiyya appears several decades after Jāmī’s death. In contrast, al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya caused immediate interest, and even in the last decade of the fifteenth century, several copies were made (nine). In the following century, twenty-three copies were produced, more than half (fourteen) dating from the second half of the century. The seventeenth century saw the peak: sixty copies were made, almost half of them (twenty-nine) dating from the period of 1650–1680. The reasons for this surge are not immediately apparent. 1648–1687 was the reign of Mehmed IV (the Hunter) and he was not known for a particular interest in scholarly issues. However, at this time the Qadizādelis, a religiously conservative movement, dominated the Ottoman political and religious scene, and we can plausibly connect this jump in the number of copies produced with the influence of the Qadizādelis. The eighteenth century was the century in which the fewest copies were made (fifteen). Nevertheless, about half of these copies (seven) coincide with the reign of Ahmed III (r. 1115/1703–1143/1730) who was known for his interest in learning. He always kept a fixed group of scholars around him for scholarly discussion. His reign also witnessed the introduction of print into the Ottoman Empire, and translations to and from French. According to a note following the poem, the chronogram gives 1081/1670 as the date. Jāmī, Al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya, Süleymaniye Library, Ragıp Paşa, 1310, fol. 201b. 72  İlker Evrim Binbaş, “Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (ca. 770s–858/ca. 1370s–1454): Prophecy, Politics, and Historiography in Late Medieval Islamic History” (PhD diss. University of Chicago, 2009), 80‒82, 91, 99‒106. İhsan Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kültür Hayatında İhvānu’s-safā ve Abdurrahmān Bistāmī,” Divan 2 (1996): 229‒40, 239‒40.

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A high number of copies were also produced in the nineteenth century (forty-two). Almost half of them (twenty) were printed, the earliest dating from 1257/1841 and the latest from 1308/1890. Among the printed copies, two print houses are of note. The first one was Bosnalı Hacı Muharrem Printing House, which printed al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya five times between 1863 and 1876. The other one was the royal press, that is, Maṭbaʿa-yi Āmira, which printed the work seven times from 1855 until 1890. Why the state printing press would be interested in printing this work is a question that also requires further research. Unfortunately, I do not have any data concerning the number of copies printed with each edition. Among approximately 250 manuscripts on which I undertook catalogue research, only one manuscript was copied in Egypt in 930/1523–4.73 At this point, without a survey of the catalogues of manuscript libraries in the Arab world, it is too early to make a definitive statement on the work’s reception in the Arab world, but my initial impression suggests that it was not as popular as it was in the Ottoman core lands.74 The presence of many manuscript copies of the text in various collections and several printed editions published from the nineteenth century onward also attests to the extreme popularity of the work in South Asia.75 7 Conclusion In light of the above discussion, how can we further reflect upon Jāmī’s thought? First, our study has shown that as an intellectual, Jāmī was engaged with the ʿilm al-waḍʿ tradition. Even if the authorship of the treatise attributed to him is questionable, the contents of al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya clearly demonstrate 73  Jāmī, al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya, Millet Library, Ali Emiri Arabi, 3696. 74  It is necessary to inquire the reproduction history of al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya in Central Asia, too, however, this requires working with the card catalogue of Al-Beruni Oriental Institute in Tashkent. The print catalogue (Sobranie Vostochnykh Rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR), the readily available catalogue of this collection, was not designed to list all the copies of a certain work and it records only some of the most significant manifestations of manuscripts. It mentions only a couple of copies al-Fawā’id al-ḍiyā’iyya and several ḥāshiyas written on it which is far from representative. Therefore, it is not the right source for such an undertaking. The card catalogue is much more comprehensive in recording all the works in the collection and thus surpasses the print catalogue. Unfortunately, I was not able to consult the card catalogue extensively for this paper. Sobranie Vostochnykh Rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, eds. A.A. Semenov et al., 11 vols. (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk UzSSR, 1952–1987). 75  See the contribution of Muzaffar Alam in the present volume.

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the existence of such an engagement. From a linguistic point of view, Jāmī was familiar with issues such as meaning, linguistic process(es) in the mind, and their relationship to the external world. The ontological implications of Jāmī’s linguistic thought themselves constitute an area of further research, a proposal supported by the fact that Jāmī wrote a significant amount on existence (wujūd). A systematic assessment of the Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya and al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya, together with his writings on existence, will add significantly to our understanding of Jāmī’s thought as well as its historical and intellectual context. From a historical point of view, it is clear that Jāmī was seen as the author of a well-known contribution in the field of waḍʿ. This seems to be particular to the Ottoman context, which hints at differing receptions of Jāmī in different cultural and scholarly contexts. Finally, the example of al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya shows that when a work acquired high enough acclaim, its influence could extend well beyond the borders of the field for which it was originally intended, becoming part of a larger cultural world. Bibliography Al-Ījī, ʿAḍud al-Dīn. al-ʿAḍudiyya. Süleymaniye Library, Fatih, 4719, fol. 2a–b. Arslan, İclal. “Abdurrahman el-Cami ve el-Fevaidü’z-Ziyaiyye Adlı Eseri.” PhD diss., Dokuz Eylül University, 2008. Binbaş, İlker Evrim. “Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (ca. 770s–858/ca. 1370s–1454): Prophecy, Politics, and Historiography in Late Medieval Islamic History.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009. Durmuş, İsmail. “İsferāyīnī İsāmüddin.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi. Durmuş, İsmail. “Sekkākī Ebū Yaʿkūb.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi. Fazlıoğlu, İhsan. “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kültür Hayatında İhvānu’s-safā ve Abdurrahmān Bistāmī.” Divan 2 (1996): 229‒40. Görgün, Tahsin. “Īcī, Adudüddin.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi. Kılıç, Hulusi. “el-Kāfiye.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. Al-Beruni Oriental Institute, 8862 (autograph). Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. Millet Library, Ali Emiri Arabi, 3696. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya. Süleymaniye Library, Ragıp Paşa, 1310. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. (El-Fevāidü’z-Ziyāiyye) Molla Cāmi Tercümesi. Translated by Ercan Elbinsoy. Istanbul: Yasin Yayınevi, 2005. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Risāla fī al-ṣarf. In Kulliyāt-i Jāmī. Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine 672, fols. 374a–379b.

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Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿ alā al-Waḍʿiyya. Süleymaniye Library, M. Hilmi, F. Fehmi, 201, fols. 48a–55b. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ Risāla al-waḍʿ. Süleymaniye Library, Carullah, 1875, fols. 151b–158a. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ Risāla al-waḍʿ li al-ʿaḍud. Atıf Efendi Library, 2420, fols. 135–41. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ al-Risāla al-waḍʿiyya. Süleymaniye Library, Çelebi Abdullah, 388, fols. 7–12. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya. Süleymaniye Library, İbrahim Efendi, 873, fols. 18a–23a. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ al-Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya. Süleymaniye Library, Laleli, 3021, fols. 74a–83b. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ Mullā Jāmī [Sharḥ Waḍʿiyya al-ʿaḍudiyya]. Süleymaniye Library, Hamidiye, 1449, fols. 232a–236a. Köksal, A. Cüneyd. Fıkıh Usūlünün Mahiyeti ve Gayesi. Istanbul: İSAM, 2008. McChesney, Robert D. “Islamic Culture and the Chinggisid Restoration: Central Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In The New Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 3. Edited by David O. Morgan and Anthony Reid, 239–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mollazāda al-Kurdi. Taʿlīqa ʿalā al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya li al-Jāmī. Süleymaniye Library, Esad Efendi 3090, fols. 76–77. Özdemir, İbrahim. İslam Düşüncesinde Dil ile Varlık: Vaz’ İlminin Temel Meseleleri. Istanbul: İz Yayıncılık, 2006. Shabistarī, Saʿd al-Dīn Mahmūd. Gulshan-i Rāz. Edited by Edward H. Whinfield. London: Trübner & Co., 1880. Sobranie Vostochnykh Rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR. Edited by A.A. Semenov et al. 11 vols. Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk UzSSR, 1952–1987. Smyth, William. “Controversy in a Tradition of Commentary: The Academic Legacy of Al-Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112/4 (1992): 589‒97. Taşköprülüzade. Sharḥ al-Fawāʿid al-ghiyāthiyya min ʿilmay al-ma ʿānī wa al-bayān. Dar Saadat [Istanbul]: Dār al-Tibāʿa al-ʿĀmira, [1312?]. Taşköprülüzade. al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya. Edited by Ahmed Subhi Furat. Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1985. Turan, Abdülbaki. “Elfiyye.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi. Turgut, Kadir. “Abdurrahman Cāmī, Hayatı, Eserleri ve Eserlerinin Türk Edebiyatına Etkisi.” PhD diss., İstanbul Üniversitesi, 2013. Türker, Ömer. “Seyyid Şerīf Cürcanī’nin Tevīl Anlayışı: Yorumun Metafizik, Mantıkī ve Dilbilimsel Temelleri.” PhD diss., Marmara University, 2006.

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Vasalou, Sophia. “ ‘Their Intention Was Shown by Their Bodily Movements’: The Baṣran Mu’tazilites on the Institution of Language.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47/2 (2009): 202‒21. Weiss, Bernard George. “ʿIlm al-waḍʿ: An Introductory Account of a Later Muslim Philological Science.” Arabica 34/3 (1987): 339‒56. Weiss, Bernard George. “Language in Orthodox Muslim Thought: A Study of ‘Waḍʿ alLughah’ and its Development.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1966. Weiss, Bernard George. “Medieval Muslim Discussions of the Origin of Language.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 124 (1974): 33‒41. Weiss, Bernard George. “A Theory of The Parts of Speech in Arabic (Noun, Verb and Particle): A Study in ʿIlm al-Waḍʿ.” Arabica 23/1 (1976): 23‒36. Weiss, Bernard George. “Waḍʿ al-Luġa.” Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics. Brill Online, 2015. Accessed 04 May 2015. . Yanık, Nevzat H. “İbn Muʿtī.” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslām Ansiklopedisi. Yıldırım, Abdullah. “Vaz ilmi ve Unkūdu’z-Zevāhir/Ali Kuşçu (İnceleme, Değerlendirme).” M.A. thesis. Marmara Üniversitesi, 2007.



Appendix: Collections Containing Jāmī’s Treatise in Chronological Order (Based on Süleymaniye Library Catalogue Search)

Süleymaniye, Laleli, 3021 Süleymaniye, Laleli, 3030 Süleymaniye, Kasidecizade, 558 (The only single standing copy of this work) Burdur İl Halk, 417 Süleymaniye, Hamidiye, 1265 Atıf Efendi, 2420 Süleymaniye, Mihrişah Sultan, 299 Elmalı Halk, 2989 Süleymaniye, Carullah, 1875 Süleymaniye, H. Hüsnü Paşa, 1480 Süleymaniye, M. Hilmi, F. Fehmi, 00201 Süleymaniye, Şehid Ali Paşa, 2302 Süleymaniye, Yazma Bağışlar, 1718 Süleymaniye Esad Efendi 3029 Süleymaniye, Çelebi Abdullah, 388 Süleymaniye, Yazma Bağışlar, 753

959/1551–52 1050/1640–41 1067/1656–57 1083/1672–73 1083/1672–73 1085/1674 1085/1674–75 1676 1089/1678–79 1097/1685–86 1099/1687–88 1101/1689–90 1110/1698–99 1704 1130/1717–18 1131/1718–19

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(cont.)

Süleymaniye, Halet Efendi ve Eki, 523 Kastamonu Yek. KHK 2483 Elmalı Halk, 2834 Süleymaniye, Kasidecizade, 719

1170/1756–57 1195/1780 1788 1277/1860–61

Manuscripts that cannot be dated exactly Süleymaniye, Reşid Efendi, 581 Süleymaniye, Darülmesnevi, 479 Süleymaniye, Süleymaniye, 910

Post Saçaklızade (d. 1145/1732) Post Saçaklızade (d. 1145/1732) 1173?/1759?, 1223?/1808?

chapter 10

Jāmī’s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn Alexey Khismatulin To Marijan Molé (1924–1963)

⸪ There is a unique case in Persian hagiographical literature when, after the death of the founder of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband in 791/1389, four different hagiographic works were dedicated to him and compiled one after another. Two of them have the same title—the Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn, but represent quite distinct compilations known among specialists as the shorter and the longer versions of the Anīs (henceforth Anīs-1 and Anīs-2 respectively). While comprising the most significant accounts of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, they differ not only in their extent but also in their content, dates of compilation, and, more importantly, in authorship. Another two—the Risāla-yi Bahāʾiyya by Abūʾl-Qāsim b. Masʿūd and the Maqāmāt of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband by Abūʾl-Muḥsin Muḥammad Bāqir, compiled later, are also considered to be separate hagiographies of Naqshband. The most important problem that has been raised in relation to these hagiographies concerns the authorship of both versions of the Anīs: Anīs-1 appears to be anonymous, while Anīs-2 is attributed to a certain Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī—a figure absolutely unknown in the famous Naqshbandī hagiographies. This problem has been discussed by specialists involved in Naqshbandī studies for more than half a century. It was the late prominent Slovenian and Polish scholar, Marijan Molé, who first addressed this problem in his paper published in 1959.1 From then on, the issue was examined by several scholars, 1   Marijan Molé, “Autour du Daré Mansour: l’apprentissage mystique de Baha’ al-Din Naqshband,” Revue des Études Islamiques 27 (1959), cahier 1: 35–66. About him: Gianroberto Scarcia, “Ricordo di Marijan Molé,” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 13 (1963): 319–25; Alexey Khismatulin and Samra Azarnouche, “The Destiny of a Genius Scholar:

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Khismatulin

but no definitive conclusions have been made thus far.2 The most recent research on the issue was published by two Iranian scholars, but without deep content analysis of the Naqshbandī sources already published by now, their conclusion on the authorship of both versions of the Anīs seems more like a right guess rather than a good probative argument.3 Due to a rare foreword composed in rhymed prose (sajʿ ) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī to a redaction of Anīs-1, and the results of its textual comparison with Anīs-2, we can now undoubtedly conclude that both versions were compiled by a well-known disciple of Naqshband and one of the first Sufi shaykhs of Jāmī—Muḥammad Pārsā al-Bukhārī (d. 822/1420). That is why the present paper aims not only to finalize the older discussions and to show how these two quite distinct versions of the Anīs correlate with each other, but also to clarify the role of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī in the first and second redactions of Anīs-1. 1

The First Redaction of Anīs-1—Patna Copy

In this redaction of Anīs-1, the compiler’s name is not mentioned, and therefore the text appears to be anonymous. The earliest manuscript of this redaction, as stated in its colophon, was copied by Jāmī in 856/1452 when he was about 40 lunar years old. It is possible, of course, that Jāmī could have transcribed this redaction from an earlier copy. But no earlier copy of it has been found in the world manuscript collections so far. Therefore, Jāmī was most probably the first one to copy this redaction from its original by Pārsā for further transcription.

Marijan Molé (1924–1963) and His Archives in Paris,” Manuscripta Orientalia 20/2 (2014): 45–56. 2  For more details and bibliography, see Jürgen Paul, Doctrine and Organization. The Khwajagan/ Naqshbandiya in the first generation after Baha’uddin (Halle-Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998); Devin DeWeese, “The Legitimation of Bahā’ ad-Dīn Naqshband,” Asiatische Studien/ Études asiatiques 50/2 (2006): 261–305; Hamid Algar, “Anīs al-tālebīn wa ‘oddat al-sālekīn,” Encyclopædia Iranica II fasc. 1 (1985): 76–7. A short article by Hamid Algar does not touch upon the questions discussed below. The article was then translated into Persian and contributed by Masʿūd Anṣārī Khūshābar and ʿAlī-Riḍā Dhukāvatī Qarāgizlū to: Farhang-i āthār-i irāni-islāmī 1 (1385/2007): 348. 3  Āghā Ḥusaynī Ḥusayn and Yalamihā Aḥmad-Riḍā, “Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn az kīst?,” Muṭālaʿāt-i ʿIrfānī 17 (Dānishkada-yi ʿulūm-i insānī-yi Dānishgāh-i Kāshān, 1392/2013): 5–20.

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

311

Jāmī’s manuscript is kept in the Khudā Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna (India) and is described in the Library catalogue.4 Starting with the traditional ammā baʿd immediately after the basmala, and ending with a story told by a “reliable friend” about Jalāl al-Dīn Khālidī Kishī and his impression of Naqshband,5 it has several significant codicological features: 1. The most important feature is that the manuscript was wrongly bound— its final part occurred in the beginning and vice versa; evidently, this happened to Jāmī’s manuscript rather late, for no other copy stemming from this copy and attesting such mis-binding has been found until now; 2. Time and human factors affected the manuscript to the extent that it has become unreadable in many places; 3. Anīs-1 as presented by the manuscript has a few marginal notes—some of them obviously belong to Muḥammad Pārsā, while others were presumably written by Jāmī. By the end of the 1950s, Molé completed a critical edition of this version for publication under the title Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn (the abridged version). He based his edition on Jāmī’s manuscript, known at that time as the Bankipur copy, and used eight more reliable copies for comparison with it. After the unexpected death of Molé in 1963, the prepared text (without his foreword and notes), together with his archives, was moved to the CNRS Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes and, unfortunately, remained there unpublished. In 1996, having no idea of the work done by Molé, an Indian scholar, Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn, edited and published Anīs-1 using only Jāmī’s manuscript. Its aforementioned features caused many mistakes to appear in this edition, and the arrangement of the marginal notes was wrongly understood by the editor. Following a description made by Abdul Muqtadir—the compiler of the Khudā Bakhsh Library catalogue—the editor visually compared a handwriting used in the manuscript with the authentic handwriting by Jāmī along with this redaction of Anīs-1 with a copy of Anīs-2 also kept in the Library (and described in its catalogue).6 The results of this comparison led him to an unexpected conclusion: Jāmī not only transcribed the text, but also rearranged and abridged it. That is why Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn attributed Anīs-1 to the poet, and gave it the title Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn (see 4  Bahadur Abdul Muqtadir-khan, Catalogue of Arabic & Persian Manuscripts in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library XVI (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1994): 46 (no. 1377); also at: http://kblibrary.bih.nic.in/Vol16/Bp044.htm. 5  The story is quoted by Jāmī, see ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1382/2003), 393. 6  Abdul Muqtadir, Catalogue XVI, 44–46 (no. 1376).

312

Khismatulin

fig. 10.1). Unfortunately, his baseless attribution misled some scholars, who began to consider the text as the authentic redaction by Jāmī.7 2

The Second Redaction of Anīs-1—St. Petersburg Copy

There is another manuscript, held in the manuscript collection of the Faculty of Asian and African Studies of the St. Petersburg State University Library (Russia). While there was no comprehensive catalogue of Persian manuscripts,8 some of them were described by the late Soviet Iranist Abdurahman T. Tagirdzhanov (1907–1983). His extensive description of 81 historical, geographical, and biographic texts, which covers 169 items of the collection including the redaction in question,9 was published in 1962 and obviously did not reach Molé. The manuscript contains 29 original texts, most of which were compiled by the Naqshbandiyya masters and transcribed between 944–951/1538–1545 in Bukhara by one scribe whose name was Luṭf Allāh Ḍīyā al-Dīn b. Abūʾl-Maʿālī al-Sanūjirdī. Among these texts is Anīs-1. Its full title there is Anīs al-ṭālibīn dar sharḥ-i Maqāmāt-i Sulṭān al-ʿārifīn Khwāja-yi Bahāʾ al-Ḥaqq wa‌ʾl-Dīn. The main text of this copy generally corresponds with both the critical edition prepared by Molé and Jāmī’s manuscript published in Patna by Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn. At the same time, there are some key features in the St. Petersburg copy that differ substantially from both texts, and which provide sufficient reason to consider the text represented in St. Petersburg’s copy as the second redaction of Anīs-1 made by Jāmī himself. 1. To begin with, the main text is preceded by a foreword written in sajʿ by Jāmī (see fig. 10.2 and below) and located before the same “anonymous” foreword of the Patna copy (see fig. 10.3). In his foreword Jāmī uses his honorific 7  ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn, ed. Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1996). Hamid Algar, “Jāmī ii. and Sufism,” Encyclopædia Iranica XIV, fasc. 5 (2008): 475–79. The statements related to Anīs-1 in the article need to be revised. 8   Firuza Abdullaeva, “Persian manuscripts collection of the St Petersburg University: Gotwald’s curse?,” in Writings and Writing from another world and another era: Investigations in Islamic Text and Script in Honour of Dr Januarius Justus Witkam Professor of Codicology and Palaeography of the Islamic World at Leyden University, ed. R.M. Kerr and T. Milo (Cambridge: Archetype, 2011), 1–23. 9  Abdurahman Tagirdzhanov, Opisanie tadjikskikh i persidskikh rukopisei vostochnogo otdela biblioteki LGU (Description of Tajik and Persian Mansucripts at the Oriental department of the library of the Leningrad State University) (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1962), 286–310.

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

313

title ʿImād al-Dīn and plainly says that the narratives presented in the text were collected and compiled by Muḥammad Pārsā al-Bukhārī: In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Merciful. In His name, Glory, Praise from us, may His Stature be elevated. Praise to God who adorned our souls with vision of the glimmers of maqāmāt and enlightened our hearts with observation of the extraordinary phenomena. May the blessing and peace be upon His Prophet—the head of Sayyids and the source of happiness—and upon his family and companions, who followed his example. 1

2

3

4

5

6

But thereafter, scribbling these words loop after loop, a servant of beggars, ʿImād al-Dīn—nobody, a son of nobody—says: ‘There is a famous epistle and a valuable gift,

�‫ب����س� ا �ل�ل�ه ا �لر��ح��م� ن� ا �لر‬ �‫ح����ي‬ ‫م‬ ‫م‬ ُ� ‫َّ تَ َ َ َ أ‬ � ُ ‫ش‬ � �����‫ب�ا ��س��مِ�ه ����س ب‬ .‫ح�ا �نِ�ه ح���م�د ِه �ِم���ن�ا ����ع�الی ���� ��ن�ه‬ ‫�ذ‬ ‫ا �ل‬ � ‫ح���م�د �ل�ل�ه ا �ل� �ی‬ ‫ز ّ� ن ن���ف�� ����سن���ا �بم��ط�ا �ل�ع��ة ط ا �ل ا لم��ق���ا �م�ا ت‬ � ‫�ي� و‬ ‫�ة وع‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ن ق‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ش‬ � ‫و� ّور ��لوب���ا �بم����ا �ه�د �وا ر� ا �ل�ع�ا د ا‬ َ ََ ُ َ َّ ُ‫َّ َ �ة‬ ‫َوا �ل���ص�لا َوا �ل��س�لا ع��لی ن��ب� ي�ِ�ه‬ ‫م‬ ‫����سّ���د ا �ل��س�ـ�ا د ا ت‬ � ‫ي‬ ‫ت‬ � ‫و�م ن�� ب�� ا �ل��س�ع�ا د ا‬ َ ‫َ ََعآ َأَ ْ َ ت أ ن آ‬ ‫ع�� � �ل�ه � �ص‬ � ‫ح�ا �ِ�ه ا ��ل�� د ب�ي��� �� د ا �ِ�ه‬ ِ‫بِ ب‬ ِ‫وَّ لى ِِ و ب‬ ‫ا �م�ا ب��ع�د‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ن‬ ‫گ خ شن‬ � ��‫�مي‬ ‫�و�ي�د �را ��������د ه ا�ي� ک�ل���م�ا � پ�����ي�چ� د ر پ�����ي��چ‬ ����‫خ��ا د ا �ل��ـف����ق��را �ع�ـ��م�ا د ا �ل�د � ن �ه���� � ن �ه‬ �‫ي� ي چ� ب� ي چ‬ ‫م‬ ‫ت ن‬ ‫ک‬ ‫��ه ر��س�ا �ل�ه ا ����س�� �ا می‬ ‫ت� ف گ‬ �‫و‬ ‫�را ـم‬ � ‫ح�����ه‬ ‫یش�� �م��ق���ا �م�ا ت‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ن‬ � � ‫�ض‬ ‫� ع��ليّ��ه‬ � ‫م‬ � � �� � ‫�م���� � ب ر ر‬ ‫ح‬ ‫� ت ن‬ ‫�ش‬ ‫� ��س��يّ��ه‬ ‫م������ت���م�ل ب�ر طر کرا �م�ا‬ ‫و‬ ‫ح‬

which contains commentary on the high maqāmāt and encloses the outline of the Sunni miracles ‫�ق‬ of the pole of the realm of �‫��ـ�ط� ب� �م��لک �ه�د ا ي� ت‬ guidance, ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ �‫و ���لک ���ط� ب� ولا ي� ت‬ and the vessel of the pole of sainthood, ‫ق �ة‬ the role model for the men of �‫��د و ا رب�ـ�ا ب� �م�ـ�لا �م� ت‬ reprehension, ‫و ز���د �ة ا �ص‬ � and the essence of the men of �‫ح�ا ب� ��س�لا �م� ت‬ ‫ب‬ salvation— ‫ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫آن‬ ‫� � طوا ي���� را �م��ق����بول ج��ا � و د �ل��پ��ـ��س��ـن���د‬ for these groups, he is attractive and desirable [that is] ‫ح ق ا �ل�د � ن ا �ل� ش‬ ‫�خ�وا ج��ه ب���ه�ا ء ا �ل‬ � ،‫��م�����ت����هر ب�ن�ق�� ش����ب� ن��د‬ ‫و‬ �‫ي‬ � Khwāja Bahāʾ al-Ḥaqq wa‌ʾl-Dīn, famous as Naqshband,

314 7

8

9

10

11

‫�ذ �ق‬ ‫ّو��ـن���ا ا �ل�ل�ه �ف�ي �م��ـق���ـ�ا �م�ـ�ات�ِ�ه‬ ‫�م� ن �ل��ذ ا ت‬ ‫� �م��ق���ا �ص�د ِه و �مرا �م�ات�ِ�ه‬ � ‫���ا ن ��ع�ض��� ح�ا لا ت‬ ‫�ق‬ �‫� ن�ا ي�� ب‬ ‫ب‬ �‫ح‬ ‫و بي � ب ی‬ ‫�خ ف‬ ‫ق‬ �‫و ��ـ�ل��ي��ـ���ـ�ه �م�ـ�ط�ـ�لـ‬ ‫�خ� ا ��ه � ش‬ ،‫م����ارا ��لي�ِ�ه‬ ‫وج‬ the above mentioned Khwāja, َ َ may the mercy of Allāh be upon ْ‫َ ْح�مَ��ةُ ا �ل�ل�ه ع��ل‬ ، ‫�ه‬ � ‫ر‬ him,— ِ‫ِ ي‬ ُ ْ ُ‫أ‬ ‫ا �ع ن�ی � ��سَو�ة الا و��لي��ا ء‬ I mean, the role model for the saints and the essence of the pure ones, ‫و خ��لا �ص��ة الا � فص��ي���ا ء‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ح ق ا �ل�د � ن‬ ‫�خ�وا ج��ه ع�لا ء ا �ل‬ Khwāja ʿAlā al-Ḥaqq wa‌ʾl-Dīn, ،‫ي� ا ل��م�عرو�� ب��ع��ط�ار‬ ‫�� و‬ َ ُ ُ َ َّ َ‫ن‬ ْ known as ʿAṭṭār, َ �ْ‫ح�هُ �ـ�ا نـ‬ ‫ال‬ � ‫ا‬ ‫ا‬ � ، � ‫�س‬ ‫� ا �ل�ل�ه‬ ‫ـ‬ ‫ا‬ ‫ر‬ ‫و‬ ‫ر‬ let Allāh enlighten his spirit with ِ‫ور ر و بِ ر‬ may Allāh let us taste in his Maqāmāt some of the pleasures of his purposes and aims— with explanation of some states of the lawful deputy and the absolute successor of

the light of mysteries,— 12

13

14

15

16

Khismatulin

which the center of the circle of �‫��ه ن���ق����ط�ه د اي�ره ت�و‬ ‫حي���د‬ ‫ک‬ oneness ‫ت‬ and the circle of the center of ‫و د ا ي�ـ�ره ن���ق����ط�ه � �غ�ر�ي�د‬ caroling, ‫�م ن�� ب����ـ ا �ه�ل � فص���ا ء‬ the source for the people of ‫ع‬ pureness ‫ف‬ ‫� ب� ا �ص��ط�����ا ء‬ �‫�و�ک‬ ‫وک‬ and the star of chosenness— ‫�خ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ن‬ ‫م‬ Khwāja in form and substance, ‫�خ�وا ج��ه �صور� و �م�ع� �وا ج��ه ح‬ ،‫��م�د پ�ار��س�ا‬ ‫ی‬ Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā, َْ َ َّ ‫َق‬ َ ُ ‫ک‬ may Allāh sanctify his innocent ،‫��د ��س ا �ل�ل�هُ ر وح�هُ الا ز� ی‬ spirit, ‫ت‬ ‫�� ت ت ق گ‬ � ‫�م��ق�����د ��س��لک‬ ‫�رد ا ن�ي��د ه‌‌ا ن��د‬ � ‫حر�ير و سم�� �����ر�ير‬ has tied together by a writing ‫ي‬ ‫� ن �ذ‬ thread and related, ‫ت‬ ‫ن‬ � �‫وب��د�ي� و����سي���ل�ه ط�ا �لب��ا �را �ل‬ and, by this means, has let the ‫آ‬ ‫��سر� د ا ب� چ� ش����ا ن�ي��د ه‌‌ا ن��د‬ seekers taste the pleasure of traditions. َّ ‫�ذ‬ Peace be with you! That is how it is’. .‫وا �ل��س�لا �م و �هو ��ه�ه ن���ا �ه� ا‬

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

315

2. The main text of Anīs-1 ends with a short “semi-colophon” that joins another text, appearing as a supplement and bearing its own title: the Dhikr-i Quṭb alaqṭāb Khwāja-yi ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (Mention of the Pole of poles Khwāja ʿAlā alDīn ʿAṭṭār)—a deputy of Naqshband. In the supplement, there are five stories about Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband that repeat verbatim the same five stories located at the very end of the first redaction of Anīs-1 (see below for more detail). 3. The main text of the Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb follows a simple basmala and ends with a chronogram obviously written by Jāmī (see fig. 10.4 and below). The chronogram shows that the St. Petersburg copy was transcribed from an early copy (875/1470) made by Jāmī at the age of 58 lunar years, and 19 years later than his copy used for the Patna publication. The chronogram reads: I have written the Maqāmāt of the men of religion, for there is no one who has such miracles. You will say the compilation date of the Maqāmāt of the men, if there are not two alifs in the Maqāmāt.10

‫ن شت ق‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ن ن‬ �‫�و����م �م��ـ���ـ�ا �م�ـ�ا � �م�ـ�رد ا � د�ي‬ ‫ن‬ ‫� ا�م�ا ت‬ ‫ز ن‬ ‫ک‬ �‫� ن���ي����س� ت‬ ‫��ه��ک��س را ا �ي�� ��س�ا � کر‬ ‫ن ت خگ‬ ‫�م��ـق���ـ�ا �م�ـ�ا ت‬ � �‫� �م�ـ�رد ا � ب���اري‬ ‫�و�ی‬ � ‫گ‬ ‫� د ا �ل��ف� د �م��ـق���ـ�ا �م�ـ�ا ت‬ �‫� ن���ي����س� ت‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ا �ر و‬

I have seen no other reference to this foreword and chronogram in the existing manuscript catalogues, except for Tagirdzhanov’s description of the same copy. Moreover, none of the listed features are marked by Molé for any copy used in his critical text of Anīs-1. This chronogram provides crucial evidence for reading this manuscript as the second redaction prepared by Jāmī for Anīs-1. There is no doubt that the first redaction belongs to Muḥammad Pārsā, and the second one to Jāmī. In 856/1452, Jāmī, acting as a scribe, made a copy of the first, authentic redaction of Anīs-1 written by Pārsā and presently lost; the copy is preserved today in the Khudā Bakhsh Library of Patna. In 875/1470, Jāmī found the authentic text of Pārsā’s diary notes about ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār and his sayings, added it to the first redaction of Anīs-1, and supplied the compiled text with his own title, foreword and chronogram. Thus, Jāmī, acting as a compiler and editor, realized a well-known but unfulfilled intention of Pārsā to gather the Maqāmāt of Naqshband and the sayings of ʿAṭṭār under one cover. This intention was stated by Pārsā in the foreword to Anīs-1, repeated in Anīs-2, and

10  MS 386, fol. 227b (see fig. 10.4). Calculation should be made for word combination Maqāmāt-i mardān excluding two alifs.

316

Khismatulin

confirmed by Jāmī himself in his Nafaḥāt al-uns11 as well as by Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Kāshifī Vāʿiẓ (d. 939/1533) in his Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt (Sprinklings from the Spring of Life).12 There is an important reason behind why Jāmī did this. Due to his own admission in the Nafaḥāt al-uns, we know that Jāmī was deeply impressed by his first and last meeting with Muḥammad Pārsā when the latter blessed him. The meeting took place when Jāmī was about five years old, during Pārsā’s last pilgrimage to Mecca, and seven months before Pārsā’s death in Medina. In the year 882/1477, that is, at the age of 65 and seven years after the completion of the second redaction of Anīs-1, Jāmī wrote:

‫ت � ن َّ ا ش ن‬ ‫ا�م ز‬ ‫��ه �ه ن�� ز ف‬ ‫��ه ا ز �آ ن� �ش������ص� ت� ��س�ا ل ا ����س� ت‬ � ‫د‬ ‫ا‬ � ��� � �� ‫م‬ � ‫ع‬ � ‫ل‬ � � ‫ط‬ ‫ا‬ � ��‫ص‬ ‫ک‬ ‫و� ک‬ � � � � ‫ر‬ �‫و‬ � ‫ی‬ ‫و ر‬ ‫ور ي‬ َّ‫�ذ‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ .��‫چ� ش��� �م�� ا ����س�� و �ل� � د ي��د ا ر �م ب���ارک ا ي�����ا � د ر د ل �م‬ ‫م‬ Today, when sixty years have gone by since then, his bright image still stands in front of my eyes, and pleasure of the blessed meeting with him is still in my heart.13

This means that all his life Jāmī maintained a great reverence for one of his first Sufi shaykhs. Given such reverence, Jāmī probably took upon himself the obligation to find and copy the authentic writings and sayings of Pārsā, sometimes commenting on them. If this is the case (and evidence from the world manuscript collections confirm such a supposition), then Jāmī’s main task would have been to obtain the original authentic texts written by Pārsā. Consequently, the texts transcribed either by Jāmī himself or by his team of scribes are currently the most reliable versions available to us. At least in the second half of his life, Jāmī is known to have had a sophisticated publishing house, that is, a whole staff of copyists who transcribed his numerous texts, and then he edited and proofread them personally.14

11  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 394. 12  ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Kāshifī Vāʿiẓ, Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīnīyān (Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi nūrīyānī, 2536/1356/1977), 1:144. 13  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 398. 14  See Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 53 (of the foreword by M. ʿĀbidī).

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

3

317

The Copyist’s Work

These texts were also the most reliable for the copyist, Ḍīyā al-Dīn b. AbūʾlMaʿālī in the 1530–40s. Generally, there were two categories of medieval copyists. Some of them worked in a way similar to modern copy machines, transcribing exactly what they had in hand, while others combined the function of copyist with editorial work, interfering with and altering the original text. This especially concerns the marginal notes, which were sometimes omitted during the copying, and sometimes introduced into the main text. As other texts included in the St. Petersburg manuscript show, Ḍīyā al-Dīn, fortunately, belonged to the first category. A seven-year gap between the earliest and the latest dates of transcription clearly indicates that he received no order from a customer to copy these texts from an earlier manuscript. This means that each text was separately copied by him without the pressure of a deadline for his personal use and pleasure. Unlimited in time, Ḍīyā al-Dīn looked for the original (aṣl) or the most reliable copy, often marking his own ‫ق �ة‬ copy with a marginal note—“collated with the original” (‫ )ب���ل�غ ا �ل���م�����ا ب��ل� ب�ا �ص���ل�ه�ا‬or just “collated” ( ‫)ب���ل�غ‬. For example, the Risāla-yi qudsiyya (The Essay on the Holy Sayings), which is considered so far to be the first compilation written by Pārsā after the death of Naqshband, was copied by Ḍīyā al-Dīn in 946 AH from its original, which was transcribed and commented upon in turn by Jāmī, judging from the marginal notes containing his signature—‘J, sallamahu Allāhu’

ُ

ََ ُ َّ

(‫)�ج ��س�ل�م�ه ا �ل�ل�ه‬.15

Ḍīyā al-Dīn applied this same approach to other texts. However, he was faced with an unexpected problem in the case of the Anīs. Having transcribed the second redaction by Jāmī with Pārsā’s diary notes about ʿAṭṭār, he then found the first redaction by Pārsā. Both redactions were reliable and authentic. He had no choice but to place the variant readings of the first redaction on the margins of the second one. Therefore, in this copy we have a kind of critical edition of the Anīs made by a certain medieval copyist or, following the definition given by Paul Maas (1880–1964), the “contaminated” text.16 15  A Paris copy of the Risāla-yi qudsiyya accompanied with the same marginal notes, however, fewer in number and ending with a posthumous eulogy—‘J, quddisa sirruhu’

ُُّ

(‫��سِ ره‬

َ ّ ‫ُق‬ ‫)�ج � ِ�د ��س‬, was described by the late Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ʿIrāqī in his foreword to the criti-

cal edition of the work. See Muḥammad Pārsā, Qudsiyya, ed. Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ʿIrāqī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ṭahūrī, 1354/1975), 91–92 (of the foreword). 16  Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, trans. from German Barbara Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 7–8 (§ 10).

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Khismatulin

4 The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb Pārsā’s diary notes about ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, occupying one third of the contaminated text, may be classified into three groups: 1) ʿAṭṭār’s sayings related to Sufi practice with Pārsā’s comments on them; 2) sayings, describing his relationship with Pārsā, recorded by the latter before the death of ʿAṭṭār in 802/1400 and immediately afterwards (most of the sayings from these groups, with some corrections, were included by ʿAlī Kāshifī in his Rashaḥāt and some of them were quoted by Jāmī in his Nafaḥāt);17 and 3) several maxims by Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband with a few accounts of him, five of which repeat the same accounts as in the first redaction. Such thematic diversity seems to have arisen because these notes may have been recorded by Pārsā in his diary or on separate sheets, which were neither prepared for publication nor given any titles by him. Nevertheless, a considerable number of ʿAṭṭār’s sayings related to Sufi practice were explained by Pārsā on these sheets following a classical pattern of sharḥ, when comments on a certain saying are based on compilations of the citations taken from the various authoritative sources. The same pattern was applied by Pārsā to comment on Naqshband’s sayings in the Risāla-yi qudsiyya. The main purpose of this pattern was to show how the sayings correspond with the previous doctrinal tradition, and what this tradition is. Therefore, the authoritative sources used by the commentator played an important role. To comment on ʿAṭṭār’s sayings, Pārsā freely borrowed entire passages (sometimes abridged by him) from the Sharḥ Manāzil al-sāyirīn written in Arabic by Kamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. 736/1335) and especially from the Misbāḥ al-hidāya wa miftāḥ al-kifāya written in Persian by Maḥmūd b. ʿAlī al-Kāshānī (d. 735/1334–5) as well as from a few other books. Compiling citations or “hidden” borrowings was a very typical practice in the Islamic Middle Ages for writing in the form of the secondary tāʾlīf, which was quite common to all of the genres of Islamic medieval literature. Writing in this form, a medieval compiler had either to have at his disposal or to study in a traditional way a considerable amount of books written by his forerunners in order to select materials from them for his own compilation. While writing in the form of the primary tāʾlīf, mostly applied in Islamic written tradition to hagiographical genres such as maqāmāt and manāqib as well as to hadith literature, the same medieval compiler had to find a considerable number of living informants and narrators to gather information for his own book. Hence, the compiler must have chosen between the available written or oral sources correspondingly. Some combination of the two, however, seems to have been possible. In both forms, the compiler first had to collect (jamʿ) 17  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:144–58; Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 394–96.

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

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materials, then make selections (takhṣīṣ) of what to include and/or exclude, and finally to compile (tāʾlīf ) the selected materials according to a certain generic order already prescribed by the literary and scholarly traditions of his day, thereby receiving the right to title his own compilation and write a foreword. This logical approach to writing compilations is quite similar to that widespread in our days, for example, at the student level.18 By deleting the five repeated stories from the first redaction of Anīs-1, then simply supplementing it with Pārsā’s diary notes about ʿAṭṭār and slightly editing the final text, Jāmī also received the right to provide it with his own title and foreword, composed by him in rhymed prose. Located before the foreword by Pārsā, Jāmī’s foreword aimed, on the one hand, to express once again the great reverence owed to Pārsā by stating his authorship and, on the other, to plainly show that such a combination of both texts had never been compiled by Pārsā himself. This conclusion is confirmed by Jāmī in his chronogram at the end of the second edition, and ʿAlī Kāshifī in his Rashaḥāt:

َ ّ ‫ّ ن ُق‬ ‫ن‬ ‫��ه ��ع�ض� ا ز ک�لم�ا ت �ق�د ����س���ه � ض ت �خ‬ � � � ‫پ�وش�����ي���د ه �م�ا ن��د ک ب ��ی‬ ‫ح����ر� �و ج‬ ‫ � ِ�د ��س‬،�‫ا��ه ع�لا ء ا �ل ِ�د�ي‬ ‫ي‬ َ ّ ‫ُق‬ ُُّ ‫ خ��د �م� ت� �خ� ا��ه حم‬،‫ح� � ت� م ‌‌ ف� �م د ه ا ن��د‬ ‫م‬ ‫��ا �ل�� �ص‬ ‫ ک‬،‫��سِ ره‬ ‫وج‬ ‫ � ِ�د ��س‬،‫��م�د پ�ار��س�ا‬ ‫� �ب ی ر و‬ ‫��ه د ر �ج س‬ ‫ُُّ ق ت‬ ‫��ه ��ه �م��ق���ا �م�ا ت � ض ت �خ‬ ‫کا � ت� �آ د ه ا ن��د م ‌‌�خ� ا ����ست���ه ا ن‬ ‫ا��ه‬ ‫�د‬ � � ‫ د ر �ي���د‬،‫��سِ ره‬ ‫ک‬ � � ‫ور‬ ‫و‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ح����ر� �و ج‬ ‫ی‬ ‫و‬ ‫ب‬ ‫گ � ق ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫�ب�زر� ا ل‬. � ‫ ��لي� ک‬،‫��� ن���د‬ ‫ح�ا � �ک‬ �‫�� ن� �م��ي��سر � ش����د ه ا ����س� ت‬ Let it be known that some of the holy sayings by ʿAlā al-Dīn, may his soul be sanctified, told by him in companionship sessions, have been written down by Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā, may his soul be sanctified, who wanted to supplement the Maqāmāt of the Great Khwāja with them. However, for him it was impossible.19

Having already edited Anīs-1, it is curious how Jāmī modestly fails to mention in the Nafaḥāt both his participation in fulfilling Pārsā’s intention to combine the Maqāmāt of Naqshband with ʿAṭṭār’s sayings, and Pārsā’s failure to do so: 18   For more details, see Alexey Khismatulin, “Vidy musul’manskoi nauchnoi literatury v X–XV vekakh: sochineniya (taṣnīf ) i kompilyatsii (tāʾlīf )” (The Forms of Islamic Scholarly Literature in the 10th–15th centuries: compositions (taṣnīf) and compilations (tāʾlīf )), in Rahmat-nama, ed. Maryam Rezvan (St. Petersburg: Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, 2008), 410–43; idem, “Islamic education reflected in the forms of classical scholarly literature. Jamʿ, tāʾlīf and taṣnīf in the Medieval Ages” in Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 19  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:144.

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Khismatulin

َّ ‫ف‬ ‫��ع�ض��� ا زک�ل�م�ا ت‬ ‫��ه د ر �جم‬ ‫��ا �ل�� �ص‬ � � =[ �‫� �ق�د ����سي���ه ا ي� ش����ا ن‬ ‫ا‬ ،‫ح��ب� ت� می‌‌�ر�مود ه ا ن��د‬ ] ‫ط‬ � ��‫ع‬ ‫ک‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ار‬ � ‫ب ی‬ ‫س‬ َّ ‫َق‬ ‫آ‬ َ ُ َ َ َ ‫ت‬ َ ُ َ ‫ق‬ ‫ت‬ ‫�خ‬ ُ ‫خ��د �م� ت� � ا��ه حم‬ �‫ ��د ��س ا �ل�ل�ه ��ع�الی ر و‬،‫��م�د �ار��س�ا‬ .‫کا ب� ت� � ورد ه ا ن��د‬ �� ‫د ر �ي���د‬،‫�ح�ه���م�ا‬ ‫وج‬ ‫پ‬ ُّ ‫ز آ ن ن َّ ت ت‬ ‫گ‬ ‫�ذ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ش‬ � .‫�رد د‬ � ‌‌‫و چ� ن���د �ی ا � � � ب��ه ���ي�� ���برک و ا ��س��ر����ا د �م� کور می‬ Some of his [= ʿAṭṭār’s] holy sayings, told by him in the companionship sessions, have been written down by Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā, may Allāh Most High sanctify the spirits of both. Several of them would be mentioned following intention to find the grace and the right way.20

At the same time, referring to Anīs-1 by Pārsā as to the genuine Maqāmāt of Naqshband, neither Jāmī nor Kāshifī said anything about Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak alBukhārī and his Anīs-2. With the substantial difference between the two versions, such silence suggests a great deal. 5 Anīs-2 The modern textual history of Anīs-2, so far ascribed to a certain Ṣalāḥ alBukhārī, starts from the same date as Anīs-1. According to a letter dated April 26, 1961, from Molé to ʿAlī Akbar Siyāsī (1896–1990), the dean of the Faculty of Literature (la Faculté des Lettres) of the University of Tehran, and a note (Note sur les textes proposés) attached to the letter and addressed obviously to Muḥammad Muʿīn (1918–1971), a compiler of the famous Persian dictionary, Molé had already prepared the critical edition of Anīs-2. He based the edition on six reliable manuscripts, of which the oldest one was dated Safar 831/December 1427. He planned to publish the text together with the critical editions of Anīs-1, the Risāla-yi qudsiyya by Pārsā based on six manuscripts and two lithographs, the Risāla-yi unsiyya (The Essay on Intimacy) by Yaʿqūb Charkhī (d. 851/1447)—another disciple of Naqshband—based on six manuscripts and one lithograph, and the Uṣūl-i Naqshbandiyya (The Principles of the Naqshbandiyya) by ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Kāshifī. Taken together, these texts should have occupied 712 pages in the published book, since Molé referred to the exact number of pages in the note.21 Unfortunately, all of these texts, 20  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 394. 21  There is miscalculation in M. Molé’s note, altogether it should have been 712 pages instead of 752 announced in the note. Full text of his letter is prepared for publication, see Khismatulin, “He was years ahead of his time: Destiny of the unpublished works by Molé on the Naqshbandiya,” in Entre le mazdéisme et l’islam. Recueil d’articles autour de l’oeuvre de Marijan Molé (1924–1963), S. Azarnouche éd., Bibiliothèque des Sciences Religieuses, Paris, à paraître 2019.

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

321

a­ lready prepared for publication in the very beginning of the 1960s, suffered the same fate as Molé’s critical edition of Anīs-1.22 An independent critical edition of Anīs-2 only came out in print in 1992 (see fig. 10.5) due to the efforts of Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārī-ūghlī, who, regrettably, has not said a single word about the “anonymous” Anīs-1 and appears to have been unaware of the Molé edition. Of 14 copies collected by Khalīl Ibrāhīm mostly from the manuscript depositories of Turkey, he selected just three of them as the bases for his edition, including the oldest known copy of 823/1420. Although some of the copies used by both editors are the same, the differences between their editions strike the eye. As for the three other risālas Molé planned to publish, a reliable critical edition of the Risāla-yi qudsiyya was printed by the late Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ʿIrāqī in Iran in 1975, and the Risāla-yi unsiyya, based on a copy of 909/1504 and provided with an Urdu translation, was independently published by the Pakistani scholar Muḥammad Nazīr Rānjhā in 1984 and then re-edited by him in a volume of collected works by Charkhī in 2009.23 To my knowledge, the Uṣūl-i Naqshbandiyya is still in its manuscript form. To shed light on the problem of authorship of Anīs-2, we must examine how Pārsā wrote the foreword to his authentic Risāla-yi qudsiyya, and then compare in terms of textual studies: a) the contents of both versions of the Anīs; b) the forewords written to these versions; and c) the main text of both versions. 6

The Foreword to the Risāla-yi qudsiyya

As a rule, any medieval foreword was written in a classical style and usually followed a khuṭba (opening address), which would answer a few questions concerning the main text: who the author was, what motivated him to start his 22  For more details, see Khismatulin and Azarnouche, “The Destiny,” 53–54. Anīs-1 was prepared by me for publication in Persian and is waiting for its publisher. The text is supplemented with the Risāla-yi qudsiyya by Pārsā (with 99 comments by Jāmī on its margins), the Risāla-yi unsiyya and the Risāla-yi abdāliyya both by Charkhī. All the risālas are taken from the same St.Petersburg MS 386. Therefore, Molé’s idea to publish these major Naqshbandī texts under one cover would not go to waste. Meanwhile, the Russian translation of the Risāla-yi abdāliyya provided with its Persian original was also published independently, see Alexey Khismatulin, “Srednevekovyi tāʾlīf: textologicheskii analiz i perevod Risāla-yi abdāliyya Yaʿquba Charkhī” (Medieval tāʾlīf: textual analysis and translation of the Risāla-yi abdāliyya by Yaʿqub Charkhī), in Ars Islamica, eds. M. Piotrovsky and A. Alikberov (Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 2016), 392–436. 23  See the bibliography at the end of this paper. This example plainly demonstrates that the four foreign scholars mentioned above had absolutely no idea and information about the work done by Molé, and prepared their texts even without reference to his Fond.

322

Khismatulin

work, what form his writing would take—either collection (jamʿ), compilation (tāʾlīf ) or composition (taṣnīf )—and how he would tackle the task he had set for himself in writing his work. In other words, such a foreword was traditionally intended to clarify four main questions: who, why, what and how. This is, of course, the most complete and standard arrangement of the medieval foreword, but it could be truncated for various reasons. Such a standard arrangement is seen in the foreword to the Risāla-yi qudsiyya. A few short excerpts, answering the questions “who” and “why,” are cited below:

‫ض زآن ل ت ق‬ ‫�ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫��م�د � ن حم‬ ‫� �ع�� ف� حم‬ ‫��م�د ا �ل‬ ‫� ��د ����سي���ه‬ ‫ح�ا � ظ���ی ا �ل ب�����خ��ار �ی ⟨…⟩ ب��ع����ی ا � � �ک��م�ا‬ �‫ب‬ ‫ب���د ه �ض ي‬ َ ‫آ‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ا �ک ن ن‬ ‫ز‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ت ش‬ ‫نّ ت ت‬ �‫��و‬ ‫ و‬.‫را ا � ��سر �ص�د � و ا را د � ب��ه ���ي�� ��ي���م� ن� و ا ��س��ر����ا دآ د ر ���لم می‌‌� ورد‬ ُّ ‫ت‬ ‫��ه ا�م ا �ش��� ت ا �ع�ز ه د ����ست���ا ن ⟨…⟩ ح ف ن ز ن ن ف‬ �‫ب ر و ار‬ � ‫و‬ ‫ ب�را �ی ���برک و‬- ‫�ر�ی چ����د ا � � � ا������ا ��س‬ ‫آ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ق‬ …‫کا ب� ت� د ر � ورد‬ �� ‫ د ر �ي���د‬- ‫ا ��س��ت��ي ن���ا ��س‬ َّ ‫ن ن ق ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ف‬ ‫� ا �ش��� ت‬ ‫ا�ن‬ ‫ي� �ض‬ ‫� �عي��� د ر �خ�ود �می‌‌د ي��د ک‬ � ‫ ا�م�ا ب��ه ح مک ار‬.‫��ه ب�ر ا�ي� �م�ع�ی ا ��د ا م �م�اي��د‬ ‫و‬ َّ ّ ‫�ن ف‬ ‫�ة‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ش‬ � ‫ا�� ع�لا ء ا ل‬ � ‫ح� وا �ل ِ�د�ي� ⟨…⟩ ا ل‬ ‫ د ر اي� �ر��ص�� د ر‬،‫م���������هر ب��ه �ع��ط�ار‬ ‫⟨…⟩ �و ج‬ َّ ‫گ‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ ز �ا د ت‬،‫� �م�د د �ه�م� ت� ��ظ�� ��� ل ا � ش����ا �ا �ش���د‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ا �م�لا ء ا � ن‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ي� �جم‬ � ‫و ر بو ي � ب‬ ‫ ا �ر‬.‫����موع ���روع ا ����ا د‬ ‫�ي‬ ‫گ‬ .‫�رد د‬ � This weak slave, Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓī al-Bukhārī … fraught with sincerity and devotion, has penned some of these holy sayings intending to have a good sign and a guidance to follow. And today, looking for grace and peacefulness, he wrote down a few words from these maxims by order and directive of dear friends … This weak did not presume to take action on this matter. However, by directive of Khwāja ʿAlā al-Ḥaqq wa‌ʾl-Dīn … known as ʿAṭṭār, this time the collection of sayings begun to be dictated. If he helps with his care and looks after it with his approval, it will be increased.24

These excerpts clearly show that Pārsā (or any other follower) had the right to take notes on everything that was said by or about Naqshband, but could do it for personal use only—this is what Pārsā did. At the same time, neither Pārsā nor any other follower had the right to spread or reproduce these notes by copying them for general use without ʿAṭṭār’s permission or direct order. In modern language, Pārsā had no right to publish them. Upon receiving such direct orders, Pārsā had to submit the complete work to ʿAṭṭār for his final 24  Pārsā, Qudsiyya, 2, 7.

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approval. Thus, ʿAṭṭār played the role of the modern canonical editor. In fact, Pārsā addresses him directly in the foreword to the Risāla-yi qudsiyya: “If he [i.e. ʿAṭṭār] helps with his care and looks after it with his approval, it will be increased.” Answering the questions “what” and “how,” Pārsā says that he is going to arrange his work in the forms of jamʿ and tāʾlīf with no presence of himself:

‫ت گ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫���ف��ت�� ن ن� �ش��ت�� ن � د ا � ن‬ ‫ن‬ ،‫� �عي��� د ر �مي���ا � ن�ب��ا �ش���د‬ ‫ي� �ض‬ ‫ب�ا �ش���د ک‬ ‫��ه د ر ا�ي� أک�ل�م�ا � � � و و � و�ج و‬ ‫ف‬ ‫� ن ن‬ ‫� ت� د �ع ا ت‬ ‫ا�ن‬ ‫� �ص�ا �ل‬ � ‫ح�ه �ص�ا‬ �‫ي� �ج��ـ�مـ و ت�ـ� �ل��ـ��ي��ـ� ب��ه ب�ر�ک‬ ‫ح� ب� ��ظ�� را � ��س�ب�� ب� �م�ز �ي�د‬ ‫و‬ ‫و‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ت ق تگ‬ .‫�رد د‬ � ��‫د ر ج��ا � �رب‬

Let it be no existence of this weak one in narrating and writing down these maxims, and let this collection (jamʿ) and compilation (tāʾlīf ), thanks to the pious supplications by the men of vision, lead to increasing the levels of closeness to God.25 In his Risāla-yi qudsiyya, Pārsā also makes a well-known reference to the Maqāmāt of Naqshband. While telling a story about Naqshband, he prevents himself from finishing it:

‫آ‬ ‫� �غ� ���ه ا � ش����ا ن د �م��ق���ا �م�ا ت‬ ‫� ا�م�ا ت‬ ‫حوا ل ��جع‬ � ‫�ش��ر ق����ص�ه � ن� وا ق���ع�ه و ��س�اي�ر ا‬ � ‫ريب ي � ر‬ ‫���ي ب���ه و کر‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ت‬ ‫��ه ب��ع�ض��� ا ز� ا �ع�ز ه ا �ص‬ � ‫ح�ا ب� و خ���ل���ص ا‬ � � ‫ا‬ �� ‫ح ب���ا ب� ⟨…⟩ ب��ه �ج �م‬ � ‫ط‬ ‫س‬ � � ‫ا ي� ش����ا � م��س��ور � ک‬ ‫ی‬ ‫ع‬ ‫تأ ف آ ن ق‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن ش‬ ‫ک�ل ا �لو�ج�وه و ا �ج �م���ل�ه�ا ت����م�ا �م‬ ‫ ع��لی ا م‬،‫ ا � ����ا ء ا �ل�ل�ه‬.‫و �� ��لي�� � � ����ص�د �ی ����مود ه‌‌ا ��د‬ ‫گ‬ .‫�رد د‬ �

An expanded story of that vision as well as other wonderful states and amazing miracles were written (masṭūr) in his Maqāmāt, since some of his dear companions and sincere friends … have already set a purpose to collect and compile it. If Allāh so desires, it will be completed (tamām) in the most perfect and excellent way.26 At first glance, this reference implies that some other people were to be involved in collecting and compiling the Maqāmāt of Bahāʾ al-Dīn, not Pārsā alone.27 But this reference suggests the following question: what author would 25  Pārsā, Qudsiyya, 7. 26  Pārsā, Qudsiyya, 9. 27  As the phrase is understood by DeWeese, see DeWeese, “Legitimation,” 275 (n. 26). The expression “some of” (baʿḍī az) often occurs in medieval Persian texts, in many cases

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grant to anybody the right to see and read his incomplete book? Nevertheless, Pārsā saw the text of the incomplete Maqāmāt already written down (masṭūr) as evidenced by the fact that the story he mentions is found in the second part of both versions of the Anīs,28 and the other wonderful states and amazing miracles of Bahāʾ al-Dīn, which were mentioned by Pārsā, are the subject of its final fourth part (see below). In other words, Pārsā refers his reader (or, more precisely, his editor-in-chief, i.e. ʿAṭṭār) for further details to his own stillincomplete work, that is, to Anīs-1. Hence, Anīs-1 was compiled simultaneously with (or even prior to) the Risāla-yi qudsiyya, but needed a certain completion (tamām) due to reasons I will discuss below. Since writing commentaries on Naqshband’s sayings is known to have been a prerogative of Pārsā, his direct participation in preparing the Maqāmāt is also evidenced by an account found among Pārsā’s notes in Jāmī’s redaction of Anīs-1.

َ َّ ‫َق‬ ‫گ‬ َ ُ ‫ق‬ �‫�خ‬ ‫��ه د ر �ج �م‬ ‫ د ر وا ���ع�ه د ي��د ن��د ب���ي ن�� ن���د ه‌‌ ا �ی ک‬،ُ‫ ��د ��س ا �ل�ل�هُ ر وح�ه‬،‫ا��ه �ب�زر� را‬ ‫ج‬ ‫و‬ ‫ع‬ ‫گف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫�م��ق���ا �م�ا ت‬ ‫ «می‌‌ �خ�وا �ه‬:‫�������ت ن���د‬ ��‫��ه ا ��سرا ر ا روا ا و��لي��ا را �ش‬ � ‫ ا و را‬،‫� ا ي� ش����ا � ب�ود‬ ‫ک‬ ‫ی‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ن‬ ‫گ‬ ‫گف‬ ‫ز ت ف‬ � »‫��ی؟‬ .‫ خ��ا �موش��� �ش���د ن��د‬.»‫� �ر�م�ا ي�ي��د‬ ‫ک‬ � ‫ «می‌‌�خ�وا�ه���م ا‬:�‫������ ت‬ � ‫ا��ا‬ ‫�ر ج‬ The Great Khwāja [Naqshband], may Allāh sanctify his spirit, was seen in a vision by a seer, who was collecting his Maqāmāt: He asked him: “Do you want to comment on the mysteries of the spirits of saints?” The seer said: “I want to, if you give me your permission.” He stopped talking.29

Pārsā’s authorship is implicitly confirmed in Anīs-2 as well by a narrative of his first meeting with Naqshband. Pārsā came in Naqshband’s house in Qaṣr-i ʿārifān, when the latter was telling a story about a meeting which took place between the Shāfiʿī scholar Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī (544/1149–606/1209) and the Sufi shaykh Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (540/1145–618/1221)—the founder of the Kubrawiyya order. The point here is that, through the story, Naqshband hinted at a similar meeting with Pārsā, who belonged to the scholarly circles of Bukhārā.

politely implies “one of,” especially when followed by a quotation which belongs to a certain person. 28  The story was first translated by Molé into French then by DeWeese into English. This story is stated by the latter in his article focused on it, to be the central narrative of legitimation for Naqshband. See Molé, “Autour du Daré Mansour,” 38–40; DeWeese, “The Legitimation,” 272–303. 29   M S 386, fol. 225b (The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb).

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325

َّ ‫ُ َّ �ة‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن ت‬ ‫َّت‬ ‫ف‬ ‫��ه ا � ن‬ � ‫��� ن���د ه ا‬ ،�‫�ي�� ن� ا ����س� ت‬ �� �‫ي‬ ‫��ه �ج �م �ک‬ ‫ي� ب�ن��د ه �ض‬ ‫ا ول ک‬ ‫کا ب� ع�د ا �ل��س�ا �ل �ک‬ ‫� �عي��� ک‬ ‫�ر�ی را ک‬ ‫قع‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ض‬ ‫��ه � ت‬ ‫ا��ه �ر�مود ن��د‬ ‫ا��ه ر����سي���د ه ب�ود د ر ����صر ع�ار��ا � ⟨…⟩ ب��ع�د ه �و ج‬ ‫ح����ر� �و ج‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ ‫�غ‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ي�ز‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ش‬ � � � ‫��ه و �ی ع�ل�م�ا �ی ب��ارا ��� ب��ه �م�ا �م����ول ����د ��د و ا�ي� ���ص�ه را‬ ‫ب��ه ا�ي� �ض‬ ‫� �عي��� ک‬ ‫ف‬ .‫�ر�مود ن��د‬ For the first time, this weak slave, who is the collector of the book ʿUddat al-sālikīn came to Khwāja in Qaṣr-i ʿārifān … Then Khwāja addressed to this weak one: “When the scholars of Bukhārā also paid attention to me, they told this story.”30

7

The Results of Textual Comparison

7.1 The Contents In their complete form, both the first redaction of Anīs-1 and Anīs-2, in addition to the same title, have explicitly the same structure and approximately the same headings of four parts (sometimes with minor variants in their formulations, especially in the third part, dealing with Naqshband’s career as a shaykh): The Foreword; The First Part: On the Definition of Saint and Sainthood (walī wa wilāyat); The Second Part: On the Early Life of Our Khwāja and the Khwājagānī Chain of Spiritual Succession; The Third Part: About the Spiritual Qualities, Behavior, States, Sayings and Character of Our Khwāja, On His Method of the Spiritual Relation and the Results of His Conversational Companionship as well as On the Subtle Meanings (laṭāʾif ) and Higher Spiritual Meanings (ḥaqāʾiq) Discussed by Him; The Fourth Part: On Miracles, Spiritual Stages, States and Effects which were shown by Our Khwāja. 7.2 The Forewords However, if we compare Pārsā’s foreword to Anīs-1 with Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī’s foreword to Anīs-2, we will see that the former, in fact, looks like a draft, lacking a khuṭba and starting immediately with the traditional ammā baʿd (see fig. 10.3). 30  Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 272 (no. 390); Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī, Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat alsālikīn, ed. Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārī-ūghlī (Tehran: Kayhan, 1371/1992), 334.

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By contrast, the latter represents a complete and standard sample of the medieval foreword. The point I wish to emphasize here is that the former is incorporated into the latter verbatim. That is why, even with substantial differences in their length, both give the same answers to the key questions concerning the main text. Both the unnamed compiler of Anīs-1, that is, Muḥammad Pārsā, and the compiler of Anīs-2, that is, Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, come to Bahāʾ al-Dīn by way of ʿAṭṭār. Both recognize ʿAṭṭār as the lawful successor to Naqshband. Both are ordered by ʿAṭṭar to collect the Maqāmāt after the death of Bahāʾ al-Dīn. Both tell about the final edition of the text, and both address ʿAṭṭār expecting him to give permission in supplementing the main text with his sayings, which have to be selected (takhṣīṣ) by ʿAṭṭār himself. This is shown below to compare both versions visually:31 Table 10.1 Comparison of two forewords of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

Anīs-2

‫آ‬ ‫ث‬ � ‫��ه �ث�ار �ی وا‬ ‫ا�مي���د وا � ق� ا ����س� ت� ک‬ ‫حوا لی‬ ‫ف‬ –�‫��ه ا ز� خ��د �م� ت� �م��ط��ل ا ن�وا ر خ��لا �� ت‬ ‫ک‬ َّ ‫ق ع ّ ن‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ز‬ ‫ا��ه ع�لا ء ا �ل‬ � ‫ �ا د‬،‫ح� و ا �ل ِ�د�ي� �ع��ط�ار‬ ‫�و ج‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ّ ني�ز‬ ‫ا �ل�ل�ه ا �وا ر روح�ه ا لم��ط��ي� ب�–��� ب��ه ���هور‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ ا ز � � ت ن �ظ‬، ‫�آ�م�د ه ا ����س� ت‬ ‫� � بر‬ ‫کا �ی ��� ُر�ی َو �ل��ط��ُ�ی‬ ّ‫ق‬ ُّ ‫��ه � ض ت �خ‬ ،‫ � ِ�د ��س ��سِ ره‬،‫ا��ه �م�ا‬ ‫ک‬ ‫ح����ر� �و ج‬ َ َْ َ َ‫َ َ َّ ُ ت‬ � � ‫ب��ه ح ک‬ ‫� «�م�ا ��ص� ب� ا ل�ل�ه ��ع�الی فِ�ي �ص�د رِ ��ي‬ ‫م‬ َ ُ‫شَ ْ ئً ّ َ َ َْت‬ َْ ‫ا ش ن‬ ُ � ‫ ب��ه ي�����ا‬،»ِ‫�����ي��ا �إ لا و�ص �ب���ب���ه �فِ�ي �ص�د رِ ه‬ ‫�ذ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ح�ض��� ت‬ ‫ن ق ت‬ ‫ن‬ � ‫د ر ي�ل ا�ي� �م�����ا �م�ا � � ر‬،‫�ر�مود ه‌‌ا ��د‬ ‫آن‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫��ه ب��ه‬ ‫ا��ه ث��ب�� ت� ک‬ ‫ � � �م��ق���د ا ر ک‬،‫�رد ه �ش��ود‬ ‫�و ج‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ح���� ��ه ا � ن‬ ‫ن���ق��� �ص‬ ‫ي� �ض‬ �‫� �عي��� ر����سي���د ه ا ����س� ت‬ ‫� يح ب‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ت‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ش‬ � ‫و ب��ه‬ …‫�رد ه‬ ‫�����صي�����ص �ود �م����ا �ه�د ه ک‬

Anīs-1

‫آ‬ ‫ث‬ � ‫��ه �ث�ار �ی وا‬ ‫��ه‬ ‫حوا لی ک‬ ‫ا�مي���د وا � ق� ا ����س� ت� ک‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ا ز� خ��د �م� ت� �م��ط��ل ا ن�وا ر خ��لا �� ت� ن���ي�ز ب��ه‬ ‫ع‬ ‫آ‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ز‬ ‫کا �ت ن����ظ‬ ‫ت‬ � � ‫ا‬ ، ‫���هور � �م�د ه ا ����س�� � ب ر � ی َ ری و‬ ُ‫ �َق ّ�د ��َ ا �ل�ل�ه‬،‫� �خ� ا��ه �م�ا‬ ‫ح�ض��� ت‬ � ‫��ه‬ ‫�ل��ط�ف��ی ک‬ ‫وج‬ ‫س‬ ‫ر‬ َ َ َ‫َ َ َّ ُ ت‬ ُ َّ َ َ َ‫ت‬ ‫ ب��ه ح ک‬،‫��ع�الی ��سِ ره‬ ‫� «�م�ا ��ص� ب� ا �ل�ل�ه ��ع�الی‬ ‫م‬ ُ‫شَ ْ ئً َّ َ َ َْت‬ َْ َْ ُ ‫�فِ�ي �ص�د ��ي �����ي��ا �إ لا و�ص �ب���ب���ه �فِ�ي �ص�د‬ ِ‫ر‬ ِ‫ر‬ ْ َ َ‫أ‬ ‫آ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ش‬ � � �‫� � ب� ك‬ ‫ � � �م�����د ا ر‬،‫ ب��ه ا ي�����ا � ر مود ه‌‌ا ��د‬،»‫�ٍر‬ ‫بِ�ي‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ت‬ ‫��ه ب��ه ������ �ص‬ � ‫ح��ي�� ر����سي���د ه ا ����س�� و ب��ه‬ ‫ک‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ف‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫�خ‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ش‬ � ‫د ر‬،��‫�����صي�����ص �ود �م����ا �ه�د ه ا ����ا د ه ا ����س‬ ‫�ذ � �م��ق���ا �م�ا ت � ض ت �خ‬ ‫�رد ه‬ ‫ا��ه ث��ب�� ت� ک‬ � ‫ح����ر� �و ج‬ َّ َ َ َّ َ ُ َ َ ْ‫يل ن‬ .‫ � �ش���ا ء ا �ل�ل�ه �ع�ز و ج��ل‬،‫�ش��ود‬ ِ‫�إ‬

31  Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 68; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn, ed. Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1996), 1–2.

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If there is nothing unusual in the first two statements, then the last statements imply that the same order was given by the leader of one Sufi community to two different followers, who had the exact same idea on how to complete the Maqāmāt. This seems not only illogical but even impossible for any community. The only substantial difference between these writings, focused on the preliminary stage in compiling the Maqāmāt, concerns the second order by ʿAṭṭār which is mentioned solely in Anīs-2. There was a considerable interval between the first order—to collect ( jamʿ), and the second one—to complete (itmām) the Maqāmāt as it was expected in the Risāla-yi qudsiyya. The interval is said to have been caused by a delay in submitting ʿAṭṭār’s materials to the compiler of the main text of the Maqāmāt because of the “whirligig of time” (taṣārīf-i zamān).32 Both the Persian taṣārīf-i zamān and Shakespeare’s “whirligig of time” semantically mean a period of time that can often be filled with unpleasant or, at least, unexpected events and tends to last for several years. This already implies the appearance of two versions of the Anīs compiled by the same compiler upon receiving ʿAṭṭār’s first and second orders correspondingly. 7.3 The Main Text If we look at the content of the main text, we will see that Anīs-2 is deprived of all of the narratives that are included in Anīs-1, where Bahāʾ al-Dīn distinguishes Pārsā from the rest of his followers, although Pārsā is mentioned there not by his proper name, but only as this “weak one” (īn ḍaʿīf )—an equivalent of “I.” This is also true of the narratives related to one of the teachers and intimate companions of Bahāʾ al-Dīn, ʿĀrif Dīggarānī, who trained Naqshband for seven years33 and to whom the latter entrusted Pārsā for further training. Finally, Pārsā was singled out by Dīggarānī as the best disciple in the whole Naqshbandī community.34 Extended insertions in Arabic, which are typical of Pārsā’s written style in the sharḥ genre, are omitted in Anīs-2. At the same time, Pārsā is mentioned there only once by his proper name and as a thirdperson narrator,35 while the main text is substantially expanded due to the accounts transmitted by the mostly unnamed followers and ʿAṭṭār. Moreover, at the very end of the second part of Anīs-1, Pārsā refers the reader to his Risāla-yi qudsiyya for the detailed description of the Khwājagānī chain of spiritual 32  Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 67. 33  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 23–24 (No 36); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 60–62; MS 386, fols. 177b–178b; Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 42–44 (no. 48); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 100–103. 34  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 57 (no. 173); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 33–34; MS 386, fols. 194b–195a; Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:88–89 (based on Anīs-1 but slightly abridged). 35  Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 181 (no. 294); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 229.

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succession (silsila), which is provided in full at the same place in Anīs-2, but without this reference.36 The results of this editing process are reflected in the table below. Unfortunately, neither Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn nor Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārīūghlī numerated the accounts and narratives in their editions of Anīs-1 and Anīs-2 respectively. Therefore, I must make recourse to the unpublished texts by Molé, which are more convenient for a statistical comparison allowing for a true notion of the scope of editing, amendments, and changes in the figures presented. Table 10.2 The number of accounts in the 1st redaction of Anīs-1 in comparison with Anīs-2 (according to the critical editions by Molé)

Number of accounts Number of accounts The accounts in Anīs-1 excluded from in the 1st redaction in Anīs-2 Anīs-2 of Anīs-1 Foreword The 1st Part The 2nd Part The 3rd Part The 4th Part Total

1 2–8 9–61 62–156 157–239 239

1–6 7–24 25–72 73–221 222–417 417

— — 25, 28, 48, 49 90–93, 147–156 163–180, 221–239 56

The content of the narratives omitted in Anīs-2 indicates four general directions taken in editing the main text: firstly, excluding the accounts by Bahāʾ alDīn and ʿĀrif Dīggarānī that attest Pārsā’s legitimation (No 48–9, 90–3, 169, 173); secondly, departing from his scholarly style of compilation in the sharḥ genre (No 163, 165, 227–9) and from the accounts repeated in the Risāla-yi qudsiyya (No 230–1); thirdly, removing the accounts of both Naqshband and Dīggarānī’s lessons, sayings, and behaviour, which could have been ambiguously interpreted by an independent reader (No 25, 28, 164, 166–8, 170–1, 174–80, 224–5, 232–4, 236, 238), and thus to fully legitimize Naqshband in terms of the holy men (awliyā) of sharīʿa; fourthly, to expand the remainder of the text by means of the narratives recounted by ʿAṭṭār himself and others whose names are mostly hidden or who are identified by name as transmitters, but are likely either 36  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 30 (no. 61); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 11; MS 386, fol. 182а; Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 55–58 (no. 72); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 113–15.

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to have been ordinary disciples and adherents of Naqshband or have already passed away by the time of the final editing of Anīs-2. For example, there are several accounts transmitted by a certain “scholar” (dānishmand) whose name is intentionally hidden because he was a would-be competitor to ʿAṭṭār. In the first of these accounts, we are told that such a laqab (honorific title) was once given by Naqshband to one of his followers,37 as it has earlier happened to Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓī al-Bukhārī when Naqshband honoured him with the laqab of Pārsā (Pious).38 Due to some of these accounts in Anīs-2, including the last one, transmitted initially by Pārsā in Jāmī’s redaction of Anīs-1 (the Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb) and repeated then in the Risāla-yi unsiyya,39 we know that “Dānishmand” implies the faqīh and scholar Yaʿqūb Charkhī who is never mentioned by his proper name in Anīs-2. This identification certainly adds new facts to the biography of Charkhī, otherwise hidden altogether in the 15 narratives in Anīs-2: two of them are in the second part, two others in the third one, and the rest in the fourth one.40 Such results raise key questions: for whose benefit was the editing made and for what reason? Even more importantly: who had the right to make it while Pārsā was still alive? To answer these questions, we have to discuss the embarrassing situation of Naqshband’s community after the death of its founder. 8

Historical Context

As is usually the case, the situation concerned a question of succession: who would take over the leadership of the community of Naqshband? There were only two real candidates: ʿAlā al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār and Muḥammad Pārsā. Belonging to a handicraftsman’s family who migrated from Khwārazm to Bukhārā, ʿAṭṭār was intentionally withdrawn by Naqshband from education in a madrasa at a very young age to make ʿAṭṭār his son-in-law and companion41—it was 37  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 22–23 (no. 34); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 60; MS 386, fol. 177a–b; Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 40–41 (no. 45); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 99. 38  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:101. 39  Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 316 (no. 417); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 386; MS 386, fol. 222a (The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb); Yaʿqūb Charkhī, “Unsīya,” in Rasāʾil-i haḍrat-i mawlānā Yaʿqūb-i Charkhī, ed. in Persian and trans. into Urdu by Muḥammad Nazīr Rānjhā (Kundian: Khanqah Sirajia Naqshbandia Mujaddidia, 1430/2009), 211. 40  Molé, ed., Anīs-2, 40–42, 71, 99, 166–69, 170–74, 237, 316 (no. 45, 47; 84, 140; 272–3, 275–82, 358, 417); Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 99, 100; 124, 146; 212–21, 292, 386; Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 22–24; 35; 67–68 (no. 34, 37; 86; 200–2); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 60, 62; 15, 41–42; MS 386, fol. 177a– b, 178b; 184b, 199a–b, 222a–b. 41  The story is described by Kāshifī. See Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:139–41.

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undoubtedly a significant change in ʿAṭṭār’s social affiliation, a so called “social elevator”. As for Pārsā, he was descended from a notable family of the religious scholars of Bukhārā42 and became the most gifted follower of Naqshband, as well as an educated faqīh and scholar. As we know from the narratives excluded from Anīs-2, Bahāʾ al-Dīn, even a day before his death, gave his followers explicit explanations about Muḥammad Pārsā’s high spiritual status, which would make him the next leader of the community. The problem of the lawful successor to Naqshband emerged among followers and disciples because many of them had heard his last will. This is the reason why ʿAlī Kāshifī used the word “even” (ḥattā) in his Rashaḥāt, while transmitting a comment by Khwāja Aḥrār (d. 895/1490) on Pārsā’s recognition of ʿAṭṭār as the lawful successor to Naqshband and thus hinting at the problem: “Even Muḥammad Pārsā took his oath of loyalty to ʿAṭṭār.”43 We can see the results of such recognition in Pārsā’s foreword to his Risāla-yi qudsiyya, which he compiled on ʿAṭṭār’s order and which deals with the sayings by Bahāʾ al-Dīn supplied with Pārsā’s commentary on them. However, we do not see the same results in the narratives, excluded from Anīs-2, which causes us to reflect upon Pārsā’s sincerity in his oath. ʿAṭṭār also seems to have had some doubts about Pārsā’s full loyalty. According to Pārsā’s notes added by Jāmī to the first redaction of Anīs-1, ʿAṭṭār once ordered him: “Follow me! Everyone, who follows me in the practical methods will certainly reach the Truth.”44 This was said by ʿAṭṭār a month prior to his death and approximately eleven years after the death of Naqshband. With such doubts, it would have been of great importance for ʿAṭṭār to force Pārsā—one of the Bukharan luminaries and the best disciple of Dīggarānī and Naqshband—to prove his loyalty in practice. Having Pārsā’s oath in mind, ʿAṭṭār had obviously no need of any Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī to edit the Anīs. On the contrary, he should have “asked” Pārsā to revise his Anīs-1. And Pārsā did it, only once referring to himself as the third-person narrator and attributing Anīs-2 to a certain Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī. That is why both versions have the same title, headings and structure. Why did Pārsā do this? There are several possible reasons. The problem of the lawful successor to Naqshband, as mentioned by ʿAṭṭār in Pārsā’s notes about him, as well as by ʿAlī Kāshifī in his Rashaḥāt,45 is said to have caused a split in the young 42  Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 75–77. 43  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:144. 44   M S 386, fol. 224b (The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb); Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:153 (slightly revised). 45   M S 386, fol. 219b (The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb); Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:157.

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community of Naqshband, dividing it into two groups: adherents of ʿAṭṭār versus supporters of Pārsā. Many disciples had heard Naqshband talking about the future leader of the community (on the back way from his first pilgrimage) to ʿĀrif Dīggarānī two days before the latter’s death.46 Then, getting sick during the second pilgrimage, he confirmed once again to his companions that Pārsā would assume the responsibility of leadership.47 Finally, he repeated it one day before his own death, according a story told by ʿAlī Dāmād.48 It seems obvious to me that Pārsā recognized ʿAṭṭār in order to avoid the split, which nevertheless occurred in the aftermath of ʿAṭṭār’s death. Presumably, both worried that this split would weaken the young community, already involved in strong rivalries among other Sufi communities active in Central Asia. Of course, there were also ethical reasons for Pārsā to do so. One of them concerns the difference in age between Pārsā and ʿAṭṭār. I did not find any indication about ʿAṭṭār’s age in the available sources. Therefore, given the year of 746/1345 as the earliest possible date of Pārsā’s birth,49 three accounts in Anīs-1 and one account in Anīs-2 can be taken into consideration in order to suppose that ʿAṭṭār was older than Pārsā. 1. There is an undated narrative of a meeting between Pārsā’s paternal uncle Ḥusām al-Dīn Khwāja Yūsuf and Naqshband, which took place in the presence of Pārsā and was related by him in Anīs-2. In his Tārīkh-i Mullāzāda, Aḥmad b. Maḥmūd Muʿīn al-fuqarāʾ asserts that Ḥusām alDīn died in 768 AH.50 Therefore, by the time of the meeting, Pārsā was younger or even much younger than 22 years old. 2. On the other hand, there are two sayings dated by Pārsā in Anīs-1. One of them was transmitted by Naqshband to Pārsā in audience approximately 20 years before the death of Naqshband, that is, in 771 AH, when Pārsā was about 25 years old.51 3. Another saying was recorded by Pārsā just before the death of ʿAṭṭār in 802 AH and related to their friendship on the way to God and in God 46  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 57 (no. 173); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 33–34; MS 386, fols. 194b–195a; Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:88–9 (based on Anīs-1 but slightly abridged), naturally omitted in Anīs-2. 47  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 36–37 (No 93); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 16; MS 386, fol. 185a; Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:103, omitted in Anīs-2. 48  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 55 (no. 169); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 32; MS 386, fol. 194a; Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:99–100, omitted in Anīs-2. 49  Kāshifī states that by the time of the death of Pārsā in 822/1420, “he is said to have been about 73 years old” that gives 748–9 AH as the date of his birth. See Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:111. 50  Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, Anīs, 229–31; Aḥmad b. Maḥmūd Muʿīn al-fuqarāʾ, Tārīkh-i mullāzāda dar dhikr-i mazārāt-i Bukhārā, ed. Aḥmad Gulchīn Maʿānī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ibn Sīnā, 1339/1960), 56; Manz, Power, 76. 51  Molé, ed., Anīs-1, 36 (no. 90); Jāmī, Khulāṣa-yi Anīs, 15–16; MS 386, fol. 185а.

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(li-llāh wa fī-llāh), which had lasted over 20 years by the time52 and had thus started in 782 AH or a little bit earlier, when Pārsā was 36 years old or even younger. All of these indications should correlate with Pārsā’s statement in his foreword to Anīs-1 that he had come to Naqshband thanks to ʿAṭṭār. If so, then it was ʿAṭṭār who should have invited Pārsā to meet his father-in-law in Qaṣr-i ʿārifān (see above) or acquainted them with each other, when Pārsā was still an inexperienced teenager and a madrasa student. Consequently, the deep friendship between ʿAṭṭār and Pārsā started when the latter had already become an advanced follower of Naqshband. Therefore, a certain respect to his senior friend might have inclined Pārsā to quit his claims and revise Anīs-1 in favor of ʿAṭṭār and under his editorship. We can be sure that the second order by ʿAṭṭār was meant to complete the Maqāmāt with the narratives, of which some were obviously not written down on Pārsā’s own initiative in his diary notes for personal use. Transmitted by mostly unidentified disciples of Naqshband and ʿAṭṭār, the number of such narratives is shown by the table above to exceed 200. Following one another, some of them are arranged into the groups related to their narrators. The first narrative in such groups often begins with the sentence “A dervish said that,” while the second one starts with word combinations such as “The same dervish said that.” It means that the narratives and the accounts have been independently collected from each disciple and dervish, reminiscent of a kind of modern interview. Judging from either the first or last sentences given as an answer by many of these interviewees—“The reason of my love to/affiliation with Naqshband was that” or “That was the reason of my love to/affiliation with Naqshband”—occurring in the fourth part of Anīs-2 in particular, we can deduce the same key questions in the interviews conducted in accordance with ʿAṭṭār’s order. This way of collecting a half of Anīs-2 followed by the premeditated selection of the narratives included into it by ʿAṭṭār seems to have taken a lot of time to reach its final version. This is confirmed by the appearance of its intermediate version (used by Molé and Sārī-ūghlī in their critical editions and represented by a copy of 831/1427) with the lack of about 30 narratives, dispersed later in the fourth part of Anīs-2. This approach could have been another ethical reason that caused Pārsā to consider Anīs-2 a somewhat collective work and attribute it to Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī. There might have been additional reasons which will remain hidden to us. But we can be certain that Jāmī was aware of these reasons. That is why he 52   M S 386, fol. 220b (The Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb); Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:156.

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initiated two main streams for the further transcription of Anīs-1, and absolutely disregarded Anīs-2 compiled by Pārsā under the control of ʿAṭṭār. The results of the first stream, i.e. Pārsā’s redaction, are found in the world manuscript collections, while those of the second one, i.e. Jāmī’s redaction, are preserved until now by a single copy kept in St. Petersburg. 9 Conclusions Judging from a reference to the Maqāmāt in the Risāla-yi qudsiyya and a crossreference to the Risāla-yi qudsiyya at the very end of the second part of Anīs-1, we can conclude that: a) in this case, the Maqāmāt implies Anīs-1; b) Pārsā has simultaneously prepared two texts written in two genres: Anīs-1 in the hagiographical genre, and the Risāla-yi qudsiyya in the sharḥ genre by 796/1394. Following the indication in the foreword to Anīs-2, we can furthermore state that: c) Anīs-1 was compiled by Pārsā after the first order by ʿAṭṭār and substantially revised after the second one, given by ʿAṭṭār but considerably delayed. Taking into account the results of the present study, we can also affirm that: d) the same titles, headings, structure, and common points in both forewords, with significant differences in the main text and the direct indication to Pārsā’s authorship of Anīs-1 made by Jāmī in his sajʿ (foreword to the second redaction), taken together are sufficient evidence to support the claim that only Pārsā could revise his draft of Anīs-1 in order to convert it into Anīs-2; e) the main purpose of Pārsā’s textual revision made under the editorship of ʿAṭṭār was to quit his own claims to be the leader of Naqshband’s community in favor of ʿAṭṭār in order to avert the imminent split in the community; f) this is why Pārsā intentionally kept his primary Anīs-1 unauthorized and attributed the final Anīs-2 to an abstract figure—Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak alBukhārī. Perhaps it took time for him to make such a decision and to prove his loyalty in practice. Otherwise, it seems that there would have been no reason for him to prepare the draft in which his own right to be the leader was so obvious. Presumably, it was agreed that Pārsā’s Anīs1 would not be copied (i.e. published in the modern sense) while both Pārsā and ʿAṭṭār were alive. This supposition can be confirmed by the fact that the oldest copy of Anīs-1, dated 856 AH and copied by Jāmī, is more

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than 30 years younger than that of Anīs-2, transcribed in 823 AH immediately after the death of Pārsā; g) Jāmī was certainly aware of the hidden agenda related to the lawful successor to Naqshband, and this is the reason why he initially made a copy from the first redaction of Anīs-1, acting like a scribe, and then, absolutely disregarding Anīs-2, prepared his own redaction of Anīs-1 as a compiler and editor, supplying the main text of Anīs-1 with Pārsā’s diary notes of ʿAṭṭār; h) most of the accounts excluded from Anīs-2 were included by ʿAlī Kāshifī in his Rashaḥāt, and three of them have direct reference to the Maqāmāt of Naqshband;53 this means that with the reference ʿAlī Kāshifī implies Anīs-1 and absolutely disregards Anīs-2. In this way, we better understand the role of the medieval maqāmāt in legitimating its compiler and attesting his right to be the true transmitter of the master’s teachings. For his late master, a posthumous maqāmāt was of no importance, and the after-the-fact legitimation did not make any sense. However, we may not say the same about his followers, for whom compiling a hagiography of their holy shaykh was not only an honorable duty but was used to assert their own special place within the tradition they represented. We can only suppose what might have happened to ʿAṭṭār and his son Ḥasan, who later became the hereditary leader of his father’s community, called ʿAlāʾiyya, if Pārsā had not attributed Anīs-2 to a third person, that is, to Ṣalāḥ al-Bukhārī, especially after the compilation of the Risāla-yi qudsiyya. For me, there is no doubt that here we have a case of false attribution intentionally made by Pārsā either to show his full reverence to the late Naqshband as well as his loyalty to his lawful successor, or to avoid the split of the Naqshbandī community, or even both. Having such noble intentions, Pārsā had (or agreed) to ascribe it to an abstract figure who, naturally, could never have pretended to be the leader of this community, and about whom the invented and scant biographical data were assembled later.54 This case should not be confused with the false attribution of a certain text to a prominent scholar or statesman with selfish, ideological, and other partial motives, as has sometimes been made in classical Persian literature, for example, by Muḥammad Muʿizzī Nīshābūrī (d. 518–22/1124–28)—the most famous court poet of the Seljuq dynasty—with the Siyar al-mulūk (or Siyāsat-nāma). 53  Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:92 (for no. 221 and 233); 141 (for no. 174). References are given to Molé’s edition, see Table above. 54  Huda Ḥusaynzāda, “Bukhārī, Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak,” Dāyirat al-maʿārif-i buzurg-i islāmī 11 (2002).

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This case has been touched upon elsewhere, but in short he not only ascribed this text to the outstanding Seljuq vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (killed 485/1092), but also fabricated it, trying his hand as a prose writer.55 A question formulated earlier concerns the real name of the author of Anis-2.56 This question raises another, which remains unanswered: why did Pārsā (perhaps, with ʿAṭṭār) choose Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī as a pseudo­ nym among many other names? Was the pseudonym, so to speak, a nomen appellativum, or was the name “Ṣalāḥ” just an Arabic translation of “Pārsā” with the same meaning, or does the pseudonym imply a “blessed reconciliation” between ʿAṭṭār and Pārsā? Whatever these reasons may be, in the case of both versions of the Anīs we have a good example of the primary tāʾlīf compiled by one compiler who collected materials mostly taken from the oral tradition, i.e. living informants and his own memory. In the case of two later hagiographies dedicated to Naqshband—the Risāla-yi Bahāʾiyya of Abūʾl-Qāsim b. Masʿūd and the Maqāmāt of Abūʾl-Muḥsin Muḥammad Bāqir—we see two patterns of the secondary tāʾlīf, with the narratives and accounts taken from the written tradition i.e. both versions of the Anīs as well as from other written sources. These accounts were then rearranged by their compilers who, according to the literary tradition, thereby gained the right to give them new titles and supply them with their own forewords. But this is a subject of another story.

55  For more details see Alexey Khismatulin, “Two Mirrors for Princes Fabricated at the Seljuq Court: Nizām al-Mulk’s Siyar al-mulūk and al-Ghazālī’s Nasīhat al-mulūk,” in The Age of the Seljuqs. The Idea of Iran 6, ed. Edmund Herzig and Sarah Stewart (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 94–130. 56  DeWeese, “The Legitimation,” 287 (n. 54).

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Figure 10.1 The Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn ascribed by the editor to Jāmī

Jāmī ’ s Statement on the Authorship of the Anīs al-ṭālibīn

Figure 10.2

Scientific Library of the St Petersburg State University, MS 386, fol. 168a. A foreword written in sajʿ by Jāmī to the second redaction of Anīs-1

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Figure 10.3

The “anonymous” foreword written by Pārsā to the first redaction of Anīs-1

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Figure 10.4

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Scientific Library of the St Petersburg State University, MS 386, fol. 227b. A chronogram written presumably by Jāmī to the second redaction of Anīs-1

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Figure 10.5 The Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn (Anīs-2) edited by Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārī-ūghlī under the authorship of Salāh b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī

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Bibliography Abdul Muqtadir-khan, Bahadur. Catalogue of Arabic & Persian Manuscripts in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library XVI. Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1994. URL: http://kblibrary.bih.nic.in/Vol16/Bp044.htm. Abdullaeva, Firuza. “Persian manuscripts collection of the St Petersburg University: Gotwald’s curse?” In Writings and Writing from another world and another era: Investigations in Islamic Text and Script in Honour of Dr Januarius Justus Witkam Professor of Codicology and Palaeography of the Islamic World at Leyden University, edited by R.M. Kerr and T. Milo, 1–23. Cambridge: Archetype, 2011. Āghā Ḥusaynī Ḥusayn and Yalamihā Aḥmad-Riḍā. “Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn az kīst?” Muṭālaʿāt-i ʿIrfānī 17 (Dānishkada-yi ʿulūm-i insānī-yi Dānishgāh-i Kāshān, 1392/2013): 5–20. URL: http://s-erfani.kashanu.ac.ir/browse.php?mag_id=18&slc_ lang=fa&sid=1. Algar, Hamid. “Anīs al-tālebīn wa ‘oddat al-sālekīn.” Encyclopædia Iranica II fasc. 1 (1985): 76–77. URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/. Algar, Hamid. “Jāmī ii.and Sufism.” Encyclopædia Iranica XIV, fasc. 5 (2008): 475–79. URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jami-ii. al-Bukhārī, Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak. Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn. Edited by Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārī-ūghlī. Tehran: Kayhan, 1371/1992. Charkhī, Yaʿqūb. “Unsiyya.” In Rasāʾil-i ḥaḍrat-i mawlānā Yaʿqūb-i Charkhī, edited in Persian and translated into Urdu by Muḥammad Nazīr Rānjhā, 207–37. Kundian: Khanqah Sirajia Naqshbandia Mujaddidia, 1430/2009. DeWeese, Devin. “The Legitimation of Bahā’ ad-Dīn Naqshband.” Asiatische Studien/ Études asiatiques 50/2 (2006): 261–305. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn. Edited by Muḥammad Dhākir Ḥusayn. Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Library, 1996. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds. Edited by Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1382/2003. Kāshifī Vāʿiẓ, ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn. Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt. Edited by ʿAlī Aṣghar Muʿīnīyān. 2 vols. Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi nūrīyānī, 2536/1356/1977. Khismatulin, Alexey, and Samra Azarnouche. “The Destiny of a Genius Scholar: Marijan Molé (1924–1963) and His Archives in Paris.” Manuscripta Orientalia 20/2 (2014): 45–56. Khismatulin, Alexey. “He was years ahead of his time: Destiny of the unpublished works by Molé on the Naqshbandiya.” In Entre le mazdéisme et l’islam. Recueil d’articles autour de l’oeuvre de Marijan Molé (1924–1963), S. Azarnouche éd., Bibiliothèque des Sciences Religieuses, Paris, à paraître 2019. Khismatulin, Alexey. “Islamic education reflected in the forms of classical scholarly literature. Jamʿ, tāʾlīf and taṣnīf in the Medieval Ages” in Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

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Khismatulin, Alexey. “Vidy musul’manskoi nauchnoi literatury v X-XV vekakh: sochineniya (tasnīf ) i kompilyatsii (tāʾlīf )” (The Forms of Islamic Scholarly Literature in the 10th–15th centuries: compositions (tasnīf ) and compilations (tāʾlīf )). In Rahmat-nama, edited by Maryam Rezvan, 410–43. St. Petersburg: Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, 2008. Khismatulin, Alexey. “Srednevekovyi tāʾlīf: textologicheskii analiz i perevod Risāla-yi abdāliyya Yaʿquba Charkhī” (Medieval tāʾlīf: textual analysis and translation of the Risāla-yi abdāliyya by Yaʿqub Charkhī), in Ars Islamica, ed. by M. Piotrovsky and A. Alikberov, 392–436. Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 2016. Khismatulin, Alexey. “Two Mirrors for Princes Fabricated at the Seljuq Court: Nizām alMulk’s Siyar al-mulūk and al-Ghazālī’s Nasīhat al-mulūk.” In The Age of the Seljuqs. The Idea of Iran 6, edited by Edmund Herzig and Sarah Stewart, 94–130. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Khūshābar, Masʿūd Anṣārī, and ʿAlī-Riḍā Dhukāvatī Qarāgizlū. “Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn.” Farhang-i āthār-i īrānī-islāmī 1 (1385/2007), 348. Maas, Paul. Textual Criticism. Translated from German by Barbara Flower. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958. Manz, Beatrice Forbes. Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Molé, Marijan. “Autour du Daré Mansour: l’apprentissage mystique de Baha’ al-Din Naqshband,” Revue des Études Islamiques 27 (1959), Cahier 1: 35–66. Molé, Marijan, ed. Anīs-1, in Fonds Molé in the CNRS Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, Box V-B, 1–97 (altogether 239 accounts), unpublished. Molé, Marijan, ed. Anīs-2, in Fonds Molé in the CNRS Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, Box IV-F, 1–316 (altogether 417 accounts), unpublished. Muʿīn al-fuqarāʾ, Aḥmad b. Maḥmūd. Tārīkh-i mullāzāda dar dhikr-i mazārāt-i Bukhārā. Edited by Aḥmad Gulchīn Maʿānī. Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ibn Sīnā, 1339/1960. Pārsā, Muḥammad. Qudsiyya. Edited by Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ʿIrāqī. Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ṭahūrī, 1354/1975. Paul, Jürgen. Doctrine and Organization. The Khwajagan/Naqshbandiya in the first generation after Baha’uddin. Halle-Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998. Sayyid Ḥusaynzāda, Huda. “Bukhārī, Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak.” Dāyirat al-maʿārif-i buzurg-i islāmī 11 (2002). Scarcia, Gianroberto. “Ricordo di Marijan Molé.” Annali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 13 (1963): 319–25. Tagirdzhanov, Abdurahman. Opisanie tadjikskikh i persidskikh rukopisei vostochnogo otdela biblioteki LGU (Description of Tajik and Persian manuscripts at the Oriental department of the library of the Leningrad State University). Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1962.

chapter 11

Jāmī’s Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd

Merging Akbarian Doctrine, Naqshbandī Practice, and Persian Mystical Quatrain Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek Jāmī’s work represents the fullest summation of the long history integrating Ibn ʿArabī’s1 Sufi theosophy with the Persian literary tradition. Many of his works are in fact dedicated to explaining the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī. His first commentary in Arabic and Persian, Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fī sharḥ naqsh al-fuṣūṣ,2 was written in 863/1458–59 and draws on Qūnawī and other previous commentators, such as Jandī, Farghānī, Kāshānī, and Qayṣarī. About 65% of the book comprises verbatim quotation from these commentators, with particular attention given to the concept of the “Perfect Man” (insān al-kāmil). The commentary begins with a general introduction to the thought of the “Greatest Shaykh.” In 896/1490–91, Jāmī later wrote an Arabic commentary on the entire text of the Fuṣūs, entitled Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam,3 in which he confines himself to elucidating the immediate meaning of each sentence in the original text and shuns any theoretical digressions. A further exposition of the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī can be found in al-Durra al-fākhira where Jāmī compares the conflicting views of the Sufis, the theologians, and the philosophers on key matters of doctrine, especially the question of being. The position of the Sufis, presented as rationally superior to the competing other ones, is essentially identical with 1  Muhyī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn al-ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240), known to his disciples as the “Greatest Master,” has exercised a deep influence over the intellectual life of the Muslim community over the past 700 years. Among the immense number of works attributed to him, one must mention the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, a vast encyclopedia of the Islamic sciences seen within the context of tawḥīd, the profession of God’s Unity, as well as the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, which, according the author, was handed to him by the Prophet in a vision. The latter text was abundantly commented on by his disciples and followers, including Ṣadr alDīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), Muʾayyad al-Dīn Jandī (d. 690/1291), Saʿd al-Dīn Farghānī (d. ca. 699/1299–1300), ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī (d. 730/1330), and Dāwūd Qaysarī (d. 751/1350) in the Arabic language, and Bābā Rukn al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 769/1367), Tāj-al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. Ḥasan Khwārazmī (d. 840/1436), and Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī (d. 786/1385) in the Persian language. 2  Jāmī, Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fi sharḥ Naqsh al-fuṣūṣ, ed. William C. Chittick (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977). 3  Jāmī, Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam ed. ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Khayyālī al-Ḥusaynī al-Shādhilī al-Darqawī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004).

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the doctrine of the Akbarian School. More accessible and attractive than these works are Jāmī’s literary writings: Lavāʾiḥ (“Flashes,” ca. 870/1465), Lavāmiʿ (“Gleams,” 874/1470), and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt (“Rays from the flashes,” 886/1481).4 The question of Ibn ʿArabī’s influence on the Naqshbandī tradition in general, and on Jāmī in particular, has been studied by Hamid Algar in two important articles.5 Algar shows that the awareness of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine had penetrated Eastern Khorasan and Transoxiana by the fourteenth century, a period that saw also the emergence of the Naqshbandī order. There were indeed devotees of Ibn ʿArabī among the first generations of this order: Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā (d. 822/1419) and Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār (d. 896/1490) were definitely adherents of the doctrine of Oneness of Being. But Jāmī was certainly the most eminent and influential representative of this school, particularly in the Persian-speaking world. Algar has briefly presented the numerous writings in which Jāmī expounded the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī. I will here analyze in some detail one of his less well-known and studied works: Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt,6 an eighty-page commentary on his own quatrains, which imitates Ibn ʿArabī’s Tarjumān al-ashwāq.7 He first illustrates some of the important topics discussed by the “Greatest Shaykh” before explaining the Naqshbandī practice of dhikr. The book begins with a quatrain in praise of God, who is conceived of as an endless sea engulfing all atoms, followed by a quatrain devoted to the Prophet, who is portrayed as a mirror of the divine Essence and Attributes, and the only way to God. In his introduction, the author explains that he composed these quatrains to present the doctrine of the Oneness of Being and God’s descent into the degrees of Manifestation (shuhūd). But these divine mysteries can only be truly understood through personal unveiling (kashf ) and spiritual

4  Jāmī, Lavāyiḥ, in Sih risāla dar taṣavvuf (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Manūchihrī, 1360/1981), 3–103; Lavāmiʿ, in Sih risāla dar taṣavvuf, 104–89; Ashiʿat al-lamaʿāt, in Ganjīna-yi ʿirfān, ed. Ḥamīd Rabbānī (Tehran: Ganjīna, 1974). 5  Hamid Algar, “Jāmī and Ibn ‘Arabī: Khātam al-shu‘arā’ and Khātam al-awliyā’,” Ishraq. Islamic Philosophy Yearbook, 3 (2012): 138–58; Idem, “Reflections of Ibn ‘Arabi in Early Naqshbandî Tradition,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 10 (1991): 45–66, published again on the website: http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/naqshbandi.html. I would like to thank Alexandre Papas for drawing my attention to these articles and providing me with a copy of the first one. 6  Jāmī, Sih risāla dar taṣavvuf, 41 sqq. Henceforth abridged as ShR, followed by the page number. 7  The Tarjumán al-ashwáq. A collection of mystical odes by Muḥyi’ddín Ibn al-‘Arabí, edited from three manuscripts with a literal version and an abridged translation of the author’s commentary thereon by Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911).

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perception (dhawq). For this reason, he felt it necessary to explain the poems in a prose commentary in order to reveal all of their nuances. In fact, although the meaning of the quatrains seems clear to anyone with some knowledge of the thought of Ibn ʿArabī, the prose commentary is full of technical terms and Arabic passages, as well as long, complex sentences, which often makes it much more difficult to understand. The poor condition of the text does not help matters: the editor did not restore the punctuation and retained the archaic writing style, in addition to obvious errors in the copy. Some excerpts are borrowed from the introduction of Naqd al-nuṣūṣ in which they appear in a more correct and understandable manner. The study of this latter text and Chittick’s comprehensive analysis of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine8 helped me greatly in grasping the meaning of Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt. Among the numerous studies dedicated to Ibn ʿArabī (Izutsu’s Sufism and Taoism, Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Chodkiewicz’s Le Sceau des saints), not being myself a specialist of the Shaykh al-akbar, I have decided to rely on Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge, because it is the broadest study in scope and the only one that tries to preserve the overall context of Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings as he himself present them, without, however, neglecting the interpretations of his commentators, but thoroughly separating the former from the latter. I will examine the different ideas discussed by Jāmī. One of the major difficulties in this task lies in the interrelationship between all of his discussions: in order to understand one aspect, one has to understand all the rest. However, instead of arbitrarily selecting a starting point, I have decided to follow the same sequence as the author himself. 1

The Doctrine of the Oneness of Being

1.1 Being (wujūd) and the Modes of Existence Jāmī begins with a discussion on ontology. First, let us say a few words about the terms used in this discussion. Ibn ʿArabī employs the term wujūd in two main contexts, which demand two different translations in English. On the one hand, “existence” can be said of all things, but these things also “exist” in different modes. On the other hand, wujūd is employed when speaking about the substance or nature of God Himself: in this context, we may rather use the standard philosophical term “Being.” Indeed, for Ibn al-ʿArabī, it is not fully 8  William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

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appropriate to qualify anything other than God as “being” since, no doubt, only God is being. To refer to the existing things, he instead uses the term “existent” (mawjūd), which suggests the derivative nature of their existence.9 Jāmī starts by identifying three modes of existence among existing things (mawjūdāt). According to the first mode, things derive their being from something other than themselves. Their being (wujūd) is therefore different from their essence (dhāt): accordingly, they are called “possible beings” (mumkināt-i mawjūda). According to the second mode, being is similarly different from essence, although it is impossible to separate being and essence in any other way but theoretically: these things are called “necessary beings” (wājib alwujūd). According to the third mode, being is identical to essence, a feature that can only be applied to the Divine Reality, which is also called Necessary Being (vujūd-i vājib). The third mode is indeed the highest degree of perfection of being.10 The terminology employed here borrows from philosophers and theologians who referred to the Divine Reality as the Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd) in order to differentiate it from “possible things” (mumkin) and impossible things (mumtaniʿ, muḥāl). Necessary Being is the reality that cannot not be. The impossible things, on the other hand, cannot come into existence in the cosmos, while the possible things may or may not exist, depending on the will of the Necessary Being.11 Here, Jāmī coins a new term for qualifying the Divine Reality, namely vujūd-i vājib, thus acknowledging a new “intermediate” mode of being, to which he attributes the term wājib al-wujūd. The inversion of the two terms is significant: whereas the expression vujūd-i vājib, which refers exclusively to God, emphasizes the noun “Being” and describes it as necessary in the sense that nothing would be existent without Him, the expression wājib al-wujūd insists on the adjective “necessary” to which the noun “being” is a but complement, suggesting the derivation (from God the only true Being) of “those things whose existence is necessary” (because God wants them to be such). In fact, being (wūjud, hastī) can only be attributed to God alone, because being is God’s Essence and does not come from “outside,” as in the case of the other existing things, which receive their existence from the Necessary Being: instead, they are “made existent” (mawjūd). To clarify this point, Jāmī uses the metaphor of light in the following manner:

9   Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 6–7. 10  ShR 44. 11  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 81–82.

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From the Being that is as apparent as light, atoms of the created things put in an appearance. Anything that strays from its clarity remains hidden in the darkness of nonexistence.12 Jāmī distinguishes three levels of clarity. Some things derive their light from something other than themselves, like the earth that receives its light from the sun, requiring the cooperation of three entities: the moon, the sunrays reaching the moon, and the sun providing the rays. Other things, however, provide light that is an indispensable attribute of their essence. The solar body itself is not light, but it is inconceivable without light; two entities are thus brought into play, the solar body and the light. Finally, there is one thing that is luminous by itself: its essence is light, diffusing the highest level of brightness and allowing things to become visible according to their capacity. In this last case, a single element is involved, namely Light. In this manner, God is like light: He is the only one whose being and essence are unified, and He provides existence to all other things.13 The Quranic metaphor of God as Light (Quran 24:35) was already used by Ibn ʿArabī who employed the symbolism of visible light to explain the relationship between Being and nonexistence. God is nothing but Light, while everything else are only the rays reflected from Light’s substance. In one respect, they are light, and in another respect, they are darkness, since they are not identical with the Light itself. Darkness has no positive reality of its own: it is the absence of Light. Hence, the defining characteristic of each existent thing is its absence of being, but the reflecting Light allows it to exist. Light radiates and gives of itself. Hence, there are three “things”: Light, radiance, and darkness; or Being, existence, and nonexistence;14 or, according to Jāmī’s metaphor, Light, sunrays, and the moon. 1.2 Unknowability and Self-Disclosure of Being The Reality of Being (haqīqat-i vujūd) or Essence (dhāt) is absolutely unknowable, indescribable, and incomparable: it is not even qualified by eternity or apparition in time (qidam va hudūth), or by unity or plurality (vaḥdat va kathrat). Nothing can be said about it. God is hidden from sight, but at the same time, He is apparent (ẓāhir), and even more apparent than anything else, 12  ShR 45: hastī ki ba dhāt-i khud huvaydā-st chū nūr/dharrāt-i mukavvanāt az-ū yāft ẓuhūr// har chīz ki az furūgh-i ū uftad dūr/dar ẓulmat-i nīstī bimānd mastūr. 13  ShR 45–46. 14  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 7.

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because being is what is most visible, and the degree of God’s being is the most perfect. Jāmī writes: Intelligence is blind to the Essence of the Necessary Being, but being is more manifest than anything. His Essence is too hidden to appear, his Being too obvious to hide.15 All things in the cosmos are reflections of His Light, or in the language of the theologians, they are manifestations of His “Acts” (afʿāl), Names (asmāʾ), and Attributes (ṣifāt). In other words, the Essence is God in Himself without reference to anything else. As such, God is unknowable to anyone but Himself. However, God enters into relationships with the cosmos, relationships that are denoted by various divine names. Inasmuch as God’s Essence is independent of the worlds, the cosmos is not Him, but inasmuch as God freely assumes relationships with the world through His attributes, the cosmos manifests Him:16 Apprehend God in this way: see Him at every moment in every face! Gaze at the Creator every morning: the creature is where the Creator reveals Himself. In heaven and on earth, and all that they contain, see only God and do not be superficial. (Quatrain) O you whose heart mourns because of exile, why are you crying like Noah? You are at the heart of Contemplation, where is the separation? Open your eyes and see who you are looking at!17

15  ShR 50: vājib ki buvad khirad zi kunhash aʿmā/hast az hama dar nisbat hastī ajlā// māhiyatuhu akhfā min an taẓhar/aniyatuhu aẓhar min an takhfā. 16  ShR 51–53; Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 9. 17  ShR 52: [naẓm] īn chunīn fahm kun khudā-rā ham/dar hama rūy ū bibīn har dam//mīnigar har ṣabāḥ dar fāliq/z’ānki khalq-ast maẓhar-i khāliq//z’āsmān u zamīn u har chi darū-st/juz Khudā-rā mabīn, mamān dar pūst; [rubāʿī] ay ānki dilat zi-ḥijr dar nūḥa girīst/tā kay khāhī chū Nūḥ dar nūḥa girīst?//dar ʿayn-i shuhūd-ī, ghamm-i ḥijrān chī-st?/chashm-ī bigushā, bibīn ki mashhūd-i tu kī-st!

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There are two ways of knowing God. The first consists in the knowledge of the Essence, free from any entification (taʿayyunāt)18 of His Names and Attributes and unveiled through the manifestations of creatures: but only God knows Himself in this way. The second way consists in the knowledge of God through His manifold manifestations in the mirrors of creatures: this kind of knowledge is available to man, but with two variants. The first is knowledge without consciousness of the fact, while the second is conscious knowledge of it.19 1.3

Degrees of Being (marātib al-wujūd) When the Necessary Being manifests from the Essence, it does so through five processions according to the degree (of being): the Hidden World, the World of Manifestation, and between these two, spirits and images, while the fifth one encompasses the previous four Presences.20

According to Jāmī, there are five degrees of Being known as the Five Presences. The first Presence is the degree of the Hidden (ghayb) and the essential realities (maʿānī), which includes the Essence (dhāt) passing through the primary and secondary manifestation (tajallī) and entification (taʿayyun). The second Presence is the degree of the Apparent (shahādat) and the sensible (ḥiss), and encompasses the Cosmos from the Throne through to the terrestrial world, including all species, genres, and individuals. The third Presence is the degree of the Spirits, and the fourth is the imaginal world (ʿālam-i mithāl va khiyāl). The fifth Presence encompasses the previous four and corresponds to the Reality of the world and human form. Jāmī explains that some scholars enumerate six degrees of Being. Within the Hidden (ghayb), they make a distinction between the first entification (taʿayyun-i avval), notably the Essence, and the second entification (taʿayyun-i thānī), which further splits into three degrees: the degree of the Spirits, the degree of the imaginal world, and the degree of bodies (ajsām), also called “the world of the sensible” or “the world of manifestation.” The sixth degree, being the Reality of the Perfect Man (insān kāmil), encompasses the other five.21 18  This term, the fifth verbal form of ʿayn, has been given an important role by Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qunawī. It means “the state of being specified and particularized” or “becoming an entity.” 19  ShR 52–54. 20  ShR 57: vājib chū kunad tanzīl az ḥaḍrat-i dhāt/panj-ast tanazzulāt ū-rā darajāt.//ghaybast u shahādat u dar vasaṭ rūḥ u mithāl/wa‌ʾl-khāmisu jamʿiyatu tilka ʾl-ḥaḍarāt. 21  ShR 57–59.

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For a better understanding, we must turn to Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmology. The Shaykh al-akbar speaks about worlds (ʿālam) in the plural, conceived as subsystems of the “Not He:” thus, we find the “greater” world or macrocosm, the “lesser” world or microcosm, the spiritual world, imaginal world, and corporeal world. However, the existing things are considered as not other than God, and so referred to as “Presences” (ḥaḍra). Ibn ʿArabī’s followers wrote about the “Five Divine Presences,” by which they meant the five domains in which God is to be perceived: namely, 1) God Himself, 2) the spiritual world, 3) the imaginal world, 4) the corporeal world, and 5) the Perfect Man.22 Jāmī devotes the following chapters to describing the two first “worlds” previously mentioned, giving peculiar attention to the second. In the first degree or first entification (taʿayyun-i avval), there is no distinction or separation between the terrestrial world (mulk), the world of the spirits (malakūt), the world of the Attributes ( jabarūt), and the Essence (lāhūt). All are merged together in total unity. The second entification (taʿayyun-i thānī) is characterized by the distinction of all essential realities (maʿānī), although they are unaware of their own essence. They are qualified by existence (mawjūdiyat), because being is added to them. In some way, being becomes multiple, but this multiplicity (tiʿdād) and the distinction (tamyīz) within it are only perceived through divine Science, and not by the essential realities that emerge. Thus, we read: In the world of the essential reality, things are conscious of neither themselves nor others. From the edge of being, they are but one. Only the clarity of Science distinguishes them from each other.23 To distinguish between the first and the second entifications, Jāmī uses the metaphor of the seed and the tree. The seed is the origin of the tree, with its roots, branches, foliage, flowers, and fruit. If we consider the seed in itself, it is devoid of plurality and distinction: this is the degree of the first entification. However, if we consider all the things, which will manifest from the seed, we envisage the second entification: while the objective plurality of things does not yet exist, science can still anticipate it.24 The essential realities are also

22  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 5. 23  ShR 60: ar ʿālam-i maʿnī ki nabāshad ashyā/az dhāt-i khud u ghayr-i khud āgah aṣlan// hastand hama zi rūy-i hastī yaktā/nūriyat-i ʿilmishān zi ham karda judā. 24  ShR 60–61.

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named ʿayān-i thābita, a fundamental concept of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought and variously translated as “permanent archetypes” or “immutable entities.” 1.4 Immutable Entities ʿAyn is the term employed to denote things opposed to Being, referring to specificity, particularization, and designation. God creates the cosmos in accordance with His eternal knowledge of it, and He gives existence in the universe to each entity that is immutably fixed within His knowledge. The term’s common translation as “archetype” is somewhat misleading, because it suggests that ʿayn thābita becomes the model for individuals in the manner of Platonic philosophy. In fact, what corresponds to Platonic ideas in Ibn ʿArabī’s teaching is the notion of Divine Names, while immutable entities are the things themselves, “before” they are given existence in the world. Both the immutable entity (ʿayn thābita) and existent entity (ʿayn mawjūda) represent the same reality, but the former does not exist in the cosmos, while the latter does.25 According to Jāmī, immutable entities are intelligible forms that are essentially nonexistent, remaining unaware of the external being (vujūd-i khārijī). They are hidden, but provide places of manifestation (maẓhar) for the external being, which manifests through their “properties” (aḥkām) and “effects” (āthār). As Jāmī writes: Immutable entities conceal the secret of the Eternal. They are the veils of the sanctuary in the realm of subsistence. They are all places of manifestation for the light of Being, while themselves remaining in the darkness of nonexistence.26 To make the relationship between the Being and immutable entities easier to grasp, Jāmī compares them to mirrors. We may consider the immutable entities to be the mirrors of the Being of God as well as His Names and Attributes. In this case, we must admit that nothing is visible outside of the Being of God, multiplied by the plurality of immutable entities that ensure His manifestation: this is the perspective of the unified man (muwaḥḥid) in whom the contemplation of God (shuhūd-i ḥaqq) dominates and who is also called “the owner of the eye” (dhū al-ʿayn). On the other hand, we may consider the Being of God to be the mirror of the immutable entities. In this case, the Being remains hidden and only the immutable entities are visible: this is the perspective of the 25  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 84. 26  ShR 63: ʿayān ki mukhdarāt-i sirr-i qidam-and/dar mulk-i baqā pardagiyān-i ḥaram-and// hastand hama maẓāhir-i nūr-i vujūd/bā ānki muqīm-i ẓulumāt-i ʿadam-and.

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“owner of the intellect” (dhū al-ʿaql) in whom the contemplation of the created world (shuhūd-i khalq) predominates. However, the man who is spiritually accomplished (muḥaqqiq) contemplates the two mirrors simultaneously—that of God and that of the immutable entities—and sees the same images (suvar) in both. He is called dhū al-ʿayn wa-l-ʿaql, because he contemplates God in the creation and the creation in God, simultaneously perceiving the multiplicity (kathrat) of the existent and the Unity (waḥdat) of Being.27 Thus, we read: Immutable entities are mirrors in which God manifests himself, or perhaps it is the Divine Light that is the mirror and immutable entities the forms. The wise man easily understands that each of the two mirrors is identical to the other.28 The wise man described here resembles the Possessor of Two Eyes (dhū alʿaynayn) in Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine, the perfect gnostic who sees God from various perspectives from the edge of incomparability (tanzīh) or similarity (tashbīh). The eye that looks in the direction of the non-manifest declares God’s incomparability and places all emphasis upon His Unity, since it does not perceive the multiplicity of forms. The eye that looks in the direction of the manifest acknowledges the reality of multiplicity and declares His similarity, since it observes all things as God’s self-disclosures.29 1.5 Aḥadiyya and Vāḥidiyya Jāmī then defines two concepts initially coined by Sadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī as an extension of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, notably “exclusive unity” (al-aḥadiyya) and “inclusive unity” (al-wāḥidiyya).30 As exclusive unity, God is not determined in any manner and not subject to any qualification, because His Essence and Being cannot be distinguished from one another. As inclusive unity, God is the cause of both unity and the entification of all creation: this double aspect allows us to consider God in Himself or in relation to the cosmos. Immutable entities conceal and reveal the Divine Unity, each of them revealing but a small 27  ShR 63–65. 28  ShR 63: aʿyān hama āyina va Ḥaqq jalvagar-ast/yā nūr-i Ḥaqq āyina va aʿyān suvar ast// dar chashm-i muḥaqqiq ki ḥadīd al-baṣar-ast/har yak z’īn dū āyina ān digar-ast. 29  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 361–63. 30   Aḥadiyya is God’s oneness taken from the point of view that precludes there being anything in existence but Him. Wāḥidiyya is God’s oneness as it relates to the created world by means of His names. Chittick, “The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to alQaysarī,” Muslim World 72 (1982): 116–17.

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facet of the Oneness of God. Only the Perfect Man, a unified reality reflecting the complete overflowing of Being, can reveal God in His pure unity.31 When the Being was overflowed through the levels, every moment He revealed something else. At the final level, that of man, all these things were unified in their description.32 The One sees all the numbers included in the number one. At the heart of the numbers, He also sees the One. Through the perfection of His Essence and His Names, He sees everything in Himself and Himself in all things.33 Regarding His essential perfection (kamāl-i dhātī), God has no need for the existence of the world and its creatures. Nevertheless, the manifestation of His perfection through the Names (kamāl-i asmāʾī) requires the existence of the immutable entities, as mirrors of the Attributes (ṣifāt), which can be called “other” (than God, ghayr), knowing that the “other” is perfect nothingness (ʿadam-i maḥḍ).34 The essential realities (ḥaqā’iq) of existing things are the entifications of the Absolute Being (vujūd-i muṭlaq) within the Divine Knowledge. From the perspective of the reality of Being, they are identical (ʿayn) to each other and to the Absolute Being; from the perspective of entification (taʿayyun), they are different (ghayr) from each other and from the Absolute Being in the sense that each is a particular entification of the unique Being.35 Sometimes, Jāmī expresses the same idea using the concepts of exteriority (ẓāhir or manifestation) and interiority (bāṭin or occultation): interiority means lack of entification, while exteriority is equivalent to the different degrees of entification through the immutable entities.36 This issue is difficult to understand without turning to theology and the distinction between the Essence, Attributes, and Acts. The Essence is God in Himself without reference to the relationships than can be 31  ShR 65–66. 32  ShR 67: hastī ba-marātib chu tanzīl farmūd/har jā zi rukh-ishān digar parda gushūd//dar martaba-yi bāzpasīn k’insān būd/har yak zi shuʾūn ba-vasf majmūʿ namūd. 33  ShR 68: Vāhid hama dar aḥad ʿadad mībīnad/dar ẓamn-i ʿadad nīz aḥad mībīnad//Yaʿnī ba kamāl-i dhātī u āsmānī/dar khūd hama va dar hama khud mībīnad. 34  ShR 69. 35  ShR 70. 36  ShR 71.

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envisaged between Him and the existent beings. The Acts (af‘āl) are the created things (mukavvanāt). The Attributes or Names (sifāt, asmāʾ) are the isthmus (barzakh) between the Essence and the cosmos. The Names are relationships, not entities or existing things. Each name denotes both the Essence and a specific meaning known as its “reality” (ḥaqīqa) or “root” (aṣl). The reality of the name determines its “effects” (āthār) or “properties” (aḥkām) within the cosmos.37 God rules the existent things through their realities. Excepting the One, nothing is permanent (thabāt va qarār). Each reality in this world is in itself “nothingness,” but God spreads being to it by effusion ( fayḍ) according to its ability to receive existence. Nevertheless, soon after receiving existence, the reality tends to return to its origin, which is nonexistence (nīstī). This means that God continually renews His gift of existence. This can be explained in another way: the Divine Essence reveals itself through its Names and Attributes activated in the immutable entities. Some of its Names require the existence of things, while others require nonexistence (for example, al-Mumīt “He who creates death”). Thus, at every moment, things return to their original nothingness (ʿadam-i aṣlī) and their essential annihilation ( fanāʾ-yi dhātī), but due to the constantly renewed support of the Divine subsistence (baqāʾ), these things are given a new existence without being aware of the fact: this is what Ibn ʿArabī calls “perpetual creation” (khalq-i jadīd). Their outlook does not change, but being is incessantly renewed in them.38 1.6

Oneness and Multiplicity God is one, and the emanation of God is unique. The multiplicity of Attributes is the origin of the plurality of the receptacles of the possibles. So ascribe to the plurality of receptacles all kind of differences you may observe.39

The multiplicity that we observe in this world is due to the amount of different receptacles into which the Unique is poured. Not all possible things are equally receptive to being: for example, dry wood burns more easily than green wood because it shares the same properties as fire, namely heat and dryness.40 The existents in all their diversities are the manifestation of God in the entities 37  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 33 sqq. 38  ShR 74–75. 39  ShR 77: Ḥaqq vaḥdānī u fayḍ-i Ḥaqq vaḥdānī/kathrat-i ṣifat qavābil-i imkānī//har guna tafāvut ki mushāhid bīnī/bāyad ki z’ikhtilāf-i qābil dānī. 40  ShR 77–78.

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of possible things in accordance with the readiness of these possible things. Hence, the Attributes of God are diverse, since the entities in which He manifests are diverse. The existent things thus become distinct or plural through the plurality of the entities.41 The cosmos is the manifestation of the Divine Light through the multiplicity of its Attributes that give birth to the multiplicity of forms. In fact, there are two levels of manifestation: the level of Divine Knowledge is the manifestation of immutable entities or the “realities” of things that remain hidden (bāṭin); the level of the things (ʿayn) is manifestation of the being of things in the cosmos or “outward” world (ẓāhir).42 To clarify the interaction between unity and multiplicity, Jāmī uses several metaphors: The realities of the immutable entities are like different glasses on which the sunray of the Being falls. Although these glasses are red, yellow, or blue, The sun reveals in all of them but one and the same color.43 When the sea breathes, this is called steam. When the steam condenses, this is called a cloud. When drops begin to fall, the cloud becomes rain, and the rain becomes the river, and the river finally returns to the sea.44 The beloved is unique but she placed before her hundreds of thousands of mirrors offered to our eyes. In each of these mirrors, she made appear her face according to the purity and clarity of the mirror.45 1.7

Naqshbandī Spiritual Training You should sweep the dust of multiplicity from the surface of the heart. Do not cultivate vain eloquence about Oneness!

41  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 94–95. 42  ShR 79. 43  ShR 80: aʿyān hama shīsha-hā-yi gunāgūn buvad/kuftād bar ān partav-i khurshīd-i vujūd// har shīsha ki buvad surkh yā zard u kabūd/khurshīd dar ān ham ba-hamān rang namūd. 44  ShR 81: chun baḥr nafas zanad chi khānand bukhār/chun shud mutarakkam ān nafas abr shumār//bārān shavad abr chun kunad qaṭra nithār/v’ān bārān sayl u sayl baḥr ākhir-i kār. 45  ShR 85: maʿshūqa yakī-st līk binahāda ba pīsh/az bahr-i naẓāra ṣad hazār āyina bapīsh// dar har yak az ān āyina-hā binamūda/bar qadr-i saqālat u ṣafā sūrat-i khīsh.

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Do not be proud of your rhetorical skills! The profession of the Oneness of God is to see things in their unity, not to talk about it!46 The truly wise acquire knowledge by personal experience and “ecstatic tasting” (dhawq-i vujdānī), not by hearsay (naql), imitation (taqlīd), or reason (ʿaql): the latter is like hearing about the fragrance of musk and the former like smelling it. Wayfaring is not just about listening to the masters or reading books. It requires a personal commitment to the Path, and the straightest and shortest Path is the Naqshbandī, because it begins where others end.47 At this point, the orientation of the text dramatically changes: Jāmī devotes the last ten pages of his treatise to the explanation of spiritual practices within the Naqshbandī brotherhood.48 2

Jāmī and the Naqshbandiyya

Jāmī’s association with this Sufi order began when he was still a child: when Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā was passing through Herat in 822/1419, he received his blessing. The link to the brotherhood became effective when Jāmī joined the following of Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī. After Kāshgharī’s death in 860/1456, he became close to Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār. Although authorized by Kāshgharī to provide spiritual guidance, Jāmī was notoriously averse to the tasks of mentoring. Nevertheless, several individuals are said to have been formally trained by him in the ṭarīqa: Mawlānā Shāhidī Qumī, Khwāja Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf, Jāmī’s third son (d. 919/1513), ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (d. 906/1501), and Raḍī al-Dīn ʿAbd alGhafūr Lārī (d. 912/1506), who was renowned for a number of writings, especially his supplement (takmila) to Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns.49 Jāmī expounded the fundamental principles of the Naqshbandiyya in a brief treatise entitled Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīq-i khwājagān “The Quintessence of the Path of the Masters.”50 He also gathered some of the sayings of Khwāja Muḥammad 46  ShR 86: az sāḥat-i dil ghubār-i kathrat ruftan/khushtar ki ba-harza durr-i vaḥdat suftan// maghrūr-i sukhan mashav ki tawḥīd-i Khudāy/vāhid dīdan buvad, na vāḥid guftan. 47  ShR 87. 48  See H. Algar, “Reflections of Ibn ‘Arabi in Early Naqshbandî Tradition.” 49  Hamid Algar, Jami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 24–25; Lâmiî Çelebi, Nefehat Tercemesi (Istanbul, 1872), 458. See the contributions of Alexey Khismatulin and Alexandre Papas to this volume. 50  Jāmī, Sar-rishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān, ed. ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī (Kabul: Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343/1965).

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Pārsā and supplemented them with a commentary in a brief treatise called Sukhanān-i Khwāja Pārsā. Finally, his mathnavī, Silsilat al-dhahab “The Golden Chain,” tackles some distinctively Naqshbandī matters, such as the true nature of silent dhikr. The attribution to him of a longer treatise, untitled Risāla-yi naqshbandiyya is uncertain, for no mention of it occurs in lists of his works by his contemporaries.51 2.1 The Naqshbandiyya Spiritual Rule: Some Reminders Vocal dhikr (public recollection of God, dhikr jahrī, or uttered by the tongue, dhikr al-lisān) was a prevalent practice among Sufi brotherhoods, including the Khwājagān. However, Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband adopted silent dhikr from the spiritual heritage of ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī and refused to take part in the sessions of vocal dhikr performed by his master, Amīr Kulal, leading to the subsequent establishment of a distinct group, the Naqshbandiyya. Silent dhikr (hidden recollection of God, dhikr khafī, or whispered in the heart, dhikr alqalb) became the dominant practice in this new group, but the masters had greatly divergent opinions as to the attitude to be taken toward vocal dhikr.52 Along with silent dhikr, Bahāʾ al-Dīn accepted Ghijduvānī’s set of eight principles that define the path of the Khwājagān, supplementing them with three of his own. Thus, we find the eleven “sacred words” (kalimāt-i qudsiyya): 1. yād kard, recollection; 2. bāz gasht, return; 3. nigāh dāsht, watchfulness; 4. yād dāsht, remembrance; 5. hush dar dam, awareness in breathing; 6. naẓar dar qadam, watching the steps; 7. safar dar vaṭan, travelling in the homeland; 8. khalvat dar anjuman, solitude in the crowd; 9. vuqūf-i zamānī, awareness of time; 10. vuqūf-i ʿadadī, awareness of multiplicity; 11. vuqūf-i qalbī, awareness of the heart. The first four principles refer to the foundations of dhikr: constant recollection of the unitary formula, “There is no god but God”; returning to consciousness while keeping God in mind; guarding the heart against distracting thoughts; and remembering, which signifies the heart’s continual presence with God. The two next principles, “awareness in breathing” and “watching the steps,” 51  See Hamid Algar’s essay in the present volume. 52  See Thierry Zarcone, “K̲ h̲wād̲ ja̲ gān,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill Online, 2013).

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may betray an Indian influence on the Naqshbandiyya: both practices aid concentration and avoid distraction. “Traveling in the homeland” and “solitude in the crowd” are paradoxical in nature and reveal a Malāmatī origin. In short, “traveling in the homeland” is opposed to the common Sufi practice of travelling from place to place in order to meet different masters, benefit from their blessing, and acquire spiritual knowledge. “Solitude in the crowd” means being outwardly with the creatures and inwardly with God, which is opposed to the Sufi practice of seclusion (khalvat), which the Naqshbandiyya describes as befitting weak souls. These two principles could thus be interpreted as encouraging brothers to be involved in the world and accompany a master (suḥba). The final three principles were designed to increase self-awareness, an awareness of the world around, and an awareness of the constant presence of God. On a practical level, they entail daily moral self-examination, counting the number of utterances of dhikr, breath control, and permanent concentration on the movements of the heart in order to ensure its purity and permanent attention to God.53 Companionship was considered the most effective way of reaching God: through it, the master could not only teach the disciples, but also directly transmit his spiritual qualities and attributes to them. To reinforce the link between the master and disciple, the Naqshbandīs introduced the complementary method of rābiṭa. Literally meaning “binding,” rābiṭa refers to the technique of retaining the master’s image in the disciple’s heart, regardless of whether the master is present or absent. This is reciprocated by the practice of tawajjuh, which requires the master to direct his heart toward the disciple.54 2.2 Jāmī’s Discussion of Dhikr It is precisely with a description of “binding” that Jāmī begins his discussion on the excellence of Naqshbandī wayfaring: When you will see the King seated on the throne of Poverty, you will acquire a certain knowledge about the secrets. If you engrave His image on the tablet of your heart, Beginning with this image, you will find the way to the Naqshbandiyya.55 53  Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (London: Routledge, 2007), 25–28. 54  Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya, 29. 55  ShR 88: dar masnad-i faqr chun bibīnī shāhī/z’asrār-i ḥaqīqat ba yaqīn āgāhī//gar naqsh kunī ba lawḥ-i dil ṣūrat-i ū/z’ān naqsh ba naqshband yābī rāhī. See translation and commentary of this quatrain in Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 226–27, note 13.

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In this Sufi group, the inner link with the shaykh is so strong that whenever a disciple seeks to progress in the knowledge of secrets, he begins by calling to mind the image of his master, which mirrors the Universal Spirit (rūḥ-i muṭlaq). He then focuses on his heart, which encompasses the entire human reality in which beings are individuated parts. This allows him to reach a state of absence from the self (ghaybat) and unconsciousness (bīkhūdī). He constantly strives to reject inappropriate thoughts, which is easier when calling upon the image of his master, thus benefiting from the power of his spiritual state.56 The disciple then engages in the remembrance of God, forcefully repeating the shahāda, “There is no god but God,” and making it penetrate into the heart. He does not allow temptations or visions to disturb him, keeping in mind that everything, good or bad, is a manifestation of God. If the first step is synonymous with reaching the state of bīkhūdī and keeping the mind concentrated on God, then the second leads to the contemplation of God in everything and seeing all creatures as mirrors of the Unique Beauty. In this state, the disciple sees himself in everything and everything in himself. He strives to maintain this interior state at all times, even when busy with everyday tasks, such as talking, walking, or eating. Jāmī writes: Grasp in your hand the quintessence of felicity, o brother, and do not spoil in vain your dear life! Always and in all places, whatever you are doing and with whom, always keep the eye of your heart secretly fixed on the Friend.57 If a distraction or spiritual difficulty occurs and troubles the disciple, he is advised to proceed to the great ablution (ghusl), if possible with cold water (which is more purifying), otherwise with hot, and then to dress in clean clothes and perform two rakʿas of prayer in a secluded and quiet place. He must then empty his mind and perform dhikr again. If the problem persists, he should confide in his master who is the mirror of the Lord.58 Some people do not call the image of the master to mind, but instead the image of the Book or the holy name (Allāh), imagining it outside of themselves or in their chest. Others choose a single inanimate object, like a stone, and concentrate their outward and inward eyes on it, thus eliminating all thought, 56  ShR 88–90. 57  ShR 91: sar-rishta-yi dawlat, ay barādar, ba kaf ār/v’īn ʿumr-i garāmī ba khasārat magudhār//dāʾim hama jā bā hama kas dar hama kār/mīdār nahufta chashm-i dil jānib-i yār. 58  ShR 91–92.

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suggestion, or distraction, except for God. The goal is “permanent presence with God” (davām-i ḥuḍūr maʿa‌ʾl-Ḥaqq), a state that brings great happiness and results in witnessing the divine manifestation in all things (mushāhada). The muḥaqqiq sees the Being through all the levels of the Divine manifestations and acknowledges the true meaning of ittiḥād and ittiṣāl. Ittiḥād is the vision (shuhūd) of God, the One by whom everything exists, although it is nonexistent by itself. Ittiṣāl is the servant’s observation of himself, as his “reality” (ʿayn) is united with the unique Being and so existing through it.59 According to Jāmī, Najm al-Dīn Kubrā said that the dhikr of animals (or breathing species) was found in their breathing and that successive inspirations and expirations were signs of God being hidden within them and of the letters forming His name (Allāh). The intelligent seeker (of God) should remember this, and when reciting the name of God, he should let the divine essence penetrate and fill him, being attentive to the entry and exit of his breath, so that the presence of God becomes permanent within him.60 Dhikr is evolutionary: at the beginning, it does not involve the release from all external and internal links. However, it enhances the compatibility (munāsabat) between God and man, by turning the disciple’s attention more and more exclusively to God and severing his links with the world of multiplicity. The Muslim profession of faith, consisting of the negation of everything other than God and the affirmation of His oneness, is the most effective dhikr, being the perfect remedy for healing man’s primary disease: that is, his interest in the outside world, which is in fact the negation of God and the affirmation of the “other.”61 Anyone who engages in dhikr should strive to keep his heart in accordance with his tongue: while uttering the negative part of the shahāda, he mentally annihilates ( fanāʾ) all creatures, and while uttering the affirmative part of it, he makes the subsistence (baqāʾ) of the eternal Being appear. In this way, the profession of faith is gradually engraved on his heart and so becomes a constant attribute, thus pervading its substance ( jawhar). Even if the oral recitation (dhikr-i lisānī) stops, the internal recitation of the heart continues. The man engaged in dhikr (dhākir) becomes unified with the recollection (dhikr), while the recollection is annihilated in the Recollected (madhkūr).62 We must note here that Jāmī permits both vocal and silent dhikr. He addresses the issue in his aforementioned treatise entitled Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīq-i 59  ShR 93–95. 60  ShR 96. 61  ShR 97–98. 62  ShR 98.

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khwājagān, also known as Risāla-yi sharāyiṭ-i dhikr, in which he does not advocate the exclusive recourse to silent dhikr. He discerns certain qualities in vocal dhikr that are useful to beginners and rejects the arguments that its practice is hypocritical.63 The correct performance of recollection is greatly aided both by the “awareness of the heart” (vuqūf-i qalbī), which empties thoughts from the mind, and by “counting” (raʿāyat-i ʿadad), which sustains concentration. Some people think that holding the breath during recollection favors the advent of spiritual revelations (laṭīfa) or sweet rapture (vujdān). However, according to Jāmī, the founder of the Naqshbandiyya did not consider that holding the breath (bāz dāshtan-i nafas) or dhikr counting (raʿāyat-i ʿadad) were necessary. On the contrary, he attached great importance to the awareness of the heart. Jāmī explains the meaning of the following “sacred words”: yād kard is the performance of oral or silent recollection; bāz gasht is repeating at each recollection the words, “My God, You are my goal and Your satisfaction is my desire,” in order to repel all thoughts and purify dhikr; nigāh dāsht is spiritual self-examination and concentration (murāqaba-yi khavātir), leading to vision and annihilation.64 While some people go directly to the state of nigāh dāsht, most require longer training through oral and then silent recollection.65 3

Conclusion: Commenting on Poetry or Teaching through Poetry?

Ibn ʿArabī’s theosophical concepts in the Iranian world as well as in Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and India.66 The dīvāns include 254 quatrains, about four percent of the totality of his lyrical poetry. The majority treats different mystical or religious topics: theosophy and the confession of the Oneness of God, with some being very clear allusions to the Akbarian doctrine. There are also descriptions of spiritual wayfaring and its various stages or experiences; of ascetics and wisdom; and of mystical love and unconventional themes. A few poems are even dedicated to profane topics, such as the glorification of nature or science. Besides the dīvān, quatrain was Jāmī’s favorite form for enriching his prose treatises. He wrote several treatises in which poetic commentaries play an important role. It is within these works that Jāmī tries his best to conciliate waḥdat 63  Hamid Algar, “Jâmi. II and Sufism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica. 64  ShR 99. 65  ShR 99–100. 66  Weismann, The Naqhbandiyya, 30; see also Hamid Algar’s contribution to this volume.

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al-wujūd with Persian poetical mysticism. Lavāʾiḥ is a set of thirty-six meditations of varying length on metaphysical topics. Lavāmiʿ is a commentary on the celebrated wine poem of Ibn al-Fāriḍ. Sharḥ-i qasīda-yi tāʾiyya (875/1470)67 is another commentary on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry. Ashiʿat al-lamaʿāt (886/1481)68 is a commentary on Fakhr al-dīn ʿIrāqī’s Lamaʿāt. Risāla-yi nāʾiyya69 is an interpretation of the first two verses of the Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī by Mawlānā Rūmī. Finally, Sharḥ-i bayt-i Amīr Khusraw is a commentary on a verse from one of Amīr Khusraw’s qaṣīdas. Almost all of these treatises are adorned with Jāmī’s own expressly composed quatrains. Why did he choose this form and how did he employ it in his works? It is not known when the quatrain first came into existence in the Persian world, but it is certainly of a pre-Islamic and popular origin.70 It followed the evolution of Persian poetry in general. The Iranian syllabic meter was subjected to Arabic quantitative prosody, while taking into account previous forms: including a syllabic meter, an accentual verse with caesura, and an irregular or inexistent rhyme. Rūdakī (d. 329/940) was credited with the invention of the genre. However, among the poets who preceded him, there are examples of poems that conform to the characteristic traits of the rubāʿī. In Arabic, the rubāʿī did not appear until the end of the tenth century in Khorasan, evidently under Persian influence, and from this tenth century onwards quatrains were widely used in Sufi circles. There is some evidence, emanating from the Sufi milieux in Khorasan, but also in Baghdad, that testifies to the Persians’ usage of the quatrain to express their love for God. Attempts have thus been made to ascribe Abū Saʿīd Abīʾl-Khayr (d. 440/1049) as the inventor of the quatrain in Sufism. During the same period, the Ḥanbalī Sufi al-Anṣārī (d. 481/1088) and the mountain-dwelling hermit Bābā Ṭāhir (d. 401/1010?) also expressed their experiences in this poetic form. Thereafter, all of the great Persian mystical poets used the quatrain. It is the perfect form to express short but penetrating spiritual insights, feelings, or experiences, and to summarize or conclude a prose discussion.71 67  Jāmī, Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān Afsaḥzād et al. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2000), 409–38. 68  Jāmī, Ashiʿat al-lamaʿāt, in Ganjīna-yi ʿirfān, ed. Ḥamīd Rabbānī (Tehran: Ganjīna, 1974). 69  Jāmī, Bahāristān, 325–36. 70  See for example Bo Utas, “Prosody: meter and rhyme,” in General introduction to Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (London-New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 119–21; C.-H. de Fouchecour, G. Doerfer, W. Stoetzer, “Rubāʿī (pl. Rubāʿiyyāt),” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill Online, 2015). 71  Gerhard Doerfer, “Gedanken zur Entstetung des ruba‘i,” in Arabic Prosody and its application in Muslim poetry, eds. Lars Johanson and Bo Utas (Uppsala: Swedish research institute in Istanbul, 1994), 45‒59; Alessandro Bausani, “La quartina,” in Storia della letteratura

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Denis McAulay recently devoted a whole book to the topic of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystical poetics.72 To most readers, Ibn ʿArabī’s poetry is synonymous with Tarjumān al-ashwāq “The Interpreter of Desires,” a collection of love lyrics for which the author provided doctrinal interpretations in a commentary. However, this book accounts for only a tiny part of his poetic output. Ibn ʿArabī wrote thousands of verses, many of them scattered throughout his prose works. Most of these poems deal with mystical doctrine, but are too elusive to act as a teaching tool or medium. McAulay suggests that they were intended to be used for meditations by a more select audience or to be commented on, rather than be performed at gatherings.73 McAulay studies three prose texts in which Ibn ʿArabī throws some light on his understanding of poetics, emphasizing the connection between poetry and the world of the imagination, claiming that the poetry was revealed to him by a spirit, and giving his views on the use of poetry for devotional purposes. He makes it clear that poems written in a secular context should not be used for preaching and he is wary about the use of poetry for Sufi rituals, such as samāʿ. Poetry reflects elements of the cosmos, which are the forms in which God is manifested, and the poetic verse is analogous to the structure of the world and creation, which enables it to become a vehicle for secret knowledge.74 After Ibn ʿArabī’s time, poetry was increasingly considered as a means of instruction. However, his disciples preferred to reach out to Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poems rather than those of the Greatest Master or to compose their own poetry like Jāmī. What was needed was either a didactic poem that set out the doctrine in a systematic manner or a lyrical poem onto which a mystical reading could be superimposed, regardless of whether the interpretation corresponded to the poet’s own intentions. Ibn ʿArabī’s poems were neither didactic nor lyrical. Instead, they were elliptical, paradoxical, and difficult to pinpoint, necessitating a commentary in order to be properly understood.75 persiana, eds. A. Pagliaro and A. Bausani (Milano: Nuova accademia editrice, 1960), 527‒78; Sīrūs Shamīsā, Anvāʿ-i adabī (Tehran: Firdaws, 1373/1994); id., Sayr-i rubāʿī (Tehran: Firdaws, 1374/1995); Reza Saberi, A Thousand Years of Persian Rubaiyat (Bethesda: IBEX, 2000); L.P. Elwell-Sutton, “The Rubâ’i in early Persian literature,” in Cambridge History of Iran IV, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge-New York-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 633‒57; Sayyid ʿAlī Mīr-Afḍalī, “Abū Saʿīd Abū al-Khayr va rubāʿiyyāt-i dawrayi ṣafavī,” Maʿārif 15/3 (1377/1999): 42‒65; Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005). 72  Denis E. McAulay, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 73  McAulay, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mystical Poetics, 12. 74  McAulay, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mystical Poetics, 32–58. 75  McAulay, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mystical Poetics, 214–15.

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Jāmī both taught through poetry and commented on poetry, resorting to the Persian mystical approach to poetry as well as Ibn ʿArabī’s model of commenting on poetry, as in the Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd. However, the method used in this work is paradoxical, because his quatrains are quite clear and require no comment: instead, they help to clarify the heavy prose developments, which in return destroys the beauty, lightness, and polysemy of the poetry by ascribing to them a single, intellectual meaning. It is properly a negation of the Persian theory of poetry as presented by ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī and it also contradicts Ibn ʿArabī’s own views about poetry: poetry is no longer the mirror of souls, and thus infinitely polysemous in its reflection of the innumerable facets of the Divinity. It is a mere learning tool that narrows the scope of the poem to a single unambiguous signification. Intellect has triumphed, but magic is lost. Bibliography Afsaḥzād, Aʿlākhān. Naqd va barrasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Farhangī, 1999. Algar, Hamid. Jami. Makers of Islamic Civilization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Algar, Hamid. “Jāmī and Ibn ‘Arabī: Khātam al-shu‘arā’ and Khātam al-awliyā’.” Ishraq. Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 3 (2012): 138‒58. Algar, Hamid. “Jāmi. II and Sufism.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. XIV, 475‒79. Accessed online 05 March 2013, URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jami-ii. Algar, Hamid. “Reflections of Ibn ‘Arabi in Early Naqshbandî Tradition.” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 10 (1991): 45‒66. Aminrazavi, Mehdi. The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Bausani, Alessandro. “La quartina.” In Storia della letteratura persiana, edited by A. Pagliaro and A. Bausani, 527‒78. Milano: Nuova accademia editrice, 1960. Chittick, William C. “The Five Divine Presences: From al-Qūnawī to al-Qaysarī.” Muslim World 72 (1982): 107‒28. Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Doerfer, Gerhard. “Gedanken zur Entstetung des rubā‘ī.” In Arabic Prosody and its application in Muslim poetry, edited by Lars Johanson and Bo Utas, 45‒59. Uppsala: Swedish research institute in Istanbul, 1994.

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Elwell-Sutton, L.P. “The Rubā‘ī in early Persian literature.” In Cambridge History of Iran IV, edited by Richard N. Frye, 633‒57. Cambridge-New York-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Fouchecour, C.H. de, G. Doerfer and W. Stoetzer. “Rubāʿī (pl. Rubāʿiyyāt).” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online, 2015. Accessed 04 May 2018, URL: . Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Ashiʿat al-lamaʿāt, in Ganjīna-yi ʿirfān. Edited by Ḥamīd Rabbānī. Tehran: Ganjīna, 1974. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afsaḥzād et al. Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2000. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Dīvān. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afsaḥzād. 2 vols. Tehran: Mirāth-i Maktūb, 1999. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Dīvān-i kāmil. Edited by Muḥammad Rawshan. Tehran: Nigāh, 1380/2001. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Lavāyiḥ. Edited and translated by Yann Richard as Les Jaillissements de Lumière. Paris: Les Deux Océans, 1982. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Nafaḥāt al-uns. Edited by Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī. Tehran: Iṭṭilā‘āt, 2001. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fi sharḥ Naqsh al-fuṣūṣ. Edited by William C. Chittick. Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977, new ed. Tehran: Muʿassasa-yi Muṭāla‘āt va Taḥqiqāt-i Farhangī, 1370/1991. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sar-rishta-yi Ṭarīq-i Khwājagān. Edited by ʿAbd-al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī. Kabul: Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343/1965. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam. Edited by ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Khayyālī alḤusaynī al-Shādhilī al-Darqawī. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sih risāla dar taṣawwuf. Edited by Iraj Afshār. Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Manūchihrī, 1360/1981. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Sukhanān-i Khwāja Pārsā. In “Quelques Traités Naqshbandis.” Edited by Marijan Molé, Farhang-i Īrān Zamīn 6 (1958): 294‒303. Lâmiî Çelebi. Nefehat Tercemesi. Istanbul, 1872. Lārī, ʿAbd-al-Ghafūr. Takmila-yi Ḥavāshī-yi Nafaḥāt al-uns. Edited by ʿAlī Asghar Bashīr Hiravī. Kabul: Anjuman-i Jāmī, 1343/1964. McAulay, Denis E. Ibn ‘Arabi’s Mystical Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mīr-Afḍalī, Sayyid ʿAlī. “Abū Saʿīd Abū al-Khayr va rubāʿiyyāt-i dawra-yi ṣafavī.” Maʿārif 15/3 (1377/1999): 42‒65. Murata, Sachiko. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Saberi, Reza. A thousand years of Persian rubaiyat. Bethesda: IBEX, 2000. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Anvāʿ-i adabī. Tehran: Firdaws, 1373/1994.

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Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Sayr-i rubāʿī. Tehran: Firdaws, 1374/1995. Utas, Bo. “Prosody: meter and rhyme,” In General introduction to Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, 96–122. London-New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Weisman, Itzchak. The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition. London: Routledge, 2007. Zarcone, Thierry. “K̲ h̲wād̲ ja̲ gān.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online, 2013.

chapter 12

The Recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī Paul Wormser This article deals with the ways by which Ḥamza Fanṣūrī (d. 933/1527), the first Malay mystic poet, used Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ in order to create a new literary idiom. As the other contributions of this volume plainly show, the use of Jāmī to create new literary forms and possibilities is not restricted to the Malay case, and also concerns, among others, Jāmī’s adaptations in Sanskrit, Bengali, Chaghatay and Georgian. Our aim is thus to give a detailed survey of the use of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī, in order to place it in the broad context of the Eurasian translations of this author and their exceptional literary productivity. To characterize the relations between Persian (sometimes with the addition of Arabic) and the target languages mentioned above, we will use Sheldon Pollock’s concept of “cosmopolitan vernacularism.” Although this concept was first used by this author to describe the relations between Sanskrit and the vernacular South Asian languages in the early second millennium CE, we consider it to also be relevant in the slightly later context of the new vernacular literary traditions based on the twin cosmopolitan languages of Arabic and Persian, which emerged in parallel with the spread of Islam across Central, South and Southeast Asia from the fourteenth century onwards. Our aim will also be to show, through a specific case study, that translation is a complex process of cultural creation, which is rarely adequately considered in Malay studies. The translation techniques and choices of early Malay authors such as Ḥamza Fanṣūrī can tell us a great deal about both their own personal perspectives and the cultural history of the region, and we hope through this article to inspire other re-examinations of early Malay translations from Arabic and Persian, even when they are anonymous. In order to understand the precise context of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s Malay reworking, we will first briefly present the history of Malay language and literature, before turning to a short biography of the poet.1 The third part of the article will analyze the cases of direct word for word translation in Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s prose treatises, and detail the different techniques he used to transmit a feel for Jāmī’s original text. Lastly, we will see why Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s poems can be seen as a recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ rather than as a mere translation. 1  See also Mohamad Nasrin Nasir’s contribution to this volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_014

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Placing Ḥamza Fanṣūrī in Context: the Early History of Malay Language and Literature

Although the first stone inscriptions in Malay date from the seventh century AD, the earliest surviving written texts in this language only date from the fourteenth century AD.2 Prior to the sixteenth century, all known texts are in prose, and most of them are translations or adaptations of classical Arabic and Persian texts such as the Romance of Alexander the Great, the Tales of the Parrot, or the Romance of Amīr Ḥamza. The few exceptions to this pattern are chronicles of local dynasties such as the History of the Kings of Pasai and the so-called Malay Annals, written in the sultanate of Melaka. As opposed to the vast corpus of Javanese literature, Malay literature has always remained a rather restricted tradition, with no more than a dozen texts predating Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s work, and only a few hundred texts in total before the late nineteenth century.3 In Malay, an indigenous poetical form called the pantun is certainly of great antiquity, but it was only put to paper centuries after Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s death. Writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī called his poems syair (= shiʿr), using a clearly different Perso-Arabic word, to show that what he wrote did not belong to the local pantun poetical form but had a direct foreign inspiration.4 It is in the context of this nascent prose literary culture and of this oral poetical tradition that Ḥamza Fanṣūrī began to translate and recreate Jāmī’s poetry in Malay, to form a distinct new genre which has since had a great posterity. In order to understand more precisely the translation choices of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī, it is important to delve into further detail regarding the formation of the Malay vocabulary. From the fifth century onwards, Hinduism and Buddhism were adopted by the merchants and rulers of the Malay world, and about 800 Sanskrit words made their entry in the Malay language, a good part of them being religious concepts associated with these two traditions.5 Although it is probable that some books were written in Malay using an Indic script during this period, none have come down to us, due in part to the quick deterioration of the writing materials under the tropical climate. Though a few texts inspired by Indian epics have survived, they are only much later reworkings, sometimes displaying the influence of Javanese literature. Therefore, only the Sanskrit 2  On the history of Malay literature, see V. Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature (Leiden: KITLV, 2004). 3  One can get a sense of the extent and content of classical Malay literature through the Malay Concordance Project website: http://mcp.anu.edu.au. 4  M. Laffan, The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11. 5  On this topic, see J.G. de Casparis, Sanskrit Loanwords in Indonesian (Jakarta: NUSA, 1997).

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vocabulary still present in the Malay language today can give us a glimpse into this early stage of the development of Malay literature.6 With the adoption of Islam by local rulers starting in the late thirteenth century, translations of Persian and Arabic literary and religious works into Malay gave rise to a new set of loanwords. Although approximately a thousand words of Arabic or Persian origin still figure in contemporary dictionaries, virtually every word of both languages could be used in the earliest translations into Malay, especially when the author found no straightforward equivalent. The early religious texts also routinely include direct quotations in Arabic or Persian inside the Malay text, with or without translation. To follow Sheldon Pollock’s terminology, Malay literature’s relation to Arabic and Persian from the fourteenth century onwards corresponds to the stage of “cosmopolitan vernacularism,” in which a vernacular language develops with heavy borrowing from its cosmopolitan models.7 In summation, in Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s time Malay literature was still in its infancy, and one can distinguish four different translation registers that may be defined according to their reliance on one of the main literary languages of the time: Malay, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. 2

Who was Ḥamza Fanṣūrī?

Ḥamza Fanṣūrī is the first known Malay mystical poet. Very little is known about his life. He was long thought to have lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century because he was abundantly quoted and commented upon around this time in Banda Aceh, capital of the Aceh sultanate in the Northwest of Indonesia.8 Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus have, however, found evidence of a tombstone bearing his name in Mecca, with the date of 933/1527.9 This new date places Ḥamza Fanṣūrī much closer to Jāmī’s lifetime and shows that the translation and adaptation of the Herati poet’s work in the Malay World was much faster than one may expect. Jāmī’s fame had already reached the distant shores of the Indian Ocean less than thirty-five years 6  For an informed guess about what texts may have existed during this period of Sanskrit influence, see V. Braginsky, The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature (Leiden: KITLV, 2004). 7  Pollock first uses the term to describe the relationship between Kannada literature and Sanskrit. S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 378. 8  G.W.J. Drewes and L.F. Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986), 1‒3. 9  Claude Guillot and Ludvik Kalus, “La stèle funéraire de Hamzah Fansuri,” Archipel 60 (2000): 3‒24.

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after his death in 898/1492. Fanṣūrī’s nisba as well as his poems indicate that he came from Barus, i.e. Fansur, a small port town on the West Coast of Sumatra, famous for its camphor. We know from his poems that he travelled extensively, to Ayutthaya in Thailand, and in the Middle East to Baghdad, Jerusalem and Mecca.10 He probably composed his Malay poetry in his hometown of Barus or in Pasai, which was then the major sultanate of North Sumatra and was later replaced in this role by Aceh during the course of the sixteenth century. One reason why we know so little about his biography might be that he avoided the company of the sultans, behaviour he advises frequently in his poems.11 Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ inspired all his works, which include three undated mystical treatises in prose, the Adept (al-Muntahi), the Drink of the Lovers (Syarab al-Asyiqin) and the Secret of the Gnostics (Asrar al-ʿArifin),12 as well as an untitled collection of thirty-two mystical poems, today simply known as the poems of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī.13 3

The Translation Strategies of Ḥamza Fanṣūrī

We will now analyze a few examples of direct translations of Jāmī’s Persian into Malay. In fact, although Jāmī’s thought permeates Fanṣūrī’s texts, there are only a few cases of direct quotations from Jāmī’s works, followed by a word for word Malay translation, all of them in Fanṣūrī’s mystical prose treatises. We will focus on Fanṣūrī’s translation choices, keeping in mind that, as we have explained above, the Malay language of that time allowed the use of four different registers, in which the author may use the resources of Malay, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit vocabulary in a variety of ways. We have been able to trace six different translation techniques in Fanṣūrī’s rendering of Jāmī. The first technique is the use of neologisms with Malay roots in order to reproduce both the lexical and semantic contents of the Persian original, as we will see in the following example:

10  Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, 4‒11. 11  Ibid., 74‒75 (Poem XI): Aho segala yang menjadi faqir/Jangan bersuhbat dengan raja dan amir/Karena rasul Allah bashir dan nadhir/Melarangkan kita saghir dan kabir. “Oh all ye that have taken the vow of poverty!/Do not befriend Princes and rulers,/for the Messenger of God, bringer of joyful tidings and warnings,/has forbidden this to both the small and the great among us.” 12  They were edited by Syed Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas under the title The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1970). 13  Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri.

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hamsāya u hamnishīn u hamrah hama ūst dar dalaq-i gadā u aṭlas-i shah hama ūst dar anjuman-i farq u nihānkhāna-yi jamʿ biʾllāh hama ūst thumma biʾllāh hama ūst14 Sekampung sekedudukan sekejalanan sekalian itu [Ia] jua Pada telekung segala minta makan dan pada atlas segala raja-raja itu pun Ia jua Pada segala perhimpunan dan perceraian dan rumah yang terbunyi dan yang berhipun itu pun Ia jua, Demi Allah sekaliannya Ia jua! Maka demi Allah sekaliannya Ia jua!15 Neighbor, companion, fellow voyager—all are He. In beggar’s rags, in king’s satin—all are He. In the banquet of dispersion and the private hall of gathering, all are He, by God—by God, all are He! In the original poem, Jāmī employs several words in a row formed with the Persian prefix ham-, meaning “same”, “together”, i.e. hamsāya, hamnishīn and hamrah. In order to stay close to the grammatical structure of the original Persian, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī creates new words based on the Malay prefix se-, meaning one. He starts the list with a quite common Malay word, sekampung (fellow villager), which is a culturally dynamic but close translation of hamsāya, but he then adds the words sekedudukan and sekejalanan, which sound as strange as “fellow sitter” and “fellow walker” in English. These creations are still easily understandable and reproduce the structure of Jāmī’s three related Persian words. The second somewhat similar strategy is to use Malay periphrases which retain something of the Persian structure. Thus the Persian nihānkhāna, meaning “cell of seclusion,” is translated as rumah yang terbunyi, which means “a hidden house.” The Malay word rumah (house) here hints at the polysemic Persian word khāna, and Fanṣūrī’s translation is in fact much closer to the etymology of the Persian word when it is analyzed than to its meaning in context. 14  Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, ed. Yann Richard, Les jaillissements de lumière (Paris: Deux Océans, 1982), 108 (Lāʾīḥa 22). Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Tai-yeu Wang, and Chih Liu, tr. Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yeu’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm; with a New Translation of Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 176 (Gleam 22). 15  Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 339‒40; English translation, 458.

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For prosody purposes, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī uses Malay periphrases to translate a single Persian word, even when more obvious equivalents are available. For instance, the Persian word gadā (beggar) becomes in Fanṣūrī’s translation segala minta makan, i.e. all those (who) ask for food. The direct equivalent, pengemis, would have been too short for the verse, but the grammatically correct periphrasis segala yang minta makan would have been too long and would have lacked rhythm. The examples of these two translation techniques show that even when choosing a Malay register, Fanṣūrī’s translation is a dynamic process aiming at the creation of a new poetical idiom. A third technique is to retain the Perso-Arabic original in the Malay text. This solution is used when technical terms have no direct equivalent and would require excessively long explanations. It is, for instance, the case with the Perso-Arabic word aṭlas, meaning “satin,” a very specific kind of cloth.16 The foreignness of the term also conveys the idea of luxury implied in Jāmī’s original. A fourth possible technique would have been to replace Persian terms with Sanskrit equivalents, which are particularly numerous in Malay to express religious concepts because of the early spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in the region, several centuries before the arrival of Islam in the Malay world. Ḥamza Fanṣūrī does sometimes use words with Sanskrit roots such as warna (color) or dukacita (sadness), but these occur rarely.17 In his 32 poems, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī instead relentlessly warns Muslim mystics against the use of yogic techniques that locate God between the eyebrows.18 It appears that Ḥamza Fanṣūrī knows a good deal about yoga and Hindu mysticism, but that he rejects the possible bridges between yoga and Sufism. This rejection can be seen in the apparently conscious avoidance of Sanskrit vocabulary to translate Persian. It is somewhat ironic to think that the very same Jāmī poem used by Dara Shikuh to defend the compatibility of yoga and Sufism in his Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn was used by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī to argue the opposite.19 The fifth translation technique involves the replacement of Jāmī’s Persian poetical images with more familiar local equivalents. When translating the twentieth gleam of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ (in Whinfield and Qazvini’s edition), Ḥamza 16  Ibid. 17  Ibid., 345, where the Persian word bīrangī, colorless, is translated by the Sanskrit based compound yang tiada berwarna; p. 347, where the Arabic word malāl is translated by the Sanskrit based word dukacita. 18  Instances of these warnings can for instance be found in Poem III, 48‒49, Poem VII, 62‒63 and Poem XXIII, 110‒13, and Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri. 19  Mahfuz-ul-haq (ed.), Majmaʿ-ul-Bahrain, or the Mingling of the two Oceans, by Prince Muhammad Dara Shikuh (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1929), 37.

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Fanṣūrī choses to replace the smells of rose and musk, familiar in the Persian world, with more understandable terms for a Malay audience, such as bunga, the general Malay word for flower, and cendana, meaning sandalwood.20 Finally, the sixth and last notable translation technique is the rather systematic transformation of Persian rhymes into Arabic rhymes. This provides us with a clue towards Ḥamza’s literary training: it is obvious that he is able to read and understand Persian, but he seems to have a much better grasp of Arabic poetic composition.21 Although there are no long and short vowels in Malay, they exist in Arabic and form an important part of the rules for scansion and rhyme. In creating a new poetical idiom in Malay, Fanṣūrī imposes the Arabic rhyming system and seldom rhymes a Malay word with an Arabic word. Jāmī’s syntax is thus consistently rearranged in order to fit Ḥamza’s poetical training in Arabic. For instance, in this reworking of Jāmī’s ocean and wave metaphor, all the rhyming words are Arabic and end with a yā followed by a qāf (although both of these sounds do not exist anymore in contemporary Malay); Fanṣūrī merges them with the short [i] and the letter k: Tuhan kita itu seperti Bahr al-ʿamīq Ombaknya penuh pada sekalian tarīq Laut dan ombak keduanya rafīq Akhirnya ke dalamnya jua ombaknya gharīq22 Our Lord is a fathomless Ocean, Whose waves on the surface rise and roll. The Ocean and the Waves are loyal friends, For Waves must drown in Ocean’s deep. 4

The Recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī

We have previously analyzed the cases of word-for-word translation of Jāmī’s poems, but they do not represent the whole of Jāmī’s influence on Ḥamza

20  Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 340; Jāmī, ed. Yann Richard, Les jaillissements de lumière, 98 (Lāʾīḥa 20); Jāmī et al., Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, translated by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, 170 (Gleam 20). 21  On Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s knowledge of Persian, see Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, 11‒13. For an analysis of the Arabic elements in his poems see in particular pp. 173‒89 of the same. 22  Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, 50–51 (Poem IV).

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Fanṣūrī, who makes use of other tools than direct translation in his recreation of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ. First, in his prose mystical treatises inspired by the Lavāʾiḥ, he transforms the place of poetical pieces. In Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ, the poems are always given at the end of a prose explanation, because they are supposed to give a different, more direct insight to the truths contained therein. In Fanṣūrī’s treatises, the poems are given first and followed by a commentary and explanation. Whereas in Jāmī, the poems help one to better understand the text, in Fanṣūrī’s adaptation, the prose text explicates the poems. Unlike the older, indigenous Persian poetic tradition, the new Malay mystical poetic tradition initiated by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī was based on foreign sources and was hard to grasp at first. Second, Fanṣūrī uses local images when expanding on Jāmī’s text. In the commentary following the first Jāmī poem mentioned in this article, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī adds three local plants absent from the Persian text: the sour lemon, the sweet sugar cane and the bitter mambu tree (also known in South Asia as the neem tree, Azadirachta indica): Tamthil seperti air hujan dalam sebuah tanaman Air i[tu] jua yang lengkap pada sekalian dan berbagai-bagai rasanya. Pada limau masam, pada tebu manis, pada mambu pahit; masing-masing membawa rasanya. Tetapi haqiqatnya air itu pada sekalian itu. The analogy is like rain water in a growth of plant. It is the water that permeates all and has varying tastes; in lemon, sour; in sugar cane, sweet; in the mambu plant, bitter; each to its own taste. But the real essence of all these [tastes] is the water.23 Poetical images, which are the subject of only one quatrain in Jāmī’s text, are expanded to great proportions in Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s poems. The very common Sufi image of the world as a wave and of God as the ocean appears only once in Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ:24 An ocean, not decreasing, not increasing, waves going, waves coming— 23  Al-Attas, The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī, 340; English translation, 458. 24  Jāmī, ed. Yann Richard, Les jaillissements de lumière, 124 (Lāʾīḥa 26); Jāmī et al., Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, translated by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick, 186 (Gleam 26).

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Since the world is made up of waves, it never lasts for two moments, or rather, two instants. However, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī transforms this single quatrain into a recurring metaphor in his poems, complete with various marine elements such as beaches, bays, anchors, harbors, fish, a whale, and so on. His five last poems, poems XXVIII to XXXII, are all devoted to this metaphor and form a lengthy elaboration on Jāmī’s original four verses.25 We quote here two quatrains of Poem XXXII to give an idea of Ḥamza’s reworking: Laut Cina terlalu dalam Itulah bangsa sekalian alam Merupakan Jan Malak dan Adam Di Laut itu kita nin karam Karangnya banyak rantaunya panjang Teluknya permai seperti kandang Ke laut itu yogya berenang Mangkanya dapat segera memandang The China Sea is unfathomable. For this reason the population of the entire universe, Jinn, angels and (the sons of) Adam, all of us get submerged in that sea. Its reefs are numerous its coasts extensive, its bays are fine, as it were enclosures into that sea one must swim; then you will soon be able to see.26 Through the recreation of Jāmī’s metaphor, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī is localizing Persian poetry for a Malay public, giving local flavor to a well-known Sufi trope. Finally, there is also an important change of perspective in Ḥamza Fanṣūrī’s poems. Although they are inspired by Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ, they regularly target three kinds of people who are not mentioned at all in his source: the mystics

25  Drewes and Brakel, The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri, 126‒43. 26  Ibid., 140‒41.

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who ignore Muslim law,27 those who confuse yoga and Sufism,28 and literalist judges.29 Fanṣūrī is thus trying to defend his mystical practice against two extremes in a time that may have been characterized by religious debate and confusion over the lawfulness and limits of Sufism. 5 Conclusion We thus see that Ḥamza Fanṣūrī is not merely translating Jāmī for a Malay readership but is using Jāmī’s poetry to create a new poetical language. Translation is not a neutral and unproblematic operation but rather a process of cultural creation. Thanks to the essays of this volume, we come to understand that Jāmī was not only translated very quickly all across Eurasia, also that, at a crucial time when cosmopolitan languages were slowly losing their dominant position, Jāmī’s works were used across Eurasia to create new vernacular literary traditions. Recreations of Jāmī’s works figure prominently among the earliest texts of many different and distant vernacular literatures such as Malay, Bengali or Chaghatay. In other cases such as Georgian or Sanskrit, Jāmī’s poetry was used to renew an existing tradition and create new literary possibilities. The question thus becomes: Why would Jāmī, of all Persian poets, be chosen in all these diverse literary traditions to inspire something new? Is it only a matter of timing, as Jāmī happens to have lived in a time of emerging vernacular literatures? Are there any precise characteristics of Jāmī’s works which made them more susceptible to literary re-creation? Could it be that Jāmī’s relatively simple style made his works more easily translatable and appropriatable? Did Jāmī’s authority as a scholar help his diffusion as a poet? Instead of appearing throughout Eurasia as the last classical Persian poet, Jāmī figured as a potent source of literary novelty, and we hope that further research will give us a better understanding of this key finding of the present book.

27  See for instance the following quatrain (ibid., 92‒93):    “Fardu dan sunnat yogya kaurakib/Pada sekalian Islam terlalu wajib/Jika kautinggalkan fard bukan kau talib/Jahannam tempatmu hangat dan ghalib. ‘Perform what is incumbent on you and what is recommended,/That is the first obligation for all Muslims./If you desist from what is incumbent on you, you are no seeker,/You belong in Hell, (a place) hot and overpowering.’” 28  Ḥamza’s warnings against the confusion between yoga and Sufism have already been mentioned above. 29  They are mocked for instance in Poem XXI, ibid., 107‒8.

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Bibliography Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naguib. The Mysticism of Ḥamzah Fanṣūrī. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1970. Braginsky, Vladimir. The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature. Leiden: KITLV, 2004. Casparis, J.G. de. Sanskrit Loanwords in Indonesian. Jakarta: NUSA, 1997. Drewes, G.W.J. and L.F. Brakel. The Poems of Hamzah Fansuri. Dordrecht: Foris, 1986. Guillot, Claude and Ludvik Kalus. “La stèle funéraire de Hamzah Fansuri,” Archipel 60 (2000): 3‒24. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Les jaillissements de lumière. Edited by Yann Richard. Paris: Deux Océans, 1982. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Tai-yeu Wang, and Chih Liu. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-Yeu’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm; with a New Translation of Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ from the Persian by William C. Chittick. Translated by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

chapter 13

Individual Sanctity and Islamization in the Ṭabaqāt Books of Jāmī, Navāʾī, Lāmiʿī, and Some Others Alexandre Papas Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns is simultaneously a final and foundational work in the hagiographical production of the Turko-Persian world. In contrast with its predecessors—in particular ʿAṭṭār (d. 618/1221 or 1229)’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, which was selective in the listing of saints and enjoyed great popularity from the fifteenth century onward but did not arouse a real tradition of translations, adaptations and addenda1—Jāmī wrote an encyclopedia of holy men, which became the starting point of a long series of compendiums until the nineteenth century. This formidable legacy crossed the entire Muslim world, from translations into Arabic as early as the 1600s to numerous manuscript copies made in India.2 However, the Turkish-speaking areas (Central Asia, Anatolia and the Balkans) seem to have been the most creative in terms of the reception and continuation of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns. Several interrelated factors explain such a success. As I have already alluded to, the collection is encyclopedic in both senses of the word, that it to say, it includes a very large number of biographies (between 585 and 618 according to manuscripts), and it is made for the education of a circle of acquaintances, at least the Naqshbandī milieu of Khorasan and Mawarannahr but probably beyond. These encompassing and didactic qualities presented a model to follow and to enrich for the continuators of Jāmī. A second factor is the intellectual and spiritual authority that the latter represented in both Central Asia and the Ottoman lands. Patronized by Timurid as well as Ottoman sultans, admired by litterateurs in Herat, Tabriz or Istanbul, venerated by Sufis from various horizons,3 Jāmī appeared as a “universal” figure, whose works served as 1  A clear comparison between both collections has been made recently by Denise Aigle, “ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns: Two Views of Holiness,” in Holy Men in Medieval Persia (10th–14th c.). Anthropological approaches (Boston: Ilex Foundation, forthcoming). For a description of the organizational framework of the Nafaḥāt, see Jawid A. Mojaddedi, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism. The ṭabaqāt genre from al-Sulamī to Jāmī (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 151‒76. 2  See the Muzaffar Alam’s chapter in this volume. 3  See the contributions of Hamid Algar and Marc Toutant in this volume.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_015

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decisive texts on such and such topic. Lastly, the legacy of the polymath benefited from exceptional authors, who were not servile imitators and could give a new life to the master’s original. Whether in Herat, Istanbul or the Balkans, the Nafaḥāt al-uns was not only translated into Eastern and Western Turkish, but also reshaped and considerably updated by learned scholars. While most of them came from the Naqshbandiyya order, their interest was not limited to the saints of this specific ṭarīqat. As we will see, the Turkish reception of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns accumulated paradoxes. The Herati master sought for completeness, even including saintly poets, but carefully omitted certain figures (such as Shāh Niʿmat Allāh Valī [d. 834/1430]) and presented soberly controversial ones (such as Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī (d. 261/875) and Manṣūr Ḥallāj [d. 309/922]). The Turkish compilers made other choices, which reflected the various contexts of writing as well as their own religious sensibility. Generally, they tended to draw a universal picture of Islamic sainthood, taking in multiple Sufi paths, various types of saints, and different tendencies, all under the authority of Jāmī. The comparison between these successive versions show that Central Asian and Ottoman authors, quite far from Jāmī’s elitism, constantly strove to produce simplified texts that could be read by Turkish-speaking readers and not exclusively the knowledgeable elite among them.4 Rather than a sign of intellectual decadence, this reflects an evolution in the description of sanctity towards models accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. In fact, the legacy of the Nafaḥāt reveals another purpose than the usual encyclopedic and didactic functions attributed to this literary genre. These books of ṭabaqāt, or classes/classification, were not only collections of biographies, but also became tools of Islamization in the sense that they provided Islamic contents to the representation of space and territory through saints’ lives and deaths. I shall explore these hypotheses mainly on the basis of two sources, which are supposedly well known but still have much to offer. By the end of this essay, I will introduce additonial ṭabaqāt books on the model of Nafaḥāt, written either in Eastern Turkish/Chaghatay or in Western Turkish/Ottoman, issued from different periods and different regions, among which several are preserved in manuscript form and remain untapped or neglected.5 4  Although an 18th-century source asserts that Jāmī took part of the praying sessions of Bābā ʿAlīshāh, a holy fool (majdhūb) of Herat, famous for his strange deeds (such as atrophying his penis). See ʿUbayd Allāh Abū Saʿīd Hiravī’s addendum to Aṣīl al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh Vāʿiẓ, Maqṣad al-iqbāl-i sulṭāniyya va marṣad al-āmāl-i khāqāniyya, ed. Māyil Hiravī (Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ʿulūm-i insānī va muṭāliʿāt-i farhangī, 1386/2007), 133‒34. 5  For a note on the concrete genesis of the work, based on a manuscript copied in 883/1478 under the supervision of Jāmī by Sayf Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Khalvatī, with marginal

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Jāmī and ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī

What characterizes the Turkish reception of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns is its rapidity as much as the role of intimate relationships between the master and his first legatees. As is well known to the historians of the Timurids, a strong friendship bound Jāmī to the celebrated Navāʾī (d. 1441/1501). The latter described lyrically, if not homo-erotically, their intellectual exchanges in a sort of funeral oration, the Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn (The Quintuple Amazement) composed after the death of his friend and mentor.6 In addition to a biography and the conclusion, Navāʾī devotes three chapters to the regular discussions they had together, the epistolary relation between them, and the works explained by Jāmī to his disciple for his spiritual education. Despite some minor divergences concerning, for example, the poets Anvarī (6th/12th c.) or Amīr Khusraw (d. 725/1325), both writers shared the same literary tastes and used to send to each other their own compositions. They also exchanged symbolic presents: for instance, Jāmī gave to Navāʾī a dervish hat and a handkerchief to salute a Sufi qaṣīda the latter wrote.7 Spiritual topics appeared among the main issues discussed by both friends, especially during the teaching sessions conducted by Jāmī for Navāʾī. To start, he taught ʿIrāqī (d. 688/1289)’s Lamaʿāt in order to introduce the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), then he explained Aḥmad Ghazālī (d. 517/1123 or 520/1126)’s Sawāniḥ al-ʿushshāq, comparing various commentaries and pointing out their contradictions. He came back to Akbarism by making his pupil read his own Ashiʿat al-lamaʿāt. Interestingly, The Quintuple Amazement gives the list of Jāmī’s writings and first quotes the Nafaḥāt al-uns. Navāʾī describes it as exceptionally complete, compared with former ṭabaqāt books, and states that it does justice to all the names, spiritual achievements and lives of the saints who would have otherwise been forgotten. He himself is continuously working at his interpretation. addenda by the hand of Jāmī, see ʿĀrif Nawshāhī, “Nuskha-yi Nafaḥāt al-uns az rūzgār-i Jāmī,” Āyande 8–9 (1363/1984): 587‒88. 6  ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn, ed. Izzat Soltan and others (Tashkent: Fan, 1990), 7‒85; partial translation into French by François-Alphonse Belin, “Notice biographique et littéraire sur Mir Ali-Chîr Névâïi, suivie d’extraits tirés des œuvres du même auteur,” Journal Asiatique 17 (1861): 300‒57; notes in Evgenii E. Bertel’s, Izbrannye Trudy. Navoi i Dzhami (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 121‒26. As Navāʾī explained himself, the title alludes to the five sections of the book, which should excite the amazement of the reader. 7  This fact recalls that one should not systematically interpret the giving of Sufi objects as an initiation ritual or a legitimation process, as we often read in Western scholarship. The Sufi etiquette (adab), among Naqshbandīs notably, involves numerous signs of social recognition, gestures of companionship and subtle practices of “giving and counter-giving.”

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Prior to this, autograph letters sent by Jāmī indicate that he regularly kept Navāʾī informed about the genesis of the compendium.8 “I have sent you several parts of the Nafaḥāt, all my thoughts are directed towards its completion and I will send you the other sections, may their fragrances inspire you!” (letter no. 2); “I have written a few parts of the Nafaḥāt, yet they are not verified” (letter no. 103); “Some circumstances prevented me from rewriting some parts, so I have not sent these sections to you” (letter no. 192); “Since I have not revised such parts, there is some delay in sending them to you” (letter no. 353). Navāʾī was actually instrumental in the redaction of the book, as we read in the introduction:9 Now to begin, here is what says ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Jāmī, the recluse in obscurity and forgetting (may God reinforce him …): the shaykh imām, gnostic scholar, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn alSulamī al-Nīshāpūrī composed a book on the virtues and spiritual states of the masters of Sufi path who are the great figures of religion, the grandness of the people of proximity, and the compilers of the exoteric and esoteric sciences. He entitled this The Classes of Sufis (ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya). He divided it into five classes. By “class” he meant a group [of men] in whom, at the same time or in times near to each other, appeared the lights of sanctity and the signs of guidance, and towards whom disciples and students traveled. In each class, he recalled twenty individuals among masters, imams and scholars of this group of men. He mentioned some of their holy words and laudable virtues, according to the exigency of time and place, thus explaining their path, knowledge, state and conduct. [Then] the shaykh al-islām, the shelter of mankind, the defender of Sunna, the destructor of religious innovations, Abū Ismāʿīl ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Anṣārī al-Haravī read out this [book] in the assemblies of doctrinal discussion and in the meeting of invocation and advising. He added other quotations of several masters, which were not mentioned in the book, as well as some of his own experiences and ecstasies. One of his close disciples collected these [teachings] and made a book. Truly, it is an elegant book, and a precious compendium, containing the truths of the gnosis of Sufis and the subtleties of this eminent group of men. However, since it has been produced in the old dialect of Herat, which was 8  Asam U. Urunbaev, Pis’ma-avtografy Abdarrakhmana Dzhami iz “Al’boma Navoi” (Tashkent: Fan, 1982), 39, 63, 85, 109. 9  ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1370/1991), 1‒3.

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well-established at this time, [and since] it came [to us] with mistakes and alterations of copyists, so much so that, in many occurrences, the understanding is not facilitated; since also this compendium recalls a few ancient masters and omits some of them, including the shaykh al-islām himself as well as his contemporaries and those who lived after him, [for all these reasons] several times I came up with the idea of rewriting this with more competence. For what was clear, I have used a style, which is of common usage now. For what was not understandable, I have passed it over. I have included words and teachings from other esteemed books and I put them in writing clearly. I have added descriptions of the states, degrees, teachings, miracles, dates of birth and death of saints who were not mentioned in the aforementioned book. Yet, the multiple attachments and the charge of hindrances did not enable me to undertake my project. This until the year 881, when the friend of dervishes and their protector, the one who was tired of affairs and endured poverty, Amīr Nizām al-Dīn ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, who deliberately turned away from the highest rank and honor and, with submission and resignation, embarked on the path of poverty and annihilation, asked me the same thing that I have in my heart and mind. My old desire of this task was renewed and my former inclination in this direction reinforced. Therefore, the realization of my plan and the effort in my wish started with sincere and pure intentions. Let us hope from virtues and generosity of the readers of this [book] that, pleased by the felicity of the delicate voices of the saints and the grace of their holy spirits, they will not forget and will make good prayers for the one who undertook the composition of this compendium. It is entitled Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds (The breaths of familiarity from the lords of sanctity), since it contains the breaths of the fine voices of the masters which come from the holy gardens and blow through the smell of the soul seeking for familiarity. We thus learn that, in 881/1476, Navāʾī strongly encouraged Jāmī to work again on his book. Also noteworthy—as we will encounter this question several times—is how Jāmī and his Turkish continuators situated his work in the long tradition of the ṭabaqāt genre, both linguistically, practically, and theoretically. Concerned by the accessibility of the text, Jāmī adapted the Persian language to his contemporary readers and, for example, shifted from old or dialectal words to more recent or more common ones, such as tashnagī (thirst) instead of tashnāmār, jahān (world) instead of gītī, jānab (side) instead of sūy, and

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so on.10 The mention of Anṣārī (d. 481/1089) reading out the Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya recalls the fact that these biographical dictionaries were read, studied, and commented upon in Sufi circles. Such was also the case for the Nafaḥāt al-uns, which was probably used as it is today, that is (according to my observations among surviving Sufi orders in Iran and Central Asia), as a collection where the shaykh picked up such and such a name and story to illustrate his arguments. This practical dimension of the “books of classes” will be even more evident in the Turkish versions. We find an interesting illustration of the collective didactic use of hagiographies based on the master-disciple relationship in the Malfūẓāt-i Naqshbandiyya, the eighteenth-century account of conversations of a shaykh written in Awrangabad in Deccan but deeply influenced by Central Asian Sufism. Discussing a statement about begging quoted in Aṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, after some hesitation the shaykh offered an interpretation, which was then questioned by one of his most advanced disciples—in fact, one of his representatives (khalīfa), who finally convinced the assembly, including the master himself, about the true meaning of the statement.11 We have here an instructive example of the dialectic discussions between Sufis from a book extract, discussions where a saint’s saying or deed leads to a doctrinal debate. Although the Timurid polymath followed the model of the Arabic medieval ṭabaqāt, here epitomized by Sulamī (d. 412/1021)’s work, which classified saints more or less in chronological order,12 he considerably extended the geographical frame of saints and enriched the description of particular territories such as greater Khorasan and India with series of Naqshbandī and Chishtī shaykhs. It is no coincidence that he changed the title from Classes to Breaths, suggesting an emphasis not only on the sayings of saints but also on their presence and sphere of influence. 10  Further examples in Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 20‒22; see also the linguistic study of Wladimir Ivanow, Tabaqat of Ansari in the Old Language of Herat (excerpt from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January and July 1923). 11  Simon Digby, Sufis ans Soldiers in Awrangzeb’s Deccan: Malfuzat-i Naqshbandiyya (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 179‒80. For another interpretation of the excerpt, see Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 211‒12. 12  The arrangement according to generations, instead of the alphabetical order, follows the general evolution of the ṭabaqāt genre. See Ibrahim Hafsi, “Recherches sur le genre ‘Ṭabaqāt’, dans la littérature arabe 1”, Arabica 23/3 (September 1976): 227‒65. On Sulamī’s conception of sanctity, see Jean-Jacques Thibon, “Hiérarchie spirituelle, fonctions du saint et hagiographie dans l’oeuvre de Sulami,” in Le saint et son milieu ou comment lire les sources hagiographiques, eds. Rachida Chih and Denis Gril (Cairo: Ifao, 2000), 13‒31.

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Now if we return to Navāʾī, it is not surprising that we find the first translation of the Nafaḥāt al-uns into Turkish. Here again, the incipit is worth quoting:13 Now to begin, I, the traveler in the valley of ignorance ʿAlī Shīr, whose surname (laqab) is Navāʾī, whose God has turned away from the wrong way to the right path, have caused (kitābī jamʿ ū tartībīnīng bāʿithī boldūm) in 881 the composition of the Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds by the powerless master and sayyid and shaykh al-islām Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, mercy and peace be upon him. This is why, in the beginning of his noble book, this holy man [Jāmī] recalled and stressed this fact; those who read [the beginning of the Nafaḥāt] will see it and those who did not read will read and see it. That book [Nafaḥāt] became famous among the people and widely read and copied; the benefits from the recalling of the spiritual states of shaykhs’ sanctity and from the rethinking of their sayings have reached the capable students, and their graces have touched the resolute minds. A constant trouble and sadness came to mind, thinking that the language of this book was Persian, and that mixed with Arabic its expressions were bound to these speakers. Those who share the knowledge of these languages and their expressions find the profits of the text thanks to their own skills and their usage of [this language]. However, among the Turk people, the few ones who have a pure heart and whose alchemical words affect thanks to God’s favor, because of their limited knowledge of this language, remain deprived of these graces and the subtleties of these truths remain unknown to them. I thought: if I, the miserable, make efforts, will I be able to translate this book into Turkish language and to render in simple words its subtleties and complexities? Neither this plan left me, nor did the great difficulty of such task prevent me from working. Until the date of 901 from this date [881], twenty years have passed, with God’s help, I undertook this great work and I wrote. I have included the few shaykhs mentioned in the Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ written by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār who are not included in the Nafaḥāt aluns. And since there was even less Turkish shaykhs mentioned, I have gathered the deeds and sayings of any [masters] I was able to seek and find from Aḥmad Yasavī until now. In addition, only a few Indian shaykhs were mentioned, so I have added all the last shaykhs I could find after Farīd al-Dīn Shakar Ganj. And since, in this book, there was no mention of the great master, contemporary and friend of masters [Jāmī], I have 13  ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Nasāʾim al-maḥabba min shamāʾim al-futuwwa, ed. Kemal Eraslan (Ankara: Türk Dili Kurumu, 1996): 1‒2; ed. Hamidxon Islomii (Tashkent: Movarounnahr, 2011), 1‒2 (noted in brackets afterwards).

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attached it. And since some sayings of the shaykhs mentioned were no longer very necessary to people of this time (zamān ahlīgha), I have omitted the doubtful verbosity and shortened the translation. I gave the title Nasāʾim al-maḥabba min shamāʾim al-futuwwa (The breezes of love from the perfumes of generosity) because the gardens of sanctity are freshened by love and perfumed with generosity. My hope is that the saints, whom spirits are diffused trough these breezes and these perfumes, will one by one make good prayer for the present author. Navāʾī attributes to himself a decisive role in both the redaction and the reception of the Nafaḥāt al-uns, suggesting that the latter process is more complex than a simple transmission by an intermediary—as if the traditional logic of the isnād (chain of transmitters), so present in the medieval ṭabaqāt, was no longer active. Like Jāmī, the Chaghatay polymath discusses the question of language and, interestingly, claims that many Turkish-speaking readers are simply not able to understand the written Persian, especially when it includes Arabic expressions. Would this mean that bilingualism was limited to the elite of Herat, while most of the Turks did not command Persian, and that, in other words, the language issue regarded social classes rather than ethnic groups? The answer requires more investigation. It is clear, at least, that Navāʾī wrote his compendium in a relatively simple Chaghatay Turkish—using common vocabulary, short sentences and fewer quotations—accessible to a large readership. In continuity with Jāmī’s model but in a different order, the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba aimed to be comprehensive, with a list of 770 saints including nineteen names taken from ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ, about a hundred Turkish shaykhs and thirty-six Indian mystics. Also in line with his model but more radically, Navāʾī conceived his collection as a sort of cartography of sanctity, a world of gardens—or graveyards (riyāḍ)—full of holy presence, as the title and its explanation explicitly stated. We will return to this central question of space. A last point of comparison, often neglected in scholarship, between the two introductions is the conception of sanctity and Sufism as discussed by both scholars. Once more, there is a subtle combination of continuity and rupture in the early Turkish reception of the Nafaḥāt. After the incipit, Jāmī’s dense introduction features the following sections:14 1. Introductive discussion on sanctity and saint (tamhīd fī al-qawl fī alwalāya wa al-walī): described as proximity with God, sanctity is the 14  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 3‒23. Instead of a full translation, which would be too long, I provide a summary of each section. For a study of the sources used by Jāmī, see Wladimir Ivanow, “The Sources of Jami’s’ Nafahat,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 18 (1922): 385‒402.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

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specific spiritual state of the saint who both has been conducted by God and decided to give himself to God. Discussion on gnosis, gnostic, knower and ignorant, and on the first section of the third chapter of the Tarjumat al-ʿawārif15 (al-qawl fī al-maʿrifat wa al-ʿārif wa al-mutaʿarrif wa al-jāhil wa fī al-faṣl al-awwal min al-bāb al-thālith min tarjimat al-ʿawārif): gnosis is the immediate knowledge of God’s unicity behind the apparent multiplicity; the gnostic is the one who enjoys this immediate knowledge; the knower is the one whose knowledge is not immediate; and the ignorant is the one who is deprived of it. Discussion on the gnosis of the Sufi, of the follower of Sufism, of the follower of blame, of the follower of poverty, on the difference between them, and on the tenth section of the third chapter of the Tarjumat alʿawārif (al-qawl fī al-maʿrifat al-ṣūfī wa al-mutaṣawwif wa al-malāmatī wa al-faqīr wa al-farq baynahum wa fī al-faṣl al-ʿāshir min al-bāb al-thālith min tarjumat al-ʿawārif ): the Sufi has attained perfect knowledge and then has been called to guide other people; the follower of Sufism has not yet attained perfect knowledge and is still on the spiritual path; the follower of blame, who avoids the complacency of the others to preserve the purity of his spiritual state, is still dependent on the others and not entirely absorbed in God’s unicity; the follower of poverty, who renounced the world, has not renounced himself. The section deals also with the qualities and defects of various classes of mystics: the ascetic (zāhid) and the follower of asceticism (mutazahhid), the servant (khādim) and the follower of service (mutakhaddim), the pious (ʿābid) and the follower of piety (mutaʿabbid), the esoterist (bātinī), the antinomian (mubāḥī), the heretic (zindīq), and the vagabond (qalandarī). Discussion on unicity, its spiritual stages and its possessors, and on the second section of the first chapter of the Tarjumat al-ʿawārif (al-qawl fī altawḥīd wa marātib wa arbābihā wa fī al-faṣl al-thānī min al-bāb al-awwal min Tarjumat al-ʿawārif ): the four stages toward unicity are the faith, the outer and inner knowledge, the spiritual state, and the unicity accomplished by God himself. The possessors of these stages are actually described in the next section. Discussion on the various possessors of sanctity, and on the book Kashf al-maḥjūb16 (al-qawl fī aṣnāf arbāb al-walāya qaddasa allāh taʿālā asrārahum wa fī kitāb kashf al-maḥjūb): among the 4 000 saints who

15  The Persian translation of Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191)’s ʿAwārif al-maʿārif. 16  ʿAlī ibn ʿUthmān Hujvīrī (d. 465–9/1072–7)’s Kashf al-maḥjūb.

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rule over the world and remain hidden, there are 300 excellent ones (akhyār), 40 substitutes (abdāl), 7 devoted (abrār), 4 pillars (awtād), 3 chiefs (nuqabā), and one pole/helper (quṭb/ghawth). There are also the shaykhs called uwaysiyān who became saints by decree of God with no intermediaries. 6. Discussion on the difference between prodigy, miracle and deception, and on the Tafsīr al-kabīr of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī17 (al-qawl fī al-farq bayn al-muʿjizat wa al-karāmat wa al-istidrāj wa fī al-tafsīr al-kabīr al-imām alniḥrīr Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī): when an extraordinary event occurred, some people pretend to have made it and others do not pretend anything. In the first case, people claim to be either God, or a prophet, or a saint or a magician. It can be true or false. In the second case, the extraordinary event occurred either to a man who is really a saint and is favored by God, or to a man who is a sinner and is punished by God. 7. Discussion on the confirmation of the miracles of the saints, and on the Kitāb dalāʾīl al-nubuwwa of Imām al-Mustaghfirī18 (al-qawl fī al-athbāt alkarāmat al-awliyāʾ wa fī dalāʾīl al-nubuwwa al-imām al-Mustaghfirī): the miracles performed by saints, which go against the usual flow of things, are favors given by God to certain people, and scriptural sources (Quran and many hadiths in addition to hagiographical narratives) prove this fact. 8. Discussion on the kinds of miracles and extraordinary events (al-qawl fī anwāʿ al-karāmat wa khawāriq al-ʿādāt): after a list of various extraordinary events (apparition, multilocation, clairvoyance, etc.), it is argued that God is the author of the miracle, while the saint is simply an actor. The most valuable miracle is the saint’s capacity of piety. 9. Discussion on when the Sufis were called Sufis (al-qawl fī annahu matā summiyat al-ṣūfiyya ṣūfiyya): the Sufis emerged after the Companions of the Prophet (aṣḥāb), their followers (tābiʿīn), the ascetics and the pious, just before the end of the second century of hegira. Jāmī concludes:19 “In this book will be recalled (madhkūr) numerous names of shaykhs from the school of Sufis (ṭāʾifa-yi ṣūfiyya), their dates of birth and death, their deeds, spiritual states, gnosis, miracles, and their spiritual stages. Thus, those who will read and study it will acquire a sure knowledge of this school, will not be infected by the ravings of those who deny the Sufis’ miracles 17  Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209)’s Tafsīr al-kabīr. This section is entirely in Arabic. 18  Jaʿfar b. Muʿtazz al-Mustaghfirī (d. 431/1040)’s Dalāʾīl al-nubuwwa. All quotations of this section are in Arabic. 19  Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 23.

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and spiritual stages, and will be protected from the malignity of these erring people. May God protect us and all Muslims from the perversity of our penchants and the evil of our actions (…).” Based on many translations from Arabic texts—including other references than the ones given in section titles, e.g. Ibn ʿArabī’s treatises—Jāmī’s introduction is written in a highly Arabized Persian, in addition to numerous quotations in Arabic, as Navāʾī justly noticed. Classically, the discussion focuses on sanctity and establishes a hierarchy of mystics on the path to sanctity, where the Sufis, defined as masters in gnosis as well as makers of miracles, are, after the Prophets, the only ones worthy of the title of saints. Both theoretical and practical, the Nafaḥāt’s introduction provides guidelines to understand sanctity as it is, or should be, taught within Sufi circles, in which the shaykh uses biographies as illustrations of the Sufi conception of sanctity. The point here is not to describe Sufi ṭurūq, whether informal groups, hereditary lineages or initiatory orders, but the various representatives of Sufi sanctity. Moreover, the exemplary nature of these individuals is certainly important, but more critical is to show their reality, their presence, against the negation of their very existence.20 In the introduction of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, we find a shorter but more concrete explanation of the definition of a saint. It is divided in two unequal parts:21 1. Introduction on the practices of this school (bū ṭāʾīfa sulūkīda muqaddima tamḥīdī): a narrative tells that the Prophets have been sent to command the creatures. The most eminent Prophet was Muḥammad who turned God’s words and orders into rules for people. Then, his Companions established a government to guide men on the way to God. After their rule, the Sufi shaykhs and saints were in charge of leading people, and they will be in charge until the end of the world. 2. Recalling some of the acts, conducts, occupations and spiritual exercises of this school (bū ṭāʾīfanīng aʿmāl va afʿāl va muʿāmalāt va riyāḍātī dīn baʿḍīnī dhikr qīlmāq): the primary act is repentance, which prevents Sufis from all prohibited actions. On the basis of the hadith “the one who works is beloved by God” (al-kāsib ḥabīb allāh), the great masters had craft occupations. For instance, Abū Saʿīd Kharrāz was a shoemaker,22 20  The defense of saints as well as the differentiation between true and false mystics are constant concerns for Sufi biographers. See Ibrahim Hafsi, “Recherches sur le genre ‘Ṭabaqāt’, dans la littérature arabe 2,” Arabica 24/1 (February 1977): 27‒41. 21  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 3‒12 (3‒12). Here gain, I give a summary instead of a full translation. 22  The Arabic names of masters reveal their occupation, but Navāʾī is careful to give Turkish equivalents, probably because these Arabic words were not commonly known among the

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Abū Ḥafḍ Ḥaddād a blacksmith, Mīrcha Sifālfurūsh a potter, and Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband an embroiderer. For these licit activities, the shaykhs got a salary, but furthermore, they acquired gnosis. 3. The observance of law (sharīʿat riʿāyatī): for Sufi saints, there is no greater task than to observe Islamic law and to follow Sunna, and they apply both in a firm way. This means that Sufis pronounce the profession of faith but they repeat it continuously during dhikr, whether silently or loudly, until unconsciousness. They equally perform the five prayers, but they either add numerous ones (like Ḥallāj and his thousand kneeling) or perform them intensively (like Bisṭāmī whose bones made a crashing noise when he prayed). As for the alms, the saints renounce the world, spend everything to please God, and consider charity as a duty. They also extend the fasting to the purgation of the entire body from anything but God: throat, limbs, ears, feet, hands, and heart are all devoted to the divine. To Sufis, the last pillar, i.e. ḥajj, corresponds to a permanent journey to God, whether geographically or spiritually. 4. The rules of the path that this school observes (ṭarīqat ādābīdūr ki bū ṭāʾīfa marʿī tūtārlār): the main rule of the Sufis include respect to everyone with no exception (even robbers as did Abū al-Vafāʾ Khwārazmī [d. 835/1431]); generosity with no limit (like Abū Naṣr Pārsā [865/1460] who offered his best horse to the people who had previously stole it and had been captured); gentleness in all situations (like when Mawlānā Muḥammad Tabādakānī [d. 891/1486] pardoned a young singer who acted too impetuously during Sufi gatherings); contentment, whatever may happen (as when the aforementioned shaykh accepted the sudden death of his son); and so forth. 5. The great exercises (ʿaẓīm riyāḍlār): they are ascetic lifelong practices. For example, every night Abū Saʿīd Abū al-Khayr (d. 440/1049) was suspended from a beam above a well and performed dhikr until morning; each day, Anṣārī contented himself with the same quantity of bread and spent the day writing; during eighteen years, Aḥmad-i Jām (d. 536/1141) used to climb the Mountain of Bīzd23 to get away from men. 6. About the extraordinary events and miracles that occurred to saints (awliyāʾ allāhgha vāqiʿ bolghān khavāriq ʿādāt va karāmāt bayānī): this short section is basically a list of various wonders and ends with the Turkish speaking readership. Abū Ḥafḍ Ḥaddād is called Abū al-Ḥasan Ḥaddād, and is presented as a recluse or celibate dervish in the famous guidebook for pilgrimage of Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl, 33. 23  Both editions incorrectly transcribe the name.

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following call: “Let’s hope that, in the valley of perdition, thanks to the dust of the feet of these holy guides, the lost people will succeed to get their dark vision illuminated (…)” While the Nasāʾim’s introduction addresses the same questions than the Nafaḥāt’s, it is considerably less theoretical. Using popular figures and simple examples, the Turkish poet favors the anecdotes that are likely to catch the imagination. Equally paradoxical is Navāʾī’s emphasis on law and orthodoxy, while he displays more openness toward ascetics and radical types of saints. This “universalism,” which goes further than Jāmī in completeness, serves the didactic purpose of the hagiographical compendium, that is, to teach the Sufi conception of sanctity to Sufi circles and, beyond them, to the Muslim community in general. Similar to, for example, the famous Ṭabaqāt of Shaʿrānī (d. 973/1565),24 the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba offered concrete descriptions of everyday life where holy men intervene, and from which Sufi masters—and probably other readers—could draw a variety of teachings they would retain by heart and transmit orally. We will analyze many of these descriptions in comparing the Nasāʾim with the first Ottoman version of the Nafaḥāt. 2

Jāmī and Lāmiʿī Çelebī

The second step of the Turkish reception of Jāmī’s compendium took place in the Ottoman Empire, when again an author—not simply a translator— decided to produce a Turkish version. Maḥmūd b. ʿUthmān b. Naqqāş ʿAlī b. Īlyās, better known as Lāmiʿī Çelebī, was compared to Navāʾī and had some tenuous connection with Central Asia since his grandfather had learned painting and embroidery in Samarkand and brought his art back to his hometown of Bursa.25 Maḥmūd’s father was a defterdār, a finance director, under Bāyezīd II (d. 918/1512) but his son, who was born around 878/1473, was reluctant to succeed him and rather approached Sufi circles after having completed his education at the Murādiyye madrasa in Bursa. He was initiated to the Naqshbandiyya

24  See the illuminating remarks of Jean-Claude Garcin, “Index des Tabaqāt de Sha‘ranī (pour la fin IXe et le début du Xe s. h.),” Annales islamologiques 6 (1963): 33‒40. 25  Biographical notes, chrestomathies and introductions to his works in Joseph von HammerPurgtsall, Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtkunst (Pesth: C.A. Hartleben, 1837), 2:20‒195; Elias J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry (London: Luzac & Co., 1904), 3:20‒34; Gönül Ayan, “Lâmi‘î Çelebi’nin hayatı, edebî kişiliği ve eserleri,” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 1 (1994): 43‒65.

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by Emīr Ahmed Bukhārī (d. 922/1516), himself a shaykh and a poet,26 and apparently introduced to the Gülşeniyye by Īlhām Efendī (d. 980/1572). A devout Sufi and indefatigable writer, he had no official function but received allowances from the court. When Lāmiʿī Çelebī died in 938/1531–2, he left behind him no fewer than forty-six writings. His works include mainly poetry, a treatise on poetics, a collection of model letters, a book about the city of Bursa, a Persian-Turkish dictionary, and of course Sufi writings, such as a lexicon of technical terms, and several items translated from or inspired by Jāmī. His own compositions, as well as his translations, were praised by his contemporaries, especially the poet and biographer Laṭifī (d. 953/1542). A main achievement is the translation of the Nafaḥāt al-uns, which Lāmiʿī Çelebī presents as follows:27 After inviting the reader to enter the book and enjoy the breathings and sayings of saints, the Ottoman writer recalls that Jāmī has collected books of hagiographical narratives that he clarified by the use of Persian, which was his mother tongue. Speaking about his own experience, Lāmiʿī explains that he studied closely the arguments of the Nafaḥāt and was fascinated by its writing style, so much so that the book appeared to him as an ocean with truth and gnosis at the surface, and divine secrets hidden in the bottom. More concretely, we read that, in order to generalize the profits of this book and to complete its qualities, he tried, asking the help of God and saints, to explain the words with Turkish terms (türkī ʿibāretli taʿbīr) and to interpret the difficulties in Western Turkish (rūmī lughatlı tefsīr). However, this project is described as an exhausting journey during which the wayfarer found no rest; he was overcome by doubt: would he be able to enlighten the subtleties and to reveal the secrets of the Nafaḥāt since its words cannot be read literally and come from divine knowledge? More than a rhetorical posture, which probably refers to Navāʾī’s introduction, this would describe the translator’s craft as a spiritual task. When later in the text Lāmiʿī narrates that he has been asked by close friends to undertake the translation, he again evokes the difficulties of his work, but constantly hears a divine voice telling him to turn the book into Turkish and to offer it to the students of Anatolia (türkīye döndermek ve rūming ṭālib-i ṣādiqlarına göndermekdir) and eventually recommends himself to God’s favor in order to achieve his translation. “Following the traces of Jāmī in the way to 26  For a comprehensive study of his poetry, see Cemâl Kurnaz and Mustafa Tatcı, İstanbul’da Buharalı bir Mutasavvıf Emir Buharî (Ankara: Akçağ, 1999). 27  Lāmiʿī Çelebī, Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn li tervīḥ qulūbiʾl-müșāhidīn (MS Michigan Library, Isl. Ms. 388, non-foliated), 2‒9; Nefaḥātüʾl-üns. Evliyā Menḳibelerī, ed. Süleyman Uludağ and Mustafa Kara (Istanbul: Marifet, 2005), 57‒67 (noted in brackets afterwards). I summarize the foreword and the beginning of the introduction.

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explain and the choice of words” (edā-ı merāmda ve sevq-i kelāmda Mevlānā Jāmī etherince gitdim), and reusing the Sufi technical lexis of the Nafaḥāt, he considers his translation literal and complete. Nevertheless, the Ottoman polymath confesses that he has inserted some pages in the introduction about the saints’ deeds and behaviors, introduced some details here and there, and included several biographies of shaykhs of Anatolia (meşāyikh-i rūm) and of recent spiritual travelers (sāʾīr-i müteākhkhirīn-i ṭarīqat). Like Navāʾī, although to a lesser extent, Lāmiʿī changed the original and issued updates and a supplement, again conceived as geographical and individual. Remarkably, our author mentions that he completed his compendium when Suleiman I (d. 974/1566) marched on the fortress of Belgrade, in summer 1521, an assault—here briefly narrated—that ended, we read, in the victory of the combatants of Islam on the idolatrous Hungarians. The hearts of the infidels were broken while those of the Muslims were pleased; the idols were destroyed and the churches turned into mosques; the good news spread everywhere in the Empire. This is why Lāmiʿī gave the following title to his book: Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn li tervīḥ qulūbiʾl-müșāhidīn (The conquests of the combatants relieving the hearts of the witnesses). “Let’s hope that the hearts of the mystics, hearing about these victories, will be satisfied until the end of the world!” Beyond the historical circumstances, this correlation established between the hagiography and the holy war suggests that the book itself, here featuring a battlefield rather than a garden, is an instrument of Islamization, in the sense that writing about the Muslim saints contributes to the spread of Islam. In other words, it depicts sanctity as a presence in time and space that offers both a representation of and an exemplar for the Muslim world. Before discussing further this question, it is interesting to examine the rest of the introduction, especially the additional pages mentioned by Lāmiʿī Çelebī. This is actually quite a substantial supplement to the Nafaḥāt’s section on “the various possessors of sanctity” (al-qawl fī aṣnāf arbāb al-walāya),28 composed mainly of long quotations in Turkish from Sufi texts, originally in Arabic or Persian: 1. Anṣārī’s Manāzil al-sāʾirīn and its distinction of three classes of saints. 2. Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā (d. 822/1420)’s Faṣl al-khiṭāb and its reference to the seven classes of Sufis—i.e. students (ṭālibīn), disciples (murīdīn), spiritual wayfarers (sālikīn), spiritual travelers (sāʾīrīn), virtuous (ṭāhirīn), accomplished (wāṣilīn), and the pole (quṭb)—followed by both a microcosmic and macrocosmic cartography of poles, including a list of uwaysī 28  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 21‒50 (83‒113). It has been placed before the section about unicity (al-qawl fī al-tawḥīd).

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saints, such as ʿUways al-Qaranī’s uncle ʿUṣām al-Qaranī, Aḥmad ibn ʿAṭā al-ʿArabī, ʿImād al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bārsīnī, and ʿAbd Allāh al-Shāmī. 3. About Ilyās and Khiḍr ( fī dhikr al-Ilyās wa al-Khiḍr): a series of anecdotes mostly on the Prophet Khiḍr, his descendants and his support of saints, partly based of the anonymous Fatāwā al-ṣūfiyya. 4. The blessings and the qualities told about Khiḍr ( fī al-adʿiyat wa alkhawāṣṣ al-manqūlat ʿan al-Khiḍr): a series of quotations from several texts, such as Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī (d. 386/996)’s Qūt al-qulūb, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111)’s Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, and Quṭb al-Dīn Zāde Iznīqī (d. 821/1418)’s Evrād-ı zeyniyye, in addition to a long sub-section on the Twelve poles and the Men of the unseen (rijāl al-ghayb), based on Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, including a circle diagram of mystical astrology.29 5. About the sorts of knowledge and the stages spiritual of the scholars ( fī bayān aqsām al-ʿilm wa al-marātib al-ʿulamāʾ): arguments drawn from Najm al-Dīn Rāzī (654/1256)’s Mirṣād al-ʿibād to defend the saintly merits of different classes of scholars, even exotericists, such as muftis, admonishers and judges. Lāmiʿī also inserts quotations of Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (618/1221)’s Manāzil al-ḥāʾirīn about miracles.30 Nevertheless, it is primarily Akbarian theories which influenced the Ottoman translator of Jāmī, as the supplements show, and one notices the consequent escalation in complexity and theorization. This contrast with Navāʾī’s simplicity does not mean more elitism in the selection of saints. Lāmiʿī certainly included scholars in his listing of candidates for sanctity, but this is to extend the world of saints and the manifestation of sainthood among men. We will see in the next section that he did not exclude popular, if not heterodox, figures. 3

Exploring the Addenda of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba and the Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn

Both introductions provide reading keys to enter the voluminous books. They are certainly not reading instructions, yet the commentator or the reader is 29   For an explanation of Ibn ʿArabī’s astrology in relation with hagiology, see Titus Burckhardt, Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ‘Arabi (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2001), originally written in French. 30  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 71‒72 (135‒36). I have not been able to identify this text.

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now aware that they will find an encyclopedic source of information on Sufi sanctity that can be used according to different criteria: types of saints, sorts of miracles, specific practices, particular virtues, regions of activity (where saints lived, traveled and were buried). Previous scholarship on the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba and the Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn has tried to reconstruct Sufi orders or sacred lineages or communal identities on the basis of initiatory chains or hereditary links or shared labels that could be recognized between individuals.31 Although useful, this approach does not coincide with the authors’ views and purposes, and ignores the way Sufis themselves used these hagiographical who’s-whos. In fact, the medieval ṭabaqāt genre differs deeply from the ṭurūq literature in that it focuses on individualities rather than communalities. While writings like adab treatises, silsila attestations, genealogical charts (shajara and nasabnāma), waqf certificates, and diplomas (irshād and ijāzat) allow us to reconstruct the history of Sufi communities—although many of these documents, considered secret by Sufis, remain out of libraries, or have been lost, or are still preserved in private archives—the books of classes, at least the two items we shall explore, are not necessarily the most interesting and reliable sources in this respect. Through multiple names and stories, they seek to offer a “database” for teaching and discussion among Sufis, and to prove to skeptical Muslims the reality of sanctity. Once again, the point is not to describe Sufi groups, but to explain how Sufism leads certain persons to sanctity. I propose to examine our two sources according to two axes we have already encountered in the introductions: the diversity of sanctity and the Islamization of space. 3.1 The Diversity of Sanctity The most identifiable type of saint that can be ascertained from Navāʾī’s collection is the one related to Sufi interpersonal affiliations, whether through spiritual education, family ties, or companionship. Without mentioning the name Chishtiyya or even Chishtīs, ʿAlī Shīr completes Jāmī’s notice on Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (d. 725/1325) with three notices 31  Erudite works in this vein include: Devin DeWeese, “Spiritual Practice and Corporate Identity in Medieval Sufi Communities of Iran, Central Asia, and India: The Khalvatī/ ʿIshqī/Shaṭṭārī Continuum,” in Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle, ed. Steven E. Lindquist (London-New York-Delhi: Anthem, 2011), 268–76; Nicholas Walmsley, “The Yasaviyya in the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba of ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī: A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography,” Journal of Sufi Studies 3 (2014): 38–66; Reşat Öngören, Osmanlılar’da Tasavvuf. Anadolu’da Sûfîler, Devlet ve Ulemâ (XVI. Yüzyıl) (Istanbul: İz, 2012).

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on his masters: Farīd Shakar Ganj (d. 664/1266), the one who gave him the cloak (khirqa),32 Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtyār Kākī (d. 630/1232) who gave the cloak to the latter,33 and Mawlānā Kamāl al-Dīn Zāhid, an ascetic scholar who trained Niẓām al-Dīn in hadith.34 Navāʾī mentions also a certain Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAlī Chishtī, about whom we learn that someone who did not believe in his holiness used to throw a stone whenever he passed by his shrine, until the time when the sinner was punished: his horse made him fall and the stone he was holding crushed his guilty hand.35 The much more celebrated Qāḍī Ḥamīd alDīn Nāgawrī (d. 643/1246) is presented as a disciple of Bakhtyār Kākī and of shaykhs from other Sufi traditions (not named). There are many more narratives about his power of making the rain fall during a drought year. He is said to be famous in India, but also in Khorasan, Samarkand and Rum.36 A second Sufi group mentioned in the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba appears paradoxical. Like the Chishtīs, classified within the larger group of the “Indian shaykhs,” the well-known and important Yasavīs represent only a part of the “Turkish shaykhs” class. Apart from three or four detailed biographies, the rest of the notices are relatively dry and do not seem to interest our author. Nonetheless, in conformity with the sociolinguistic aspect of the introduction, he pays some attention to the naming and occupations of saints:37 Ḥakīm Atā has been thus named because he acted skillfully (ḥakīmāna) and was renamed for this wise language (ḥikmat tīlī); Qīlich Atā was making and selling swords; Tīmūrchī Atā was a blacksmith who, one day, made an utensil from hot iron with his hand and said: “God forbids me all fires!”—an allusion to the Zoroastrian cult of fire, which symbolizes idolatry. Succinct but more creative is Navāʾī’s reference to the ʿIshqiyya.38 Previous studies have scrupulously collated the data from the Nasāʾim with other sources to reconstitute the silsila, but have missed important details—biographemes, to use a word coined by Roland Barthes—on individuals, which contradict the generalizations on the rivalry between ʿIshqīs and Naqshbandīs, the latter being supposedly more intellectual and less persevering than the former. Once such story tells of Muḥammad Shaykh, who was opposed by a scholar. In front of the latter was a jar of water, and when the scholar drank the water and 32  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 326‒27 (274‒75). 33  Ibid., 340 (286‒87). 34  Ibid., 337‒38 (284). 35  Ibid., 335 (282). 36  Ibid., 341‒42 (287‒88). 37  Ibid., 384‒86 (327‒29). Some are apparently Yasavī shaykhs but their affiliation remains unclear. 38  Ibid., 387‒88 (329‒31).

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suddenly lost all his knowledge, he repented, recovered his skills and became a disciple. Muḥammad’s son, Ilyās Shaykh, was a scholar who went on Hajj and became so much competent in Arabic literature that he composed poetry in this language. His son Shaykhzāda Abū al-Ḥasan also set off for Mecca. On the way, he felt sick and stopped at Bastam where a descendant of Bistāmī gave him a cloak and a turban. He then returned through Herat, where he joined the circle of Jāmī; the latter offered him one of his books, a prayer rug and a handkerchief. Many ʿIshqīs were actually patient ascetics, so much so that Shaykh Sulṭān Ṣūfī was said to have spent most of his time fasting and remaining silent. The Naqshbandīs or Khwājagān do not occupy a central place in the Nasāʾim and are limited to the Herati local environment. But again, seldom-noted details deserve attention as they relativize the usual qualifiers of sobriety and interiority. Among the well-known disciples of Jāmī’s master Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī (d. 860/1456), we learn that Khwāja ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jāmī (d. 902/1497) studied in depth the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, but also enjoyed Sufi musical sessions (samāʿ), screaming out and losing consciousness. The knowledgeable Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn (d. 892/1486) was euphoric as well and shouted out when he performed samāʿ.39 In rupture with society, the young and wealthy Mawlānā Ḥājī (d. 899/1493) gave everything to the poor and set out for Hajj. After several years in Mecca, he stayed in the service of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī during forty years, taking care of the writings and drafts of his master.40 Equally interesting is Mawlānā Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad, a companion of Kāshgharī, so perhaps a Naqshbandī, who was the son of Mawlānā Kalān Ziyāratgāhī, himself an ascetic and quasi-hermit in the town of Ziyāratgāh near Herat, with no Sufi affiliation.41 Kalān had a pupil named Shaykh Shāh Ziyāratgāhī who abandoned his studies at the madrasa and became a reclusive mystic who stayed at home and frostily rejected visitors, even officials.42 It is significant that we find Shāh Ziyāratgāhī among the interlocutors of Jāmī himself, who is of course presented as a Naqshbandī but dealing with shaykhs from many horizons.43 Beyond the dichotomy between exclusive and rival Sufi orders on the one hand and corporate identities on the other, we have here a considerably more complex spiritual landscape, structured on differently charismatic saints and interpersonal relationships. 39  Ibid., 398‒98 (339‒40). Additional information on him in ʿUbayd Allāh Abū Saʿīd Hiravī’s addendum to Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl, 105. 40  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 399 (341). 41  Ibid., 392 (333‒34). 42  Ibid., 395‒96 (337‒38). 43  Ibid., 439‒41 (375‒76).

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This landscape is fluctuating too, as is shown by the case of the Zaynī Sufis. Mawlānā Taj al-Dīn Aḥmad Shījānī, from the province of Bākharz, belonged to the silsila of the founding master Zayn al-Dīn Khwāfī (d. 838/1435). Since the practice of loud dhikr made him crazy, he looked for another spiritual guide and met Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī who cured his mental trouble. The new disciple studied extensively Ghazālī’s Kīmiyā-yi saʿādat and became a scribe.44 Darvīsh Sayyid Ḥasan (d. 894/1488) came from a Sharifian family of Khorasan and was a soldier but wished to become a dervish. He finally abandoned everything and followed the teachings of Khwāfī’s successor Mawlānā Muḥammad Tabādakānī (d. 891/1486), on whom we will return. For several years, he lived in poverty with dervishes and acted as a khalīfa of the master. This did not prevent him from dealing with many other shaykhs (such as Shāh Ziyāratgāhī) and even, by the end of his life, going to Samarkand and becoming a disciple of the Naqshbandī Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490).45 More than pedigrees, it is the personalities of saints that interest Navāʾī, who was close to some of them. Among the Zaynīs, a major name is Tabādakānī:46 educated at the Madrasa-yi sabz in Herat, he was attracted to Sufism and authored translations and commentaries of several Sufi books. His teachings appealed to many people. In his lodge, disciples used to practice spiritual retreat. The shaykh himself was particularly fond of the sounds of sāz and singings in samāʿ sessions. Two other names might be mentioned: Darvīsh Muḥammad Gāzargāhī (d. 890/1485) who renounced his military activity to follow the teachings of Tabādakānī; and Mawlānā Muḥammad Khurāsānī, once a “bad boy” living in debauchery, who relinquished his previous lifestyle and followed Tabādakānī. He spent several years in Haramayn and came back to Herat where Navāʾī had a conversation with him twice.47 Rather than focusing on Sufi communities, it seems more fruitful to read the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba from the individual perspective, and to include the more or less obscure figures that Navāʾī recorded as diligently as modern scholars have neglected them. For example, Bābā Sangū was a holy fool (majdhūb) who lived in the town of Andkhūd (modern Andkhoy in Afghanistan).48 Besides the famous story 44  Ibid., 407 (347). 45  Ibid., 399‒400 (341). 46  Ibid., 396‒98 (338‒39). The shaykh figured among the “pen-friends” of Aḥrār, see Jo-Ann Gross and Asom Urunbaev, The Letters of Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār and his Associates, (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 41, 52, 81‒82, 227‒34. 47  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 402‒3 (343‒44). For additional data about Darvīsh Muḥammad Gāzargāhī, see Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl (addendum), 116. 48  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 392 (334).

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in which the dervish threw a piece of meat at the feet of Tamerlane himself, an act the amir interpreted as an auspicious metaphor of his subjugation of Khorasan, we learn that Sangū’s shrine is located at Andkhūd, where his khalīfa Bābā Jān Bābā and the latter’s khalīfa Bābā Ibrāhīm also lie, and that now there is a lodge (takya) with dervishes. Another notice presents Mawlānā Muḥyī (d. 865/1460):49 also from Andkhūd, he was one of the children of a certain Imām Rāfiʿī Ghaznavī. At a young age, he was crossing the bazar with his father when they met Bābā Sangū. The dervish took the little boy by the hand, led him to the candy store and gave him halva. After that, the boy continuously said: “the sweetness of this halva never left my soul.” He went to Samarkand to study and devoted his life to spiritual exercises. He had a lodge and disciples. His clothes were limited to a woolen cape or a cover, and a bed sheet as shirt. He had the reputation of reading the Quran in its entirety every day. Consistent with his conception of sanctity as a sort of radical form of piety, the polymath multiplies the concrete examples. For thirty years, Mawlānā Shams al-Dīn Maʿdābādī stayed in a mosque and never went out except for ablutions. He used to lie down on nothing but an old mat woven of rushes with a mud brick for his head. In accordance with the Prophet’s model, he broke his thirty-two teeth.50 Darvīsh Manṣūr, a poet and the disciple of Ḥaṣan Jūrī (d. 743/1342), a shaykh of Mazanderan, would fast most of the time.51 Bābā Jalīl lived as a holy fool who lost any concern for food and drink.52 Bābā ʿAlī Pāy Ḥiṣārī was a majdhūb who decided to remain constantly silent, for repentance, after the execution of a certain Sayyidzāda Balyānī who had been accused of fanaticism. This happened during Shāhrukh Mīrzā (d. 850/1447)’s reign.53 In the same period, in Herat, the majdhūb Bābā Ḥaṣan Turk showed his madness in a particular occasion: on an early winter’s morning, plunged in a state of ecstasy and unconsciousness, Bābā Ḥaṣan came out of his lodge nude. Feeling cold, he saw smoke from a hamam; when the caretaker did not let him go in, he hit the caretaker and killed him accidentally. When the heir of the victim led Bābā Ḥaṣan in front of Shāhrukh to be judged, the dervish said to the ruler: “You killed so many people, I have just killed one more!” The heir finally accepted a compensation for the crime (diyat).54

49  Ibid., 400 (341‒42). 50  Ibid., 409‒10 (349). This refers to ʿUways al-Qaranī who, allegedly, pulled out his thirty-two teeth in honor of the Prophet who lost two teeth during the battle of Uḥud. 51  Ibid., 402 (343). 52  Ibid., 414 (354). 53  Ibid., 412 (352). 54  Ibid., 413‒14 (353‒54). Alternative biography in Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl, 85.

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Navāʾī knew personally some of these saintly outcasts:55 the Baluchi fool (tīlbe) Bābā Shihāb was a poor man that children used to torment, throwing stones at him. He had good relationships with Navāʾī and came sometimes to see him. One day, “attacking his own ego,” he wore very dirty clothes and sat near the poet who heard him say the following verse in Persian: “I am sitting where it is my way/I am not sitting where it is my place.” Suddenly, he disappeared: nobody knew if he was dead or alive. A sayyid from Rum, Bābā Sārīgh Pūlād was also close to Navāʾī. The dervish enjoyed a permanent state of “self-destruction” ( fanāʾ); he accepted to wear nothing but a woolen cape and usually refused any food from people; if people insisted he took a small piece. Since he was immolated on the road to Mecca, his grave is not known. A last name is Bābā Pīrī:56 this ecstatic majdhūb stayed at the same decrepit place for almost forty years and never moved from there. Living practically on the street, he used to insult people who passed by. Navāʾī was afraid to approach him. Once, to a friend who asked Navāʾī why he always avoided that street where Bābā Pīrī stood, he explained that he did not want to hear obscenities. The friend convinced him that he should go since the dervish had the reputation to have supernatural powers. Finally, Navāʾī passed by the misanthrope and saw that, uncharacteristically, he was praying. His grave, we read, is located in Herat, by the bridge over the Injīl canal. The Nasāʾim al-maḥabba contains the Turkic translation of the 34 biographies of Sufi women featured in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns. We find only one additional name, that of Bībīcha Munajjima, a famous learned mathematician who was also known in Herat for her rivalry, both in poetry and charity, with none other than Jāmī.57 Here we learn that she came from Kerman. Although Bībīcha excelled in science, she had strong inclinations for dervishhood (darvīshlīk). Highly respected by the Timurid ruler and his concubines, she at some point gave up intercourse with people and built a large mosque near her house, funded by her own possessions and turned into a pious endowment (waqf ). Now the splendid building is a popular place for praying and shelters the grave of the holy lady. Since the addenda are relatively short, Lāmiʿī’s Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn is less rich than the Chaghatay book. Still, the Ottoman compendium represents a fascinating source for the history of saints in Anatolia. In this second text, 55  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 414 (354). 56  Ibid., 413 (353). 57  Ibid., 455 (389). For a documented biographical sketch (without the hagiographical side), see Maria Szuppe, “The Female Intellectual Milieu in Timurid and Post-Timurid Herāt: Faxri Heravi’s Biography of Poetesses, ‘Javāher al-‘Atāyeb’,” Oriente Moderno 15/2 (1996): 132.

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although the ṭurūq are more in focus and the silsila pedigrees appear more regularly, especially in one case, Sufi communities remain behind the scenes. Concerning the Naqshbandīs, Lāmiʿī relied heavily on other sources but introduced first-hand information on two figures he was close to: the well-studied ʿAbd Allāh Ilāḥī (d. 896/1490)58 and his disciple Aḥmed Bukhārī (d. 922/1516).59 About the first, one disregarded anecdote deserves clarification. After having been educated at the madrasa attached to the Zeyrek mosque in Istanbul, Ilāḥī went to study in Khorasan with the scholar Mevlānā Ṭūsī (d. 887/1482). He read many books but remained unsatisfied. He then asked a dervish if he should cast these books into fire or drop them in the river. The dervish said: “Now I’m cold, so give me your cap, then you’d better sell your books and give the money to the poor, except that book (an unspecified Sufi treatise) which will be necessary to you.” What this story illustrates is not only the necessity of going beyond exoteric knowledge, but also the possibility of following a via purgativa which is both material and intellectual, leading to a form of poverty in lifestyle as well as knowledge. The same teaching is related in an account related to Aḥmed Bukhārī, also overlooked by commentators: his spiritual master Ilāḥī gave him the permission to leave for Hajj and even offered him a few coins and a donkey to travel. Bukhārī carried also a Quran and a copy of Rūmī’s Mathnavī. In the course of his initiatory travel (tecrīd ve tevekkül), his Quran was stolen; he sold the Mathnavī, but did not accept any other money. Thus, the pilgrimage to Mecca in itself was enough as a source of knowledge, and even sacred books could be left behind. Lāmiʿī is attentive to the Zayniyya/Zeyniyye as such, unlike the other Sufi groups. Inside the notices devoted to the Zeynī saints, we find simplified silsila charts and a circle diagram—which are unusual graphic elements in this literary genre, but are of practical use for Sufi rituals—regarding ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Maqdisī (d. 856/1452)60 and Vefā Qonevī (d. 894/1489).61 Maqdisī migrated from Sham to Anatolia, passing through Konya and Bursa. He met the shaykh Zayn al-Dīn Khwāfī in Jerusalem and they traveled together to Khorasan, where Maqdisī received spiritual training. A khalīfa of Maqdisī, Qonevī traveled too, but against his will: he took a boat from Antalya and was captured 58  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 483‒88 (574‒79). The best study on this shaykh is Mustafa Kara’s article (trans. from the Turkish by Th. Zarcone) “Molla İlâhî : un précurseur de la Nakşibendiye en Anatolie,” in Naqshbandis. Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, eds. Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone (IstanbulParis: Isis, 1990), 295‒320. 59  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 488‒93 (579‒85). 60  Ibid., 570‒72 (672‒75). 61  Ibid., Fütūḥ, 578‒81 (683‒87).

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with his family and disciples by European ( frenk) pirates who took them to Rhodes Island. After being rescued, he lived in Istanbul. Qonevī was a scholar who usually responded tersely to questions: when someone asked him, “What do you think of Ḥallāj’s ‘I am the Truth’?” he answered, “How could he say ‘I am the False’?” He composed poetry in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Noteworthy too is the full quotation of the icāzet nāme written by Zayn al-Dīn Khwāfī in Arabic in 832/1428 for his khalīfa ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Merzīfonī Rūmī,62 in which the master exposed the devotional duties of the Sufi. A last group is the Khalvetī. The Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn highlights several cases of links with other groups, which show the flexibility of affiliations according to individual itineraries. For instance, Pīr Ilyās Amāsyevī (15th c.) had been deported to Shirvān during Tamerlane’s campaign in Anatolia and became a teacher there. He met the Khalvetī master Ṣadr al-Dīn—to whom we will return—, but progressively, because of the illiteracy of the shaykh, their relationship weakened and Pīr Ilyās returned to Amasya. After twelve years of austerities, he traveled to Khorasan to meet the master Zayn al-Dīn Khwāfī. On the way, he dreamed of the Prophet, who told him to return to Ṣadr al-Dīn, which he did the next morning.63 Mevlānā Ḥabīb Khalvetī, (d. 902/1497), from Ortaköy near Niğde, studied for twelve years with the Khalvetī Yaḥyā Şirvānī (d. 868/1464 or 869/1465). Traveling frequently, he also dealt intensely with Bayrāmī, Naqshbandī, and Zeynī masters, respectively in Ankara, Kayseri, and Mecca.64 The point here is not to infer rivalries or alliances among Sufi lineages, or to search for clues about their origins, but to recognize samples of saintly individualities who are described as “having a real life,” with doubts, hesitations, and preferences. The compiler’s purpose was, of course, not to write a history of Sufism, but to attest that holy men exist and that the reader should venerate them while also identifying himself with them. It is therefore hardly surprising that Lāmiʿī inserted a digression,65 in which he opposes those who criticize the Khalvetī shaykhs for going against sharīʿa. This is outright slander, we read, since the apparent unruly behavior of Sufis hides a lawful devotion. The problem is that, these days, the Khalvetīs admitted women and youngsters in their assemblies to increase the number of disciples. These sorts of people perform music, dance, and love samāʿ sessions, but do not know what these 62  Ibid., Fütūḥ, 573‒75 (676‒79). 63  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 590‒91 (699‒700). For a different version of the biography, see John J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 52, 54; the most detailed account (although deprived of the above episode) is given in Öngören, Osmanlılar’da Tasavvuf, 28‒32. 64  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 595‒96 (704‒6). 65  Ibid., 598‒600 (709‒10).

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rituals are. Nowadays, Sufi practices need discipline and frugality to remain authentic. Anyway, the author concludes laconically, “our aim in this book is not to expose the blames of the accusers (müddeʿīler medhemmetī) but the biographies of spiritual men (ehl-i maʿnānıng tedhkiresī).” Despite this sober and intellectualist position, the great number of “radical” individual figures suggests a more encompassing vision of sanctity. A Central Asian khalīfa of ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār and close to Abū Naṣr Pārsā (d. 865/1460), another noted Naqshbandī shaykh, Mollāzāde Otrārī is well-known for having been visited in Aleppo by Jāmī himself (after his Hajj) who knew his reputation. What is interesting here is the hagiographical stress on Otrārī’s rough asceticism: he did not accept Jāmī’s presents (a shirt and a veil) as he used to wear nothing else than what he had, that is, a hat, a felt cover, a shirt and a caftan. Like a renunciant vagabond, he was said to never spend the night at the same place, even at the age of eighty. He was buried in Damascus.66 His disciple Muḥammad Badakhshī (d. 922/1516) was also buried there, and is presented as a renunciant saint (terk ü tecrīd), colorfully provocative, as two narratives show.67 In the first story, when Sultan Selīm (d. 926/1520) came to see the saint, the latter simply did not tell him anything. The sultan came back another time to see Badakhshī who said: “Like me, you’re a slave of God, but me, I don’t have any charge (yük) whereas you have one, you’d better not forget that you are in charge of the people!” In the second story, Badakhshī, who had no knowledge but only intuitions (kashf ), prevented one of his disciples from reading books. When the disciple explained that he had been strongly incited to study by a disciple of Aḥrār, Badakhshī said: “this Aḥrār’s disciple says stupid things (guzāf ), don’t worry about him. With my uncle, I have not read [Quran] beyond the sūrat al-ʿādiyāt (the Chargers)!” Other saints whom, like Navāʾī, Lāmiʿī met in his life or knew personally, epitomize this intuitional and empirical mysticism. For example, when he was a teenager, our author kissed the hand of the Zeynī Sufi Ḥājī Khalīfe Qasṭamonī (d. 894/1489), they prayed together several times, and the saint gave him a handkerchief.68 Lāmiʿī mentions another teenager, named ʿAlī Çelebī, son of a chief judge, who wished to become the disciple of Qasṭamonī. The latter advised the former that the disciple must remain constant in his spiritual quest however radical it would be, and should rely less on his master than 66  Ibid., Fütūḥ, 482 (572‒73). 67  Ibid., Fütūḥ, 482‒83 (573‒74). For a documented biography, see Hamid Algar, Nakşibendilik (Istanbul: İnsan, 2007), 538‒39. 68  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 476‒78 (680‒83). The most complete biography (but without the details given here) can be found in Reşat Öngören, Tarihte bir Aydın Tarikatı: Zeynîler (Istanbul: Insan, 2003), 101‒7.

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on God Himself. The well-known Khalvetī Gülşenī saint Dede ʿÖmer Rūşenī (d. 892/1487) was said to have frequented many whorehouses (kharābāt) in Bursa during his student years and to have a love affair with a young man named Ḥıḍr Bālī.69 He was also a sharp satirist, including against himself. Called by God, he traveled towards Iran to become a Sufi. His distracting words (melāhī) became divine words (ilāhī), we read, and his illusory desire (mecāzī) became a true desire (ḥaqīqī). The case of the Bayrāmī Ibrāhīm b. Ṣarāf Ḥüseyn (d. 887/1482), better known as Ibrāhīm Tennūrī, is discussed at length:70 he came to see the famous Aq Şems al-Dīn (d. 863/1459),71 who had a reputation for curing diseases. While people used to consult the saint for bodily problems, Ibrāhīm asked a remedy for a spiritual trouble. And when Ibrāhīm told the saint that he had nothing to offer in exchange, the saint assured him that he did not expect a physical present. After that, Ibrāhīm became the disciple of Aq Şems al-Dīn and started a prodigious spiritual retreat, which was to last for 87 nights. The first night, he had 400 dreams and was able to write them down in detail the next morning. One day, as he was tired of being the only disciple fed just porridge, a piece of bread, and a jug of water, he refused the food but had no dream the next night. After having been reprimanded by his master, he resumed his regime until the 87th night.72 In the morning, he was hungry for a pilaf and got one from his master, who considered Ibrāhīm’s initiation to be complete. Lāmiʿī asked Ibrāhīm’s son why his father has been renamed Tennūr (lit. “oven”) and was explained that Ibrāhīm introduced a technique consisting of sitting on an oven in order to sweat profusely and purify the mind. The last (but certainly not least) character worth mentioning is the saintly girl Sulayma, as she is portrayed by the Naqshbandī Muḥammad Qāsim, the grandson of ʿAbd Allāh Samarqandī:73 “Together with my mother, we bought a slave of seven years old named Sulayma. The little girl was always crying and people believed she was mad. I was sure she was sincere. When I needed to know something, I asked her while she was still asleep and she gave me a 69  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 594 (703‒4). A different version of the affair is given by Semra Tunç, “Dede Ömer Rûşenî,” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 4 (1997): 238. 70  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 702‒4 (838‒41). On whom see Mustafa Uzun, “Îbrâhim Tennûrî,” Diyanet Islâm Ansiklopedisi, 21:356. 71  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 698‒701 (835‒38). 72  This is probably in reference to the date of Ibrāhīm Tennurī’s death. 73  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 723 (866‒67). ʿAbd Allāh Samarqandī (d. 911/1505) is the eldest son of Khwāja Aḥrār. Muḥammad Qāsım is the son of ʿAbd Allāh’s son Niẓām al-Ḥādī. Since Muḥammad Qāsım lived in Hejaz and went to Yemen and Anatolia, Lāmiʿī certainly met him. On these Sufis, see Necdet Tosun, Bahâeddîn Nakşbend. Hayatı, Görüşleri, Tarîkatı (Istanbul: İnsan, 2002), 171‒72. I summarize the notice.

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detailed answer. One day, I wanted to free her but she implored me not to do it. I said that I will marry her to someone but she asked me not to do it. She explained: ‘I love you God more than anything. If you free me, you will become a stranger to me. If you marry me to someone, my love will be to a stranger.’ She died very young at the age of fourteen.” Many other individual cases could be quoted, but as Lāmiʿī Çelebī himself acknowledges, “if in this book he intended to write down the biographies of all the saints of Rum, the task proved to be impossible as they were so many.”74 In summary, all these examples reflect the diversity of holiness according to the views that Navāʾī and Lāmiʿī explicated in their introductions. Various—if not all, from the authors’ perspective—types of saints are described in a vivid and simple style that strikes the reader’s imagination and attracts his interest, regardless of his social or cultural background. As we shall see now, this totalizing tendency likewise characterizes miracles as well as holy sites, which both define an intellectual form of Islamization. 3.2 The Islamization of Space In a recent book, the late Jacques Le Goff proposed a thought-provoking reading of the famous hagiographical compendium authored by Jacques de Voragine.75 In short, Le Goff argued that the book was not simply a compilation of biographies, but a survey about time, and that his Dominican author wished to show how Christianity structured and sacralized the time of humane life in order to lead humanity towards salvation. The Christianization of time combined three conceptions: temporal (the time of liturgy), sanctoral (the lives of saints), and eschatological (the march of humanity until the Last Judgment). Instead of simply applying this approach or even comparing its results with those obtained from the Islamic narratives—although this would be certainly fruitful insofar as many hagiographical topoi are common—I propose to use it as a source of inspiration to read the addenda of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba and the Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn from the perspective of space, rather than time. We have seen that the book titles themselves referred to space in terms of holy gardens 74  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 704 (841). 75  Jacques Le Goff, A la recherche du temps sacré. Jacques de Voragine et la Légende dorée (Paris: Perrin, 2011). With Michel de Certeau, the medievalist is one of the most creative historians on the approach of hagiographies. It is regrettable that both authors remain poorly known among students of Muslim hagiographies, this apparently under the pretext of confessional exclusiveness. In fact, not only points of comparison but connections existed between Christian and Islamic hagiographies: in his Golden legend, Jacques de Voragine included a long section, of course polemical, on the Prophet Muḥammad and on the conception of the Last Judgment in Islam.

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and lands of conquest. We have also understood that the purpose of Jāmī and his Turkish continuators was to confirm the heavenly and earthly presence of saints. However, there is more: taken globally, our books of charismatic classes trace a cartography of Islamic sanctity, which includes local settlements as well as trans-regional displacements. Read at the level of the multiple individual cases, Sufi sainthood appears as an omnipresent marker of territory through not only the sacred or spiritual topography (shrines, mosques, cells and lodges) but also the everyday environment of believers where miracles occurred. Northern India is the first area described by Navāʾī through the mashāyikh-i hind. Not surprisingly, Delhi appears as a hub around which Sufi saints swarmed. The attachment to the city and the long presence of holy men are embodied by two static figures. One is the hermit Mawlānā Karīm al-Dīn Mawʿidī, who arrived in Delhi with a friend who told him to stay near a mosque and to wait for his return. The friend was never able to come back, but Karīm al-Dīn stayed at the same place for forty years and was even buried there.76 The second, Mawlānā Niẓām al-Dīn Kalāmī, was in the service of the ruler but finally entered the path of poverty. He lived as an ascetic inside Delhi’s citadel and never left for thirty years.77 Saints also intervened in the city soundscape: concerning the popular Quran reciter Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kermānī, one of his followers related that, one Friday night, he saw the deceased saint rising from his tomb and reciting Quran, accompanied by other dead people, until dawn.78 As for the dervish Khwāja Maḥmūd Mūydūz, he helped a bard to improve his artistic skills.79 Lahore was also a main reservoir for holy men, yet they seemed attracted to Delhi: Mawlānā Majd al-Dīn Ḥājī, for example, moved to the capital city and got closer to the court of Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish (d. 633/1236) in order to influence his religious policy;80 Mīr Buzurg and Mīr Khūrd al-Maʿrūf were both called by the Prophet to leave Lahore and to go to Delhi. Interestingly, the two men marked the topography in that, after the miraculous apparition of a moneybag in a mosque where they had prayed, they designated the place as benefic for devotions and the satisfaction of needs. Navāʾī adds that, today,

76  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 334‒35 (281‒82). 77  Ibid., 339 (286). 78  Ibid., 327‒28 (275‒76). 79  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 329 (276‒77). Other stories can be found in Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ, Morals of the Heart, trans. Bruce B. Lawrence (New York-Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992), 361‒62. 80  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 332 (279). Further information in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī, Akhbār al-akhyār fī asrār al-abrār, ed. ʿAlīm Ashraf Khān (Tehran: Anjuman-i Ā thār va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 1383/2005), 93‒94.

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the mosque still enjoys the influx (baraka) of both saints.81 Next to Lahore, in Sangūla, was buried the majdhūb Darvīsh Bashīr. He was famous for having appeared miraculously, glittering, to assist people who lost they way near Delhi during an eclipse.82 A last city briefly mentioned is Lucknow, with the saint Mawlānā Ḥusām al-Dīn Ghalbek, a religious combatant under Iltutmish’s reign, who “in ẓāhir jihād killed a hundred thousand infidels and sent them to hell, while in bāṭin jihād he put the infidels’ souls on the way to God.”83 Indian saints or saints living in India were not all ‘sedentary.’ Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Rūmī, buried in Delhi, was constantly traveling;84 a group of forty men called qīrq abdāl, led by Maḥmūd Maṭharadūz, continuously wandered until they settled at Hawḍ-i Shamsī in the south of Delhi;85 Shaykh Shādī left India and lived in several villages near Herat.86 Central Asia is naturally described in greater depth, including Mawarannahr and above all Khorasan. At the north, the important town of Turkistan is referred to by, among others, the well-known names of Aḥmad Yasavī—whose shrine was considered a qibla by local people87—, Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar,88 and Zangī Atā,89 who all came from Turkistan. At the center of Mawarannahr (other saints having already been mentioned in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt), the city of Samarkand is represented only by a few personalities, such as Burhān al-Dīn Sāgharchī (14th c.) whose tomb, we learn, is located in the Jākardīza cemetery at Samarkand.90 A native of Khwarezm like Ḥubbī Khwāja, who died 81  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 337 (284). Mīr Khūrd is not Sayyid Muḥammad b. Mubārak Kermānī (d. 759/1358), known also as Mīr Khūrd, author of the Siyar al-awliyāʾ. 82  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 335 (282). 83  Ibid., 337 (283‒84). 84  Ibid., 333‒34 (281). See also ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī, Akhbār al-akhyār, 139. 85  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 334 (281). For a description of the whole site, see Sadia Dehlvi, The Sufi Courtyard. Dargahs of Delhi (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012), 59‒63. 86  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 342 (289). 87  Ibid., 383 (326‒27). This is confirmed by a nearly contemporary source, see Michele Bernardini, “À propos de Fazlallah b. Ruzbehan Khonji Esfahani et du mausolée d’Ahmad Yasavi,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 3–4 (1997): 282. 88  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 383‒84 (327). For a discussion on this shaykh and his ṭarīqa, see Mihrān Afshārī, “Ḥaydariyya,” Dānishnāma-yi Jahān-i Islāmī, online 2014. 89  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 389 (332). 90  Ibid., 393 (335). The main source for this interesting shaykh, who settled in China but returned to Samarkand by the end of his life is Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Jalīl Samarqandī’s Qandiyya, see Īraj Afshār, ed., Dū risāla dar tārīkh-i mazārāt va jughrāfiyā-yi Samarqand (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī-yi Jahāngīrī, 1367/1388), 103‒28, and 32‒34 about the Jākardīza cemetery, where numerous religious dignitaries rest. It seems that nobody has made the connection with the Sāgharchī that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa met in Beijing (Khānbāliq), see Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Voyages et périples, trans. Paule Charles-Dominique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 990‒92.

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young and was popular among the Turkic and Uzbek teenagers, illustrates a social space of sanctity in the western edge of Mawarannahr.91 The cities of Khorasan welcomed numerous holy men. In the sacred Mashhad (mashhad-i muqaddasa-yi raḍaviyyat) lived, for instance, a static shaykh from Bahrabad named Mawlānā Saʿd al-Dīn (d. 900/1495), who would have spent about forty years there as an ascetic scholar.92 The Merv area is represented by the wellestablished Mawlānā Mīrzayn and his lodge93 as well as the marginal majdhūb Bābā Tīlānchī “the beggar.”94 Not surprisingly, Herat appears as a city of saints among whom many were familiar to Navāʾī. For example, he usually prayed behind the Zaynī Mawlānā Abū al-Khayr (d. 880/1476) in the assembly of Jāmī. Navāʾī adds that the saint is buried “at the east of Herat in the cemetery of Shāh Abū al-Ghayth,” along with his elder brother.95 This familiar and communal space was transmitted from generation to generation: Navāʾī’s father told him the story of Bābā Kūkī (d. 864/1459), a holy fool who is buried in Khiyābān neighborhood in Herat.96 Lastly, the city soundscape is described through the Khwarezm-born saint Muqrī Maḥmūd (d. 880/1476) who had chanted the call for prayer for seventy years (sic) at the Friday mosque of Herat.97 These espaces de l’entre-soi (spaces of among one’s own), to speak like the sociologists, were not limited to the Herat religious milieu. Our author mentions Iranian shaykhs he met several times in their hometown: the poet Khwāja Awḥad Mustawfī, who lived in Sabzavār;98 the chronicler Mawlānā Sharaf alDīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), presented as a Sufi master with a lodge in Taft (near Yazd);99 and Mawlānā Humām al-Dīn Kulbārī, in Shiraz, who offered a fabric to Navāʾī.100 In contrast, more “exotic” saints denote distant areas, such as

91  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 386 (329). 92  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 399‒400 (341). Not to be confused with the 13th-century Kubrāwī shaykh Saʿd al-Dīn from Bahradad, mentioned in the Nafaḥāt, 431‒33. Instead of giving a clear affiliation, Navāʾī merely says that Mawlānā Saʿd al-Dīn learned the Sufi litanies (awrād) of his 13th-century homonym. 93  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 406 (346). 94  Ibid., 412‒13 (352). 95  Ibid., 399 (340). On the topography of Herat, including a sketch, see Natalia N. Tumanovich, Gerat v XVI‒XVIII vekakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 45‒64. 96  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 410 (350). More on him in Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl, 93. 97  Ibid., 400 (342). 98  Ibid., 404 (345). 99  Ibid., 415 (355). Compare with the notice written by the Timurid historian Ghiyāth alDīn Khwāndamīr, Tārīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Khayyām, 1333/1954), 4:15‒16. 100  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 416 (355‒56). Wrongly transcribed as Kelebādī in Eraslan’s edition.

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Badakhshan with the famous Nāṣir Khusraw (d. 481/1088)101 or Iraq and Rum with the no less famous martyr Nesīmī (d. 820/1417).102 Similar to Indian shaykhs, many Central Asian holy men were great travelers—besides the intrepid hajjis—, even settlers, who linked together or extended the regions of Islamic sanctity. This was not always voluntary, as in the case of the Yasavī Khwāja Bahāʾ al-Dīn, who had been expelled from his homeland (probably the Turkistan area) by the ruler and went to Kashmir where he had disciples.103 More positively, Shaykh Adharī, from Isfara (in present-day Tajikistan), spent several years in India and was welcomed in the sultan’s court.104 Certain individuals also traveled from afar to Central Asia. An example is Zuhhād Khān, who would have come from China, went to Bukhara to study, then to Khwarezm where he was initiated by Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, who eventually sent him to Khorasan. His shrine was located in the “province of Chīchektū and Qayṣār” (between Balkh and Herat).105 Concerning China again, we find the intriguing story of the brothers Kīshlīk Atā and ʿUmar Atā. Originating from Kīsh (modern Shahrisabz) near Samarkand, they both settled in China and were buried there. A mausoleum was erected for Kīshlīk Atā and attendants appointed.106 In fact, shrines and other religious buildings attached to them were the most visible markers of territory. Navāʾī’s emphasis on the localization of these edifices does not mean that he composed a guide for pilgrimage, even though the kitāb al-ziyārat genre thrived in Central Asia as early as the twelfth century107 and increased in the fifteenth century with, at least, Aṣīl al-Dīn’s

101  Ibid., 435 (371). 102  Ibid., 437 (373). 103  Ibid., 385 (328). 104  Ibid., 435 (371‒72). 105  Ibid., 387 (329). 106  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 389 (331). This account reminds the founder myth of the Turkic Salar minority in Qinghai, which tells the odyssey of two brothers and their people from Samarkand to China during the fourteenth century. See my “So close to Samarkand, Lhasa: Sufi Hagiographies, Founder Myths and Sacred Space in Himalayan Islam,” in Islam and Tibet. Interactions along the Musk Routes, eds. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 261‒79. 107  With the intriguing Burhān al-Dīn Bukhārī’s Laṭāʾif al-adhkār. A unique copy (made in 834/1431) of the manuscript is preserved at the Center of Written Heritage of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan. Within four parts, the book describes the main shrines of Bukhara, Paykand, Merv, Sarakhs, Nishapur, Bastam, Rayy, Hamadan, Kermanshah, Baghdad, Kufa, and Mecca. Many thanks to Lola Dodkhudoeva for these details. Devin DeWeese seems to be the first to have noticed the manuscript.

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Maqṣad al-iqbāl and Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā’s Risāla-yi mazārāt.108 In accordance with the Nasāʾim’s introduction, the point is rather to show the posthumous presence109 of Sufi saints on earth through the sacred sites and the religious life around them. An initial example is the saint Jamāl Nūqānī who lived in the village of Nūqān, near Mashhad. Now, we learn, there are remains of his lodge in the village, whereas the shrine is located in a place called Dastjird-i Khūsh-angūr.110 Bābā Ḥasan Qandahārī is described in strictly geographical terms: he was a majdhūb with disciples coming from Ghazni to Kabul, and he was buried in Qandahar.111 Better known, Bābā Khākī was a Turkish soldier in Tamerlane’s army who became a dervish and settled at the north of the Kītū mountain, around Faryāb and Maymana. His hermitage (takya) was a sort of frontier (ḥadd) post, magically protecting Sultan Bāyqarā (d. 911/1506)’s apanage.112 Several mazārs of India—in the sense of Hind, including modern Afghanistan— present interesting cults. In thirteenth-century Delhi, Khwāja ʿImād Khalaj healed the sultan Iltutmish. This miracle made his shrine a popular place of pilgrimage for Turks who usually tied a thread to his grave, seeking cures.113 Elsewhere, the shrine of Rashn Awliyāʾ was mostly used for spiritual isolation,114 and in Ghazni, crowds visited the tomb of the tenth-century recluse Mawlānā Sarrāj Ḥāfiẓ each Monday.115 Somewhere in Hind, the very name of Ḥājī Karīm al-Dīn Nīmgūr alludes to a posthumous miracle regarding the grave itself. The gnostic stipulated that he wanted for himself a tomb at the same level as the soil, not higher. When he died, a tomb was built, but the next day people saw that the upper part had disappeared. They rebuilt it, and the miracle happened again. This is why the Sufi was called “half-tomb” (nīm-gūr).116 The meaning of the story lies not only in the saint’s humbleness, but also in the limiting of the ritual space at the same level as the common graves, as if the Islamization of the topography of death would, among the living, bring the saint and other men closer together. 108  ʿĀrif Nawshāhī, “Risāla-yi mazārāt-i Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā Bukhārī,” Dānish 105 (1390/1971): 19‒32. 109  Let us recall that Sufis invoke Quran 2:154 and 3:169 as scriptural basis of this belief. 110  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 393‒94 (335‒36). 111  Ibid., 410 (350). 112  Ibid., 409‒10 (349‒50). Sometimes erroneously identified as a Yasavī. Further details on him can be found in Khwāndamīr, Tārīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar, 4:149, 218, 243‒45. 113  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 328 (276). 114  Ibid., 338 (285). 115  Ibid., 335‒36 (282‒83). 116  Ibid., 336 (283).

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The narratives of saints’ miracles draw a space of proximity in which the reader finds his everyday environment inhabited by holy charisma and intervention from beyond. The value of these accounts resides not so much in the extraordinariness of events as in the triviality of the situations they recount. This is particularly clear in the comical stories, where Navāʾī used his sense of humour to win over his reader and cause him to feel at home in the Sufi hagiology. The famous thirteenth-century Indian saint Farīd Shakar Ganj met a yogi who wanted to show him the extraordinary things he could do.117 The yogi started to make genuflections and the like. The shaykh told him to raise his head and asked who he was and from where he came. The yogi was not able to answer. Then the shaykh asked him what the benefit of these ascetic practices was. The yogi answered: “to fly like birds,” and began to fly. At that moment, the shaykh took his sandal and threw it at the yogi who instantly fell down. They repeated the same “game” several times. The yogi eventually submitted to the shaykh and converted to Islam. We find the same evocative triptych of humour, conversion, and terrestriality in a second scene. In Ghazni, seemingly, Sayyid Jamāl Surkh met a Christian (tarsā) who declared that he preferred Jesus to Muḥammad.118 Jamāl asked why he had this preference. The Christian answered: “Because Jesus is in heaven, while Muḥammad is only on earth.” Saying that, the Christian suddenly ascended to heaven. Jamāl took from his pocket the Quran, looked at the sky and shouted: “God, by the truth of Quran, send the message of the Prophet Muḥammad and make this Christian stay up there!” The unfortunate Christian could not move from his high position and lamented. Having mercy on him, Jamāl made a prayer and the Christian came back down to earth and converted to Islam. A last comical example concerns the Samarkandi scholar Abū Manṣūr Māturīdī (d. 333/944).119 Once, Abū Manṣūr was sitting on a porch, reading a tafsīr. Two drunken wicked men came to his door—one entered while the other stayed outside. Disturbed by the noise and confused words, the scholar took a stick and hit the head of the lout who fell down, “his brain dripping out.” Abū Manṣūr buried the body in a pit and returned to his work. The second man came in and asked about his friend. The scholar answered: “Nobody came in, only a dog entered, I hit him and he died, he’s in this hole.” The ruffian saw the dog in the pit and repented.

117  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 326‒27 (274‒75). In other comparable tales, the Sufi usually flies too, see Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India (reprint New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997–2000), 1:111‒12, 233. 118  Navāʾī, Nasāʾim, 336 (283). 119  Ibid., 392‒93 (334‒35).

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Less parodic punishments arise in ordinary life to render justice and recall that social spaces are not devoid of the divine. An Indian scholar named Amīr ʿĀlim Dālvālichī was walking in the bazaar when he saw a suspended flayed sheep in the butcher shop.120 He asked the butcher to remove it and said: “Here someone dug a tomb and buried this.” The butcher, astonished, fell at the saint’s feet and made repentance, explaining that the sheep died yesterday and that he thought that nobody would notice that it was not fresh meat. In another story, the saint Qāḍī Ra‌ʾīs summoned a woman to court because she had two husbands and he demanded the sentence of lapidation.121 But the lawyer, having received a bribe from the woman, told her to argue that since it was legal for a man to have four wives, it was permitted for a woman to have four husbands. Qāḍī Ra‌ʾīs discovered the plot and invoked: “Break the neck of the one who told her to say so.” When the lawyer went out of the court, he fell down, broke his neck and died. A final example of this kind concerns the younger sister of Kök Shaykh.122 Married to an indecent man who led a loose life, she was continuously in conflict with him. She came to see the saint and told him everything. This upset the shaykh, who cursed the sinner in the name of sharīʿa, and the man immediately disappeared. In the bazaar, the court, or the household, saints discipline and punish people even to the point of making someone vanish from Islamic society. The ordinary environment in which the profane rubs shoulders with the sacred is not simply hierarchical, with holy men transcending the immanence of the common herd, but also a mutual space where saints assume men’s burdens and convey their fears and traumas. Besides the hagiographical topos of rainmaking incarnated by a saint like Mawlānā Fakhr al-Dīn Zāhid who saved Delhi’s population from starvation,123 one comes across the interesting case of an epidemic (vabā) in Khorasan during Bāyqarā’s youth. Here, instead of performing marvelous cures, Herati saints take upon themselves the sufferings of others. If Bābā Khūsh Kīldī defeated (bāstī) the plague and survived, Bābā ʿAlī Mast Nisāʾī, who struggled at his side against the “enemy” (yāghī), died, struck down by illness.124 The holy fool Bābā Bahlūl told Bāyqarā: “I have accepted your sorrow” (senīng balāngnī men qabūl qīldīm) and he perished immediately. Meanwhile, Sayyid Muḥammad Madanī, a mystic from Medina, declared: “We will take this pain on us” (bū balānī özūmīz bīle īltūrbīz). He died right after 120  Ibid., 329‒30 (277). 121  Ibid., 331 (278‒79). 122  Ibid., 386 (329). 123  Ibid., 327 (275). 124  Ibid., 410‒11 (350‒51).

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but the plague “calmed down.”125 If vabā does not correspond here to cholera, Navāʾī would refer to the infamous plague of 838/1435, despite the fact that Bāyqarā was born in 842/1438. Anyway, the point here is not historical accuracy, but the memorial construction of sanctity drawn from dramatic events. Although Lāmiʿī’s Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn cannot compete with Navāʾī’s Nasāʾim al-maḥabba in terms of prosopographical richness, its geographical range is very large, as has been shown by Barbara Flemming.126 It covers Khorasan, Caucasus, Syria, Anatolia, and Macedonia. Of western Anatolian cities, besides of course the Ottoman capital Istanbul “which had the strongest appeal to the Turkish saints,” the former capital Bursa emerged as an important site. Other towns such as Simav (in Germiyan beylīk), Balıkesri, Konya, and Aksaray had produced great numbers of ʿulamāʾ as well as mystics, while Sivas, Larende, Ankara, Kayseri, and Amasya had traditions of heterodoxy and popular revolt. Tokat, “the province of the Turkmens,” was the setting for a mysticism of the uneducated that could slip into heresy; Giannitsa in Greece was a flourishing center of Islam. Beyond this factual mapping, one may read Lāmiʿī’s biographical notices more elaborately. Here again, the territorial presence of saints is more dynamic than it seems. Many of them crossed continents either to reach Mecca, receive religious education, find a spiritual master, or spread Sufi teachings. A comprehensive illustration of this moving space is ʿAlī b. Maymūn al-Maghribī (d. 917/1511).127 Well-documented by Arabic sources, the life of this Shādhilī adept of the blame-worthy (malāmatī) is described here as a spiritual itinerance: originally a judge (qāḍī) in Fez, he renounced the world and visited most of the living masters in Maghreb, notably the illiterate (ümmī) Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Tibbāsī (d. 930/1523). Then he took a boat to cross the Mediterranean Sea and reached Syria. From there, he made the Hajj and met a shaykh in Mecca. He returned to Syria where he was initiated to the Qādiriyya order. He lived for a while in Bursa but finished his life in Damascus, and was buried near the village of Majd al-maʿūsh (in Lebanon). Lāmiʿī probably collected the testimony of al-Maghribī’s Turkish disciple Ṣūfīzāde ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 919/1513), about whom we read that he was buried in Bursa, at a place called Yūqārı Sekleme in the Emīr neighborhood. 125  Ibid., 411‒12 (351‒52). The plague of 838/1435 has decimated the ranks of the Sufi masters, as is shown in Aṣīl al-Dīn, Maqṣad al-iqbāl, 80‒84. 126  Barbara Flemming, “Glimpses of Turkish Saints: Another Look at Lamiʿi and Ottoman Biographers,” Journal of Turkish Studies 18 (1994): 64‒66. 127  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 696‒97 (831‒33). On this Moroccan shaykh, see Eric Geoffroy, “al-Ghumārī, ʿAlī b. Maymūn al-Fāsī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, online 2014.

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Such meticulousness in localization is frequent in the Ottoman hagiographical compendium, especially regarding the author’s hometown of Bursa. The Sufi topography of the city finds its best expression in the life of Tāc al-Dīn Ibrāhīm Qaramānī (d. 872/1467).128 When this disciple of the aforementioned ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Maqdisī succeeded his master, he settled in a new area surrounding ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s tomb acquired by Khwāja Bakhshāyish, an Iranian merchant who was an old sympathizer (qadım muḥibb) of the shaykh. The merchant had a lodge, a mosque, and a water tank built. Tāc al-Dīn made his mark also in the outskirts of Bursa: an anecdote relates that, one day, the saint disappeared. After a long search, his followers found him on the mountain, practicing spiritual isolation in the woods. After that, a disciple had cells built for dervishes at this place. Tāc al-Dīn was buried next to his master ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Maqdisī in Bursa, and a cupola was erected. This example shows how saints created a Sufi urbanity in late medieval Ottoman cities, contributing greatly to the Islamization of urban societies.129 More specifically, it suggests an interesting paradox: while shaping the public space of city dwellers, saints also hid themselves from public view in the wilderness, caught in a dialectic of presence and absence that complicates the apology of saintly reality. As enigmatic as it can be, the existence of the saints is not that different from that of other men. Their miracles do not always protect people from the upheavals of history. In Bursa again, Lāmiʿī conversed with the Zeynī shaykh Rüstem Khalīfe Bursevī (d. 917/1511), who was still alive when, in 1511, Qizilbash rebels threatened to attack the city after the capture of Teke.130 Before the panicked crowd, instead of a protective miracle, the saint “simply” urged them to stay calm and predicted that the insurgents would not enter Bursa. This is, of course, what happened—but whatever the turn of events, what matters here is the unpretentious nature of the prodigy. This “human, all too human” sainthood characterizes three Central Asian saints facing attacks and invasions. When the army of the “Tatar tyrant Şeybek Khān” (i.e. Muḥammad Shaybānī, d. 916/1510) marched on Samarkand, Khwājagā (the eldest son of Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār) invoked a teaching of the Prophet on the right to escape in desperate situations, and he advised people to flee to Andijan. The saint survived and was buried there.131 As for Khwāja Yaḥyā, the youngest son of Aḥrār who was confronted with the same dramatic event, he “submitted to his fate 128  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 575‒76 (679‒80). For a detailed biography, see Öngören, Tarihte bir Aydın Tarikatı, 95‒101. 129  For a discussion on this historical impact of Sufism, see my review article “Toward a New History of Sufism: the Turkish Case,” History of Religions 46/1 (2006): 81‒90. 130  Lāmiʿī, Fütūḥ, 581‒82 (687‒88). 131  Ibid., 481 (571).

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and remained at his place” (qaḍāya rıḍā verūp yerlerinde ber-qarār otūrdīler). He was eventually killed along with two of his sons.132 The hagiography presents a tragic alternative between two radically different issues, that is to say, between survival and martyrdom, a choice which was hardly an abstraction for late medieval societies, whether Eastern or Western Turkish. The third Central Asian saint is none other than ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī. The first story we find in the long notice devoted to the polymath regards his shrine in Herat. As the Qizilbash were about to invade the Timurid capital (in 1510), Jāmī’s son took the body of his father and hid it somewhere else, outside the city. When “the scoundrels” (bad-maʿāsh khādhelesī) seized Herat, they opened the grave but found nothing inside, so they set fire to the tomb.133 Rather than a posthumous miracle, which would have protected the shrine, the Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn tells of a family affair involving, once more, a father and a son, whose purpose was certainly to preserve a holy body but also to defend, at least symbolically, the soil of Sunni Islam from any violation. Reaching the end of this long exploration of both ṭabaqāt books, we understand that the individual sanctity and the Islamization of space converge toward a vision of the saints as friends of men as much as friends of God. In less lyrical terms, the hagiographical narratives uncover the concrete and practical face of the hagiological theory as Jāmī had exposed it in his Nafaḥāt al-uns. A foundational text, the Persian compendium set the tone of the Turkish ṭabaqāt tradition. Yet, intellectual heirs like Navāʾī and Lāmiʿī went a step further, in that they produced translations or renditions as well as addenda, which became dictionaries of holy quotations and narratives in their own language, making all Muslim saints speak the same tongue as that which was heard in Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Balkans. 4

Epilogue: Late Nafaḥāt Production in the Turkish-Speaking World

The second translation of The breaths of familiarity from the lords of sanctity into Chaghatay seems to have been delayed until the second half of the eighteenth century. Erroneously dated to the early sixteenth century during the Soviet period, a close reading of the incipit of the manuscript reveals a different scenario.134 The translator gives his name straightaway—ʿAbd 132  Ibid., 481‒82 (572). 133  Ibid., 479‒81 (568‒71). On this event, see also Paul Losensky’s contribution in this volume. 134  ʿAbd al-Rasūl, Nafaḥāt al-uns [translation] (MS Oriental Institute, Tashkent, IVAN Uz 11466, non-foliated), 2‒4. The manuscript has been copied in 1231/1815 by a certain Mullā ʿUmar ibn Mullā Ḥājjī Ibrāhīm.

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al-Rasūl—and presents a quatrain in mixed Turkish and Persian referring to Jāmī’s title: “These forbidden secrets are the alcove of the invisible world/And the intimate Friend is at the door of the celestial world/The light of men, it is the intimates (ahl-i uns) and the lovers/It is the nightingales in the garden of sainthood (gulistān-i quds) and veneration.” Then the translator spins out the metaphor, explaining in poetical terms that the Nafaḥāt is the book that leads to its readers the understanding of sanctity, if not sanctity itself, defined as Unity with God. However, the translator notes that this understanding and the profit of this book is tempered by the use of Persian, which has been easy for some people, possible for others despite the difficulties, but completely impossible for most (ʿumūm-i khalāʾīq). “This is the reason why the knowledgeable and powerful Khwāja Kifek Bīk … asked me, the miserable, to translate the work into Turkī and to continuously simplify (āsān) its meaning for the general readership (khāṣṣ u ʿām).” Khwāja Kifek Bīk (d. 1196/1781), or Khūsh Kipek Bīk, was a high official in Kashgar, then in Yarkand, who commissioned at least another translation of a Persian hagiography into Eastern Chaghatay, namely ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ,135 in addition to, perhaps, the Manṭiq al-ṭayr.136 The third known translation of the Nafaḥāt into Chaghatay was undertaken in 1304/1886 by Raḥmān Qulī al-Qārī, at the instance of the khan of Khiva himself, Muḥammad Raḥīm Khān II (d. 1328/1910).137 The excipit adds laconically that the translation was necessary because former (unspecified) Turkish versions were defective and incomplete. We know that Raḥman Qulī was one of the dozens of official translators in Khiva and that he translated other books, such as Masʿūd Samarqandī (9th/14th c.)’s Ṣalāt-i masʿūdī (on fiqh) and the anonymous Tuḥfat al-ʿāshiqīn (on Sufism). This was a part of the global translation project from Arabic and Persian into Chaghatay launched by the ruler 135  A description of the manuscript (MS Oriental Institute, Tashkent, IVAN Uz 12128) can be found in Katalog Sufiiskikh Proizvedenii XVIII‒XX vv. iz Sobranii Instituta Vostokovedeniia im. Abu Raikhana al-Biruni Akademii Nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002), 124‒26. For a short biography of Kifek Bīk, see Joseph F. Fletcher, “The biography of Khwush Kipäk Beg (d. 1781) in the Wai-fan Meng-ki Hui-pu wang piao chuan,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 36 (1983): 167‒72. To be completed with Muḥammad Ṣādiq Kāshgharī, Tadhkira-yi ʿazīzān (MS Oriental Institute, St-Petersburg, D 191), fols. 75a‒87a, 96b, 126a‒128b. On the Islamic culture of the high officials (bīk/beg) in Xinjiang, see my “Fonctionnaires des frontières dans l’empire mandchou: les beg musulmans du Turkestan oriental (1759–1864),” Journal Asiatique 296/1 (2008): 23‒57. 136  Translated in 1188/1774 by Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf Khotanī, see Necdet Tosun, Türkistan dervişlerinden yâdigâr (Istanbul: İnsan, 2011), 73‒74. 137  Raḥman Qulī al-Qārī, Nafaḥāt al-uns [translation] (MS Oriental Institute, Tashkent, IVAN Uz 7286), fol. 565a. For a (very) short description of the manuscript, see Kratkii Katalog Sufiiskikh Proizvedenii XVIII‒XX vv. iz Sobraniia Instituta Vostokovedeniia Akademii Nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan im. al-Biruni (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000), 62‒63.

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and poet Muḥammad Raḥīm Khān II.138 This plan was not without precedent of course—from the late eighteenth century onward, the rulers of Khwarezm commissioned such projects—and Jāmī’s works were well represented among the numerous books selected for translation. We understand from the prefaces of Turkic versions that the “patron’s motivation for commissioning these works was a concern for ensuring that the nobility and Turkic populace alike should commonly be able to take pleasure from reading these works,” and that, according to one translator, “since most books were written in Persian, only the select few (khāṣṣ) who were proficient in Persian were able to take delight in reading these works: the Turkic community (atrāk jamāʿasī) and the Turkic-speaking population of Khwarezm had no opportunity to enjoy true literature.”139 The Xinjiang translation is faithful and simplified but contains only eightyfour biographies. The Khwarezm translation is faithful and simplified too, but complete. None of these Chaghatay versions mention the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, probably because Navāʾī’s work was not considered a translation but a nearoriginal writing. Both translations were patronized by the political establishment in order to educate the population, within the frame of a literary and religious adab. This confirms the role of the Nafaḥāt as an encyclopaedia of individual sanctity and as an intellectual tool of Islamization. The next step of the Ottoman reception of Jāmī’s ṭabaqāt book took place further west, in the Balkans, but in continuity with Lāmiʿī’s translation. The first reference is Hācī ʿAlī Efendī’s Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn ve behcetüʾl-dhākirīn (The present of combatants and the joy of Sufi chanters), completed in Temeşvar/ Timişoara in 1074/1663. We know that the author was born in Amasya. He studied there, then went to Istanbul and undertook various functions. He eventually entered the Divān-ı hümāyūn (the Imperial chancery) and became an official secretary. After having completed the Hajj in 1647, he settled in Egypt in 1650 as secretary of the Ottoman high administration and stayed there for two years. Interestingly, during this time he traveled to India and Yemen, and even translated a book from Arabic to Turkish dealing with the conquest of 138  Aftandil, Erkinov and Shadman Vahidov, “Une source méconnue pour l’étude de la production de livres à la cour de Muḥammad Raḥîm Khân II (Khiva, fin XIXe s.),” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 7 (1999): 175‒93. For a philological analysis of the translation methods, in addition to the names of translators and titles of translated works, see Najmiddin Komilov, “Khorezmiiskaia shkola perevoda (problem tipologii i sopostavitel’noe issledovanie istorii perevoda XIX v.)” (PhD diss., Tashkent, Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, 1987). I am grateful to my colleagues Maria Szuppe and Aftandil Erkinov for sending me a copy of this dissertation. 139  Muḥammad Riḍā Mīrāb Āgahī, Jāmiʿ al-vāqiʿāt-i sulṭānī, ed. with an introduction and notes by Nouryaghdi Tashev (Samarkand-Tashkent: International Institute for Central Asian Studies, 2012), v, xv‒xvi.

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Yemen, the Telkhīṣ-i berqüʾl-Yemānī. In 1660, Hācī ʿAlī traveled to Transylvania and stayed several years in Timişoara, where he wrote the Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn. In 1671, he joined the governor Mustafa Paşa and his army during their campaign in Kamaniçe (Kamyanets-Podilskii, Ukraine) and participated in the negotiations of the treaty of Bucaş (Buchach) in 1672. On this occasion, he wrote a history of Kamyanets. After that, he returned to his homeland and finished his life in Edirne, probably in the 1680s.140 Like Lāmiʿī, Hācī ʿAlī entitled his translation with reference to the holy war and the Ottoman domination. The foreword recalls that his book was written after the seizure of Varad in Transylvania and when the Ottoman troops were stationed in Timişoara to protect the frontier territory (serḥad). Concerning the preparation of his translation, Hācī ʿAlī explains that he started to copy the Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn but in the mid-course of this work he noticed that there were many flaws and important things missing, such as names of ṭarīqats, names of saints, especially Ottoman shaykhs, and their spiritual states and miracles, not counting their successors.141 Hācī ʿAlī used a large number of additional sources and completely reorganized the compendium. Among these sources, we find well-known hagiographical collections such as ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. ca. 939/1532)’s Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt, al-Shaʿrānī (d. 973/1565)’s Ṭabaqāt al-ṣughrā, Taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561)’s Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, Ḥulvī (d. 1064/1654)’s Lemezāt, and Münīrī Belghrādī (d. 1026/1617)’s Menāqib. We also find less-known sources, such as ʿAlī Efendī’s Faḍl-ı Rūm or the anonymous Silsilat al-meşāyikh. At 624 folios long, the Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn includes about seven hundred biographical notices, featured in four sections, which correspond to different Sufi ṭarīqats or lineages (silsila).142 For data on the Naqshbandiyya and the Qādiriyya, the most detailed sections are those devoted to the Khalvetiye and its sub-branches throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. This complete reorganization of the Nafaḥāt according to Sufi pedigrees is unique in the Turkish tradition of the Nafaḥāt, as well as unusual in the hagiographical ṭabaqāt genre in general. This structure conveys not only the rise of Sufi orders within the Ottoman Empire, especially the Khalvetiye, but also the identification between saints and leaders of Sufi orders, that is, between walāya and mashyakha.

140  Hācī ʿAlī Efendī, Tārīkh-i Kamanīçe, ed. by Ayşe Hande Can as Târih-i Kamaniçe (Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 2007), v‒vi. 141  Hācī ʿAlī Efendī, Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn ve behcetüʾl-dhākirīn (MS Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, Nuruosmaniye 2293), fol. 2a. 142  Hācī ʿAlī Efendī, Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn, fols. 2b‒3a.

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The last translation of Jāmī’s work into Western Turkish was made by Köstendillī Süleymān Şeykhī (d. 1235/1820) under the title Baḥrüʾl-velāye ve şemsüʾl-ḥidāye (The ocean of sanctity and the sun of spiritual guidance). The author was well-studied:143 to sum up his biography, he was born in 1163/1750 in Köstendil/Kyustendil (in present-day Bulgaria), and always lived there, except during his years of study at the madrasa in Istanbul. He married the daughter of Sofia’s mufti and became a tax collector, like his father Mollāzāde Ḥasan. Apparently unsatisfied by his job, he got closer to the Sufi milieu and joined the Naqshbandiyya. In 1193/1779, at a young age, he succeeded the Naqshbandī Aḥrārī shaykh Şāmīzāde Musṭafā at the head of the lodge (tekke). He also taught at the Mollāzāde madrasa in Kyustendil. To meet his numerous disciples and khalīfas, Süleymān Şeykhī traveled frequently in Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Serbia and Northern Greece. Among the thirty works he wrote, a collection of letters (Mektūbāt, addressed to disciples and other Sufi masters) and the Zübde-i nefaḥāt (a selective summary of the Nafaḥāt) and the Baḥrüʾlvelāye deserve mention. With regard to the composition of this last work, Köstendillī gives some explanation at the end of the book, in a biographical chapter devoted to himself.144 In short, the translator felt the need to summarize the biographies, to explain the difficult concepts of Sufism, and to make additions taken from different sources (Rashaḥāt, Shaqāʾiq, etc.). His quest for both simplicity and exhaustiveness aims to recall that sanctity (compared to the ocean), through an infinity of individuals and biographies, is everywhere and at every time. However, explains our author, we hear but a small part of what saints say and understand but a tiny fraction of their secrets. Köstendillī adds that when he was composing his translation he had dreams, which confirmed that he had entered the mystical path and himself reached the step of sainthood. In other words, the book itself appears as a mystical itinerary. Interestingly, he announced that, life allowing, he would write a second volume. Completed in 1231/1816, the Baḥrüʾl-velāye was actually the last writing of Köstendillī, who died four years 143  On his life and works, see Ali Yılmaz, Köstendilli Süleymân Şeyhî (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1989), 25‒76; Gönül Doğan, Köstendilli Süleyman Şeyhî’nin Nikâtü’l-Hikem İsimli Eseri (inceleme ve metin) (Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Istanbul, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2008), 1‒13; Hadicet ül-Kübra Öksüz, Köstendilli Süleyman Şeyhî’nin Mektubât-ı Erbaîn, Terkîbât-ı Erbaîn ve Tevîlât-ı Erbaîn İsimli Eserleri (inceleme ve metin) (Yüksek Lisans Tezi Istanbul, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2010), 15‒33. 144  Köstendillī Süleymān Şeykhī, Baḥrüʾl-velāye ve şemsüʾl-hidāye (MS Süleymaniye Library, Hasan Hüsnü Paşa 579/I, non-foliated), 395‒98. Edited by Sezai Küçük and Semih Ceyhan as 1001 Sûfî (Istanbul: Mavi, 2007), 728‒30. The Süleymaniye manuscript features the Zübde-i nefaḥāt after the Baḥrüʾl-velāye.

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later. The hagiography brings together no less that 1015 biographies. As a result, they are relatively short and written in a simple and vivid style. Although not presented as such by the author, this huge volume can be divided into three parts: a summarized version of Lāmiʿī’s Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn; a section devoted to women (thirty in total, the most substantial in the whole Nafaḥāt Turkish tradition); and finally a series of two hundred notices based on additional sources as well as field data collected by the author. This addendum contains only Ottoman saints, mostly from the Balkan provinces. They are all Sufis coming either from various ṭarīqats (Naqshbandī, Khalvetī, Qādirī, Bayrāmī, etc.) or from non-affiliated milieus. These latter ones are more local and popular (ümmī), often marginal, figures. Compared with the late Chaghatay translations, the Ottoman versions, written by polymaths, offer content richer in detail and creativity. They are not translations stricto sensu but rewritings of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns through Lāmiʿī’s Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn. The two late Ottoman ṭabaqāt ended the intellectual cycle opened by Jāmī in two senses. First, the individuality of sanctity culminates in the very person of Köstendillī, who completes his listing of saints with himself. Second, the Islamized space, perceived as conquered and mastered but oceanic and overflowing, is now identified with the imperial territory and its fate in its frontiers and provinces. Bibliography ʿAbd al-Rasūl. Nafaḥāt al-uns [translation]. MS Oriental Institute, Tashkent, IVAN Uz 11466. Afshār, Īraj, ed. Dū risāla dar tārīkh-i mazārāt va jughrāfiyā-yi Samarqand. Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī-yi Jahāngīrī, 1367/1388. Afshārī, Mihrān. “Ḥaydariyya.” Dānishnāma-yi Jahān-i Islāmī, online 2014. Āgahī, Muḥammad Riḍā Mīrāb. Jāmiʿ al-vāqi‘āt-i sulṭānī. Edited in the original Central Asian Turki with an introduction and notes by Nouryaghdi Tashev. SamarkandTashkent: International Institute for Central Asian Studies, 2012. Aigle, Denise. “ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns: Two Views of Holiness.” In Holy Men in Medieval Persia (10th–14th c.). Anthropological approaches. Boston: Ilex Foundation, forthcoming. Algar, Hamid. Nakşibendilik. Istanbul: İnsan, 2007. Ayan, Gönül. “Lâmi‘î Çelebi’nin hayatı, edebî kişiliği ve eserleri.” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 1 (1994): 43‒65.

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Hācī ʿAlī Efendī. Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn ve behcetüʾl-dhākirīn. MS Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, Nuruosmaniye 2293. Hācī ʿAlī Efendī. Tārikh-i Kamanīçe. Edited by Ayşe Hande Can as Târih-i Kamaniçe. Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Balanlığı, 2007. Hafsi, Ibrahim. “Recherches sur le genre ‘Ṭabaqāt’, dans la littérature arabe 1.” Arabica 23/3 (September 1976): 227‒65. Hafsi, Ibrahim. “Recherches sur le genre ‘Ṭabaqāt’, dans la littérature arabe 2.” Arabica 24/1 (February 1977): 1‒41. Hammer-Purgtsall, Joseph von. Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtkunst. Vol. 2. Pesth: C.A. Hartleben, 1837. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Voyages et périples. Translated by Paule Charles-Dominique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Ivanow, Wladimir. “The Sources of Jami’s’ Nafahat.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 18 (1922): 385‒402. Ivanow, Wladimir. Tabaqat of Ansari in the Old Language Herat. Excerpt from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January and July 1923. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds. Edited by Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī. Tehran: Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1370/1994. Kara, Mustafa. “Molla İlâhî : un précurseur de la Nakşibendiye en Anatolie.” In Naqshbandis. Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, edited by Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone, 295‒320. Istanbul-Paris: Isis, 1990. Kāshgharī, Muḥammad Ṣādiq. Tadhkira-yi ʿazīzān. MS Oriental Institute, St-Petersburg, D 191. Published in fac-simile by A. Sh. Nurmanova as Qazaqstan tarikhi turaly turki derektemeleri. IV tom. Mukhammed-Sadyq Qashghari. Tazkira-ii ‘azizan. Almaty: Daik Press, 2006. Katalog Sufiiskikh Proizvedenii XVIII–XX vv. iz Sobranii Instituta Vostokovedeniia im. Abu Raikhana al-Biruni Akademii Nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002. Khwāndamīr, Ghiyāth al-Dīn. Tārīkh-i ḥabīb al-siyar. 4 vols. Edited by Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī. Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Khayyām, 1333/1954. Komilov, Najmiddin. “Khorezmiiskaia shkola perevoda (problem tipologii i sopostavitel’noe issledovanie istorii perevoda XIX v.” PhD diss., Tashkent, Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, 1987. Köstendillī Süleymān Şeykhī. Baḥrüʾl-velāye ve şemsüʾl-hidāye. MS Süleymaniye Library, Hasan Hüsnü Paşa 579. Edited by Sezai Küçük and Semih Ceyhan as 1001 Sûfî. Istanbul: Mavi, 2007. Kratkii Katalog Sufiiskikh Proizvedenii XVIII–XX vv. iz Sobraniia Instituta Vostokovedeniia Akademii Nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan im. al-Biruni. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000.

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Kurnaz, Cemâl, and Mustafa Tatcı. İstanbul’da Buharalı bir Mutasavvıf Emir Buharî. Ankara: Akçağ, 1999. Lāmiʿī Çelebī. Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn li tervīḥ qulūbiʾl-müșāhidīn. MS Michigan Library, Isl. Ms. 388. Edited by Süleyman Uludağ and Mustafa Kara as Nefaḥāt ül-üns. Evliyā Menḳibelerī. Istanbul: Marifet, 2005. Le Goff, Jacques. A la recherche du temps sacré. Jacques de Voragine et la Légende dorée. Paris: Perrin, 2011. Mojaddedi, Jawid A. The Biographical Tradition in Sufism. The ṭabaqāt genre from alSulamī to Jāmī. Richmond: Curzon, 2001. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Nasāʾim al-maḥabba min shamāʾim al-futuwwa. Edited by Kemal Eraslan as Nesāyimü’l-mahabbe min şemāyimi’l-fütüvve. Ankara: Türk Dili Kurumu, 1996; edited by Hamidxon Islomii as Nasoiimul muhabbat min shamoiimil futuvvat. Tashkent: Movarounnahr, 2011. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn. In Alisher Navoi, Mukammal Asarlar To’plami: 20 tomlik. Vol. 15. Edited by Izzat Sulton and others. Tashkent: Fan, 1990. Nawshāhī, ʿĀrif. “Risāla-yi mazārāt-i Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā Bukhārī.” Dānish 105 (1390/1971): 19‒32. Nawshāhī, ʿĀrif. “Nuskha-yi Nafaḥāt al-uns az rūzgār-i Jāmī.” Āyande 8–9 (1363/1984): 587‒88. Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ. Morals of the Heart. Translated by Bruce B. Lawrence. New YorkMahwah: Paulist Press, 1992. Öksüz, Hadicet ül-Kübra. Köstendilli Süleyman Şeyhî’nin Mektubât-ı Erbaîn, Terkîbât-ı Erbaîn ve Tevîlât-ı Erbaîn İsimli Eserleri (inceleme ve metin). Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Istanbul, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2010. Öngören, Reşat. Tarihte bir Aydın Tarikatı: Zeynîler. Istanbul: Insan, 2003. Öngören, Reşat. Osmanlılar’da Tasavvuf. Anadolu’da Sûfîler, Devlet ve Ulemâ (XVI. Yüzyıl). Istanbul: İz, 2012. Papas, Alexandre. “Toward a New History of Sufism: the Turkish Case.” History of Religions 46/1 (2006): 81‒90. Papas, Alexandre. “Fonctionnaires des frontières dans l’empire mandchou: les beg musulmans du Turkestan oriental (1759–1864).” Journal Asiatique 296/1 (2008): 23‒57. Papas, Alexandre. “So close to Samarkand, Lhasa:
 Sufi Hagiographies, Founder Myths and Sacred Space in Himalayan Islam.” In Islam and Tibet. Interactions along the Musk Routes, edited by Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, 261‒79. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Raḥman Qulī al-Qārī. Nafaḥāt al-uns [translation]. MS Oriental Institute, Tashkent, IVAN Uz 7286. Rizvi, Saiyid Athar Abbas. A History of Sufism in India. 2 vols. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997–2000.

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Sayyid Aṣīl al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh Vāʿiẓ. Maqṣad al-iqbāl-i sulṭāniyya va marṣad al-āmāl-i khāqāniyya. Edited by Māyil Hiravī. Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ʿulūm-i insānī va muṭāliʿāt-i farhangī, 1386/2007. Szuppe, Maria. “The Female Intellectual Milieu in Timurid and Post-Timurid Herāt: Faxri Heravi’s Biography of Poetesses, ‘Javāher al-‘Atāyeb’.” Oriente Moderno 15/2 (1996): 119‒37. Thibon, Jean-Jacques. “Hiérarchie spirituelle, fonctions du saint et hagiographie dans l’oeuvre de Sulami.” In Le saint et son milieu ou comment lire les sources hagiographiques, edited by Rachida Chih and Denis Gril, 13‒31. Cairo: Ifao, 2000. Tosun, Necdet. Bahâeddîn Nakşbend. Hayatı, Görüşleri, Tarîkatı. Istanbul: İnsan, 2002. Tosun, Necdet. Türkistan dervişlerinden yâdigâr. Istanbul: İnsan, 2011. Tumanovich, Natalia N. Gerat v XVI–XVIII vekakh. Moscow: Nauka, 1989. Tunç, Semra. “Dede Ömer Rûşenî.” Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 4 (1997): 237–49. Urunbaev, Asam U. Pis’ma-avtografy Abdarrakhmana Dzhami iz “Al’boma Navoi”. Tashkent: Fan, 1982. Uzun, Mustafa. “Îbrâhim Tennûrî.” Diyanet Islâm Ansiklopedisi, 21:356. Walmsley, Nicholas. “The Yasaviyya in the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba of ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī: A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography.” Journal of Sufi Studies 3 (2014): 38–66. Yılmaz, Ali. Köstendilli Süleymân Şeyhî. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, 1989.

chapter 14

Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper Yiming Shen From the fifteenth century, during which Jāmī gradually grew into a prolific Sufi writer, to the late seventeenth century, when his works were translated into Chinese by Chinese Muslims, the three-hundred-year time gap and the distance of thousands of miles concealed a progress of dissemination and acceptance of Jāmī’s works eastwards toward China. Considering the abundance of literary and religious works produced before the seventeenth century in and beyond Central Asia, there must be particular reasons why two of Jāmī’s works survived in this competitive environment of cultural transformation. How and when Jāmī’s works were brought to and disseminated within China proper1 is not precisely known. To account for the identity of those book carriers—academically known as cultural agents—two strands of explanation come readily to mind: a) the eastwards expansion of the Naqshbandiyya order from northwest China and b) individual Muslim travellers coming by land and sea. As Charles L. Ogilvie (1881–1919)2 reported in 1918, Chinese Muslims had “no distributing centre in China or book-shops, where it is possible to secure their books.”3 According to the genealogy of Chinese Muslim scholars, they in fact travelled around China seeking original manuscripts and meeting up with foreign Muslim masters. As a result, we notice that Liu Zhi’s 劉智 (about 1655–1745) two well-known Caiji jingshumu 採輯經書目 (Catalogue of collected and compiled scriptures)4 made at the beginning of the eighteenth century indicate a variety of original Islamic scriptures disseminated in China proper and possessed by Chinese Muslims. A total of about sixty-six titles listed in these Chinese bibliographies are identified. These original scriptures were written in different languages (Persian and Arabic) and can be categorised according to a wide range of 1  China proper in this article refers to the territory of China, especially central and east China where Han nationality live as a majority and Chinese is the common language. 2  Charles L. Ogilvie was an American missionary who came to China in 1911. 3  Charles. L. Ogilvie, “A Classified Bibliography of Books on Islam in Chinese and ChineseArabic,” The Moslem World 8 (1918): 74. 4  The two catalogues are presented in Liu Zhi’s Tianfang xingli and Tianfang dianli respectively. Each has about forty Persian and Arabic texts under their transcription titles and translation titles.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_016

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subjects (grammar, theology, Sufism or even science) and literary forms (poetry and prose).5 Moreover, the Sufi texts in these two catalogues consist of different Sufi teachings such as Naqshbandiyya, Kubrawiyya and so on. Coincidently, based on the catalogue provided by an ahong (Chinese Muslim “cleric,” from the Persian ākhund) in the Sanlihe mosque in Beijing in 1908, René Ristelhueber (1881–1960), a French diplomat and writer, reported that the collection of this ahong had approximately one hundred and fifty Arabic and Persian books on various subjects such as grammar, lexicography, theology, jurisprudence and Sufism.6 At least five Sufi texts, including Jāmī’s Ashiʿat alLamaʿāt, have been identified and as far as we can tell Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt is the only text which was translated into Chinese.7 Such complexity of manuscripts disseminated among Chinese Muslims indicates the opportunities for book transport from Central Asia to China proper. Although the number of foreign Muslim travellers in China proper could not compare with the expansive population of the Naqshbandiyya order in northwest China, it seems that those individual visitors, namely merchants and Muslim missionaries, overshadowed the influence of Naqshbandiyya in China proper and functioned as “cultural agents” by continually bringing Islamic scriptures to the hands of Chinese Muslims. In other words, despite the important influence of Jāmī’s works in the development of Naqshbandiyya order, the transport of Jāmī’s texts from Central Asia to China proper from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries seems to have been likely affected by his reader’s individual preferences rather than empowered by any Islamic religious organization. This article is divided into two parts. First, I will introduce the intellectual biographies of our two Chinese translators of Jāmī’s treatises, namely She Qiling and Liu Zhi. Then I will discuss the terminology and language of these two Chinese translations based on textual comparison.

5  See Donald D. Leslie, “Arabic and Persian Sources Used by Liu Chih,” Central Asiatic Journal 26 (1982): 78–104. 6  Lucien Bouvat, “Une bibliothèque de mosquée chinoise,” Revue du monde musulman 4 (1908): 516. 7  Martin Hartmann, “Littérature des musulmans chinois,” Revue du monde musulman 5 (1908): 278.

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Jāmī and the School of Jingxue

In the school of Jingxue 經學,8 Muslim intellectuals respected Jāmī as “Zhami zunzhe 咋密尊者” (venerable Jāmī)9 and “Tianfang daxian Zhami shi 天方 大賢查密氏” (the Great Islamic virtuous Person Jāmī).10 Among the scriptures available in both the original language and the literary Chinese (shuzi 書字),11 two scriptures have been identified as being written by Jāmī: the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt (Chinese title given as Zhaoyuan mijue 昭元秘訣 [Secret Key of Exposing the Origin] by She Qiling 舍起靈 [1638–1703]) and Lavāʾiḥ (Chinese title given as Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微 (Enlightening the Profound Meaning in the Real Realm) by Liu Zhi 劉智 [about 1655–1745]). The two translators She Qiling and Liu Zhi could be recognized as key figures in the genealogy of Jingxue, who together carved out a place in the intellectual history of the Islamic world. These Muslim intellectuals were able to read both Arabic and Persian scriptures and interpret the Islamic doctrines in the learned Chinese diction. She Qiling devoted his life to teaching Islamic scriptures and translating them into Chinese. Under his encouragement and direction, Zhao Can’s 趙燦 ( fl. 1715) Jingxue xichuanpu 經學系傳譜 (Genealogy of Chinese Islamic Teaching)12 set up the criteria of orthodoxy scriptures and teaching methodology and promoted the development of the school of Jingxue. Belonging to a later generation than She Qiling, Liu Zhi did not get 8    Jingxue in the Chinese context specifically refers to the exegetical traditions of Confucian classics, which dated to the period of Western Han (206 BC–9 AD). The Islamic Jingxue is a school of Chinese Islamic teaching focusing on the study of Islamic scriptures by collecting the manuscripts and interpreting them in both original languages and Chinese. According to Zhao Can’s genealogy of Jingxue, this school of Islamic teaching in China proper can be traced back to Hu Dengzhou in the sixteenth century, and almost all of the well-known Chinese Muslim scholars like Wang Daiyu, Chang Zhimei, She Qiling and Liu Zhi belong to this school. See the appendix for the genealogy of Islamic Jingxue. 9   She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching library, 1890), 1:4a. 10  Liu Zhi, Zhenjing zhaowei (Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe), “Preface,” 1. 11   Shuzi (literal meaning: the word of book) is mostly used to describe the literary Chinese language in the context of translating practice in the Jingxue xichuanpu. In the Chinese translations of Islamic scriptures, shuzi can be considered as a language derived from Confucian writings, which is different from the colloquial Chinese used in mosque school. Studies on the writers of the translations in shuzi illustrate how these Muslim intellectuals possessed abilities of reading and writing both original and vernacular languages and had solid knowledge of both Islamic and traditional Chinese learning. 12  Zhao Can lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He was the student of She Qiling and was well-known for his Jingxue xichuanpu, a collection of biographies of the Chinese Muslim intellectuals in the school of Jingxue.

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involved in teaching activities, but the influence of his Chinese translations and his original works went beyond the school of Jingxue and reached into the wider Confucian society. Chosen and interpreted by two such significant Chinese Muslim intellectuals of the school of Jingxue, Jāmī’s treatises were not only studied in their original language but were also deemed suitable for expression and interpretation in literary Chinese, thus establishing a relationship between Jāmī and the school of Jingxue. A biographical sketch of these two Chinese translators below sheds light on this process of selecting and studying Jāmī’s texts and interpreting them in China proper. 1.1 She Qiling She Qiling was born in 1638, the eleventh year of the Chongzhen 崇禎 (r. 1628–1644) reign in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and died in 1703, the forty-second year of the Kangxi 康熙 (r. 1661–1722) in the early Qing dynasty (1644–1912). She Qiling came from a non-Muslim family whose clan name was Wei 魏; his original name (ming 名) was Yuandu 元都. The young Wei Yuandu started schooling at the age of five and went through a six-year traditional Chinese elementary training that focused on the study of the Confucian classics. When his father died, the boy was adopted by a Muslim military officer named She Yingju 舍應舉.13 The boy’s surname was changed to She 舍 and he was converted to Islam.14 Thereafter, She Qiling “changed his name to Qiling 起靈 and was known by his courtesy name (zi 字) Yunshan 蘊善.”15 The Arabic inscription of a stone tablet on his tomb outside Xiangcheng 襄城 of Henan province gives his Islamic name as Ḥasan ibn ʿAbd al-Wahb.16 The Jingxue 13  The adoption of a non-Muslim child by a Muslim family in the early Qing dynasty was legal. Frequently, the inheritance passed on to an adopted son who does not have a drop of foreign blood in him. See G.G. Warren, “D’ollone’s Investigations on Chinese Moslems,” The New China Review (1920–1): 402. But after the New Sect upheavals of 1781 and 1784, the Qing government had forbidden Muslims to adopt non-Muslim babies. 14  Based on the Quranic law, the adoptive parents could not change the original surname of their adopted child (Quran 33:4–5). In this case, this adoptive boy changed his surname, but the biographical record shows that he kept in touch with his biological mother in his later time. 15  “改諱起靈, 字蘊善 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu (Photolithographic reproduction of the Qing edition), 128a. In this article, I call She Qiling based on his name. However, in some texts Muslim intellectuals are only known by their courtesy name. 16  This Arabic name is the re-transcription of Hasang Yiben Abudu Wahabu 哈桑·伊本· 阿布都·瓦哈布, which is Mu Bai’s Chinese transcription of the Arabic inscription. See Mu Bai, “She Yunshan,” Zhongguo Musilin 4 (1985): 18–19. I have not found the picture of this tablet, so I am not sure whether my transcription is exactly the same as the original. This Islamic name is also mentioned in Xiangcheng xianzhi published in 1993 and appears as Abudule Wahapu 阿卜杜勒·瓦哈蔔 in Luo Wanshou’s entry on “She Qiling” in

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xichuanpu informs us that She Qiling was also known by his literary name (hao 號) Ponachi 破衲癡 meaning “madman wearing torn vestment.” This literary name echoes the characteristics of early Sufis who wore patched woollen garments. It appears that She Qiling appreciated this Sufi life-style since he preferred to sign Ponachi rather than his given name or courtesy name in his works. The stone inscription of his tomb17 states, “According to the old tombstone, the master’s [She Qiling] literary name was Yunshan 雲山.”18 The literary name of Yunshan 雲山 is not attested to in the materials prior to 1795, later than the composition year of Jingxue xichuanpu in 1713. Since the names of Yunshan 雲山 and Yunshan 蘊善 are near homophones (with tonal differences) the graphic representation as Yunshan 雲山 could be understood as deriving from a misrepresentation of Yunshan 蘊善. After converting to Islam in about 1649, She Qiling turned his effort toward the study of Islamic scriptures under several Muslim intellectuals in the school of Jingxue, such as Feng Si 馮四,19 Ma Yong’an 馬永安,20 Li Yongshou 李永壽 and Chang Zhimei 常志美21 (1610–1670). In the genealogical tree proWan Yaobin, ed., Zhongguo Yisilan baike quanshu (Chengdu: Sichuan cishu chubanshe, 1994), 496. See also Xiangchengxian shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Xiangcheng xianzhi (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 1993), 558. 17  The original tombstone has vanished. This one was an accessible one reproduced in 1795. 18  “考舊碑, 大師 […] 號雲山 :” Mu Bai, “She Yunshan,” Zhongguo Musilin 4 (1985): 19. There are two transcriptions of this tombstone. One was recorded by She Xueren 舍學仁, who was the ninth generation grandson of She Qiling, and was published in 1935. The other one was recorded by Mu Bai and was published in 1985. Two transcriptions have some differences, like the literary name of She Qiling was read as Yunyou 雲由 by She Xueren but as Yunshan 雲山 by Mubai. See Yu Zhengui and Lei Xiaojing, eds., Zhongguo Huizu jinshi lu (Yinchuan: Ningxia Renmin chubanshe, 2001), 642–43. 19  “本莊延請馮四師設館, 先生從之 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 129b. Feng Si was the brother of Feng Yangwu 馮養吾, son of Feng Shaoquan 冯少泉. The Feng’s family played an important role in the development of the school of Jingxue. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 55a–56a, 57a–58a, 59a–63a, 129b. 20  “往從永安先生學 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 130a. Born in Xianning 咸宁 in today’s Hubei province, Ma Yong’an was a Muslim scholar of the school of Jingxue. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 107a–109a. 21  “常李二先生見而忻喜, 接講滿僚 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 131b. Li Yongshou and Chang Zhimei were cousins and were both born in Rencheng 任城 in the city of Jining 濟寧 of Shandong province. They first received elementary training of Confucian classics in their childhood and in 1621 they decided to learn original Islamic scriptures. After travelling to study for several years they went back to their hometown. Since then, they stayed in Jining and taught in local mosques for about forty years. Due to Chang and Li’s long-term teaching in Jining, their students were widespread in China proper and finally formed a school called Shandong school. Chang Zhimei was well-known for

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vided in the Jingxue xichuanpu, She Qiling is placed under the names of Li Yongshou and Chang Zhimei and was counted in the sixth generation of the Jingxue school, starting from its initiator Hu Dengzhou 胡登洲22 (1522–1597). She Qiling’s other teachers can be found in different branches, indicating the close relationship and frequent interaction among his contemporary Muslim intellectuals in the school of Jingxue.23 After finishing his study of Islamic scriptures in his early twenties under the instruction of Li Yongshou and Chang Zhimei, She Qiling devoted his lifetime to teaching Islamic doctrines. As Zhao Can said in the Jingxue xichuanpu: [She Qiling] has taught in twenty-one places for more than forty years. His disciples are everywhere. The number of those who had great achievements and recruited students is like the number of sparkling stars in the sky.24 During She Qiling’s time of teaching in the late seventeenth century, an annotation of the scripture whose title was transcribed as Munanbihati 穆難必哈提 or Monanbihatai 摸喃咇哈咍 was published. She Qiling named this Chinese annotation Jueshi xingmilu 覺世省迷錄 (Record of Awakening the World and the Confused)25 and it is also known under its shortened title Xingmi lu 省迷錄 (Record of Awakening the Confused). This text deals with mastering Persian language and he even wrote a book interpreting Persian grammar. This can be considered as one of the reasons that the Persian scriptures took the significance in the school of Jingxue. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 83a–101a; also Luo Wanshou’s entry “Chang Zhimei,” in Wan Yaobin, ed., Zhongguo Yisilanjiao baike quanshu, 109. 22  Hu Dengzhou was born in Shaanxi. He was recognized as one of the first to teach Islamic doctrines in mosque in China proper. He and his students are known as the Shaanxi school. During his teaching, Hu also took significance of Chinese classics and was considered as the founder of the school of Jingxue. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 43a–48b; also Feng Zenglie’s entry “Hu Dengzhou,” in Wan Yaobin, ed., Zhongguo Yisilanjiao baike quanshu, 22–24. 23  See appendix. 24  “紀設帳二十一處, 共四十餘年, 門人遍及寰宇, 而大成設館授徒者, 如列星然 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 141b. 25  The Jueshi xingmilu has two extant editions. One is a stereotype edition collated by Ma Jun 馬駿 (1882–1945) and printed by Ma Fuxiang 馬福祥 (1876–1936) in 1923 based on a manuscript preserved by Mai Xuwu 買虛吾. The other is a manuscript published by Beijing niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe 北京牛街清真書報社 in 1927. Mason mentions another edition which was “printed at Peking, and published at Tientsin [Tianjin] in 1909” but I have not found this one. See Isaac Mason, Notes on Chinese Mohammedan Literature, reprinted from Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 56 (1925) (Beijing: Wendiange shuzhuang, 1938), 202.

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quotations ascribed to the Islamic prophet Muḥammad and Muslims of virtue. Unfortunately, the corresponding original work has not yet been identified. In the preface of the Jueshi xingmilu Zhang Wenxing 張問行, who was one of She Qiling’s students, said that “then [Zhang Wenxing] asked his teacher [She Qiling] to translate it (i.e. Munanbihati) and [Zhang Wenxing] recorded it in Chinese.”26 Therefore, the Jueshi xingmilu is not a work written by She Qiling per se, but more resembles notes narrated by She Qiling and transcribed by Zhang Wenxing. The Chinese text itself was written in colloquial Chinese, which could not be recognized as a translation according to the criteria of translation in the school of Jingxue. Actually, we do not find this work mentioned in the Jingxue xichuanpu. She Qiling’s first Chinese translation in the literary Chinese (shuzi) acknowledged by the school of Jingxue is Tuiyuan zhengda 推原正達 (Tracing the Origin and Achieving the Truth). As Zhao Can said, “master [She Qiling] translated the Mirṣād/Miersade27 into literary Chinese under the title Tuiyuan zhengda.”28 Mirṣād al-‘ibād is a shortened form of a Persian text titled Mirṣād al-ʿibād min al-mabdāʾ ilāʾ al-maʿād (The Path of God’s Bondsmen: From Origin to Return) written by the Persian Sufi Najm al-Dīn Rāzī (573/1177–654/1256), who was a disciple of the Kubrawiyya order.29 Mirṣād al-ʿibād was said to be first studied in China by Feng Bo’an 馮伯菴 (late 16th–early 17th century), a scholar of the third generation after Hu Dengzhou30 and considered to be one of the main scriptures taught in the school of Jingxue.31 According to the Jingxue xichuanpu, She Qiling translated the Mirṣād al-ʿibād when he was teaching in Xiangcheng. Zhang Wenxing was at that time attracted by the reputation of She Qiling and then became his student.32 In his preface to the Jueshi xingmilu, Zhang Wenxing wrote that “he met his teacher She Yushan [Qiling] in Xiangcheng in the dingwei year of the Kangxi reign,”33 which was in 1667. From this information we can deduce that She 26  “於是求師譯之, 用漢文抄錄 :” She Qiling, Jueshi xingmi lu (Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1927), “Preface,” 2. 27  The text normally comes with both Arabic title and its Chinese transcription in one line. Hereinafter, I provide a virgule for the Chinese transcription. 28  “先生將 ‫�مر�ص�ا د‬/米而撒德譯以書字, 著其名曰推原正達  :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 135a. 29  An English translation and annotation of this work was made by Hamid Algar and published in 1982. 30  Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 53b. 31  Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 33b. 32  “有襄城營守府張公, 諱問行, […] 願依門下而求學焉 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 134b. 33  “于康熙丁未年卒, 會蘊善舍師於襄城 :” She Qiling, Jueshi xingmi lu, “Preface,” 1.

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Qiling wrote the translation of Mirṣād al-ʿibād when he was thirty years old. In his class, “[She Qiling] interpreted one thousand words [of Mirṣād al-ʿibād] every day. As for the passages of the bayt, [he] rendered them into verses to teach.”34 Different from oral interpretation, She Qiling’s Chinese translation was said to be written down in the learned language of the Chinese literati (shuzi). She Qiling’s translation, as far as we know, is no longer extant,35 and only a later translation of the Mirṣād al-ʿibād with the title Guizhen yaodao 歸真要道 (The Essential Path of Returning to the Truth), finished in about 1678 by Wu Zunqi 伍遵契 (ca. 1598–1698), is widely known and available today. In his Tianfang xingli 天方性理 (Natural and Principle of Islam), Liu Zhi titled this Persian scripture in Chinese as Daoxing tuiyuan jing 道行推原經 (The Scripture of the Spiritual Path of Tracing the Origin), but it is unclear whether Liu Zhi actually translated the entire text into Chinese. As stated in the Jingxue xichuanpu, when She Qiling was “soon at the age of half hundred”36 in the 1680s, he taught in Shenyang37 and translated two other Persian Sufi scriptures: Master [She Qiling] was just diligent in teaching. In his spare time, he compiled and collated every scripture. In addition he applied the literary Chinese (shuzi) to translate Lamaʿāt/Lemo’ate entitled Zhaoyuan mijue and to translate38 Maqṣad/Mogesuote entitled as Guizhen biyao.39 By comparing the original and the translation, She Qiling’s translation is based on Jāmī’s Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, not ʿIraqī’s Lamaʿāt. She Qiling’s translation of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, widely known as Zhaoyuan mijue has three editions with different Chinese titles of phonetic transcription, which we will discuss in detail in the next part. In his Tianfang xingli, this scripture was named by Liu Zhi in Chinese as Feiyin jing 費隱經 (The Extensive and Secret Scripture) but the full text translation probably was not done by Liu Zhi.40 Maqṣad is believed to be the short title of Maqṣad-i aqṣā, which is a Persian Sufi text written by ʿAzīz 34  “日講千言, 中有拜益忒之句, 乃作詩歌以授 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 135a. 35  Leslie mentions he found this translation was listed in the bibliography of the Ecole des Langues Orientales (Paris) catalogue. 36  “行年半百 :” She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 1:1a. 37  Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 138a–b. 38  The original text is yi 以 (to use). I assume it is a typo mistake of yi 譯 (to translate). ‫ل��م�ع�ا ت‬/勒默阿忒, 曰昭元秘訣, 以 [譯] 39  “先生惟勤授學, 暇則整輯各經, 複以書字譯 � ‫ق‬ ‫�م�������ص�د‬/默格索特經, 曰歸真必要 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 138b. 40  Besides She Qiling’s translation, a recent translation of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt was published in 2001 under the title Guanghui de shexian 光輝的射線 (The Brilliant Lights) by an ahong in Yunnan called Ruan Bin 阮斌 (1932–2007).

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al-Dīn Nasafī ( fl. 13th century). She Qiling translated this text into Chinese and called it Guizhen biyao 歸真必要 (Essential Point of Returning to the Truth). This text was also named by Liu Zhi as Yanzhenjing 研真經 (Scripture of Studying the Truth) in his Tianfang xingli, but the full text of rendition has not yet been found. Like the Guizhen yaodao, the Guizhen biyao has not been transmitted.41 The original scriptures of the above three translation works attributed to She Qiling were all Persian Sufi prose works, written by members of different Sufi orders. These three translations reflect the priority of Persian Sufi texts in the study of original scriptures and their availability for the Chinese Islamic exegetes writing for Chinese Muslim intellectuals. While ignored by the divergent background of Sufi orders, both Mirṣād al-ʿibād and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt were seen as “scriptures of Islamic practice”42 by Zhao Can in the Jingxue xi­chuanpu, illustrating that Chinese Muslim intellectuals focused on the common Islamic philosophy shared in Persian Sufi texts rather than on the arguments and politics beyond the texts. As written in the learned language of scholarly discourse of the day, She Qiling largely applied the lexicon of traditional Chinese philosophical terminology including Daoism, Neo-Confucianism,43 and Buddhism, such as miao41  There is an extant Chinese translation titled as Hanyi daoxing jiujing 漢譯道行究竟 (Chinese Translation of the Outcome of the Spiritual Practising) by Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874). Ma Dexin was a Chinese Muslim scholar from Yunnan. He performed the Hajj in 1841 and after that he stayed in the Middle East for another eight years. In his lifetime, Ma composed numerous books in Chinese and Arabic in the fields of Islamic philosophy, jurisprudence, calendar and so on. He was considered as the first to translate the Quran into Chinese. He also annotated the original Chinese Islamic writings made by Ma Zhu and Liu Zhi. His description of the travel on Pilgrimage written in Arabic called the Chaojin tuji 朝覲途記 (Travelogue of a Pilgrimage) was later translated in Chinese by his student Ma Anli 馬安禮 and published in 1861. This article provided a vivid record of the geography and culture of Southeast Asia, South Asia and Arabia. It was soon noticed by Western scholars and was translated into French by Gabriel Devéria under the title of “pèlerinages de Ma Foūtch’ou” in Centenaire de l’Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes, 1795–1895. 42  “修道諸經 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 134b. 43  Neo-Confucianism (Chinese: Song-Ming lixue 宋明理學) is a moral, metaphysical and ethical thinking on realizing the Way (Dao) and principle (li). It began in the middle of the ninth century and reached new levels of intellectual and social creativity during the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. It was an attempt to create a more rationalist and secular form of Confucianism by rejecting superstitious and mystical elements of Daoism and Buddhism that had influenced Confucianism during and after the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD). Although the Neo-Confucian scholars were critical of Daoism and Buddhism, they borrowed terms and concepts from both. They were normally categorized into two different schools of thought, one is called Cheng-Zhu school, based on

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ben 妙本 (wondrous root), ti 體 (body/substance) and yong 用 (function) in the Zhaoyuan mijue. In addition, She Qiling’s exegetical practice via translation was perceived and described only in analogy with Zhu Xi’s 朱熹44 (1130–1200) contribution to the exegesis in the Confucian Jingxue. As Zhao Can stated in the Jingxue xichuanpu: Yet without succession and interpretation of Zhuzi [Zhu Xi], the [NeoConfucian] learning of Zhou [Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–1073)], Cheng [Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107)], Zhang [Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077)] and Shao [Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011–1077)] certainly would disappear and vanish. Then the doctrine of our religion taught by Hu [Hu Dengzhou 胡登洲 (1522–1597)], Feng [Feng Er 馮二], Zhang [Zhang Shaoshan 張少山] and Chang [Chang Zhimei 常志美 (1610–1070)] certainly would be overwhelmed without master [She Qiling].45 Apart from his contribution to the study of Islamic doctrines acknowledged in the school of Jingxue, She Qiling also became involved in religious affairs of the Chinese Muslim community. Sources found in the nineteenth century and later saw She Qiling as a controversial figure in the conflict of the Old Sect and the New Sect.46 Some commentaries made in the 1930s on She Qiling the thoughts of Cheng Yi, Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi; and the other is called Lu-Wang school, based on the thoughts of Wang Yangming and Lu Jiuyuan. Neo-Confucianism, especially after the Song, influenced almost every field of Chinese culture, such as government civil service examinations, philosophy, painting, poem-writing and so on. Besides, after being introduced to Korea and Japan in the sixteenth century, Neo-Confucianism made great influence on local scholars. See Chung-Ying Cheng’s entry “Neo-Confucianism,” in Yao Xinzhong, ed., RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism (London-New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 453–59. 44  Zhu Xi was a leading figure of the Neo-Confucianism in the Song dynasty. He was well known for his own series of commentaries on the classical Four Books (the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean) which served as the fundamental and standard curriculum for aspiring scholars. His contributions to Chinese philosophy also include his synthesis of the ideas and fundamental Confucian concepts advanced by Zhou Dunyi, Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi and Zhang Zai. Meanwhile, Zhu Xi was also an influential philosopher in Korea and Japan. See Hoyt Tillman’s entry “Zhu Xi,” in Yao Xinzhong, ed., RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism, 839–43. 45  “然宋代周, 程, 張, 邵之學, 非朱子之纘述, 勢必泯滅無聞, 則吾教之胡, 馮, 張, 常諸 學者之授經學, 非先生恐亦必至淹沒而已 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 138a. 46  Almost all of the Chinese Muslims are said to be Sunnites but with a strong Sufi influence. However, they were divided into the New Sect and the Old Sect. The differentiation of these two principal groups is mostly internal and theological. See Rudolf Löwenthal, The Religious Periodical Press in China (Peking: The Synodal Commission in China, 1940),

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described him as an initiator of the New Sect who “compiled the scriptures and changed the custom.”47 Regarding the traditional Islamic custom in terms of prayer, marriages, and funerals, She Qiling launched a renovation proposal summarized as the “Eighteen Entries” (Shibatiao 十八條). The Eighteen Entries gave rise to an intense response from the Old Sect of the Chinese Muslim community, and She Qiling and his followers personally were criticised for becoming a houdusi 候都斯 (meaning probably ‘heterodoxy’). In fact, we cannot trace the discussions related to the divergence from the orthodox Islamic custom in the extant works of She Qiling. Nevertheless, She Qiling and his works were seriously affected and rarely discussed in the study of Chinese Islamic texts ever since. 1.2 Liu Zhi Compared with She Qiling, Liu Zhi is perceived as a different kind of Muslim scholar who devoted his lifetime to writing rather than teaching. This could explain why the materials of the biography of Liu Zhi are not as easily accessible as those of She Qiling. To start with, no records regarding Liu Zhi’s years of birth and death seem to be transmitted, but it is widely believed that he was born in Nanjing around 1670.48 He was known by his courtesy name (zi 字) Jielian 介廉 and literary name (hao 號) Yizhai 一齋. Liu Zhi’s father Liu Sanjie 劉三傑 was a Muslim scholar who, according to the description of Ma Zhu 馬注49 (1640–1711) in the preface of his Qingzhen zhinan 清真指南 (Guidebook of Islam), was a contemporary of She Qiling.50 214; also Ma Tong, Zhongguo Yisilan jiaopai yu Menhuan zhidu shilüe (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 2000), 72–73. 47  “遵經革俗:” Jing Jitang, Zhongguo Huijiao shi yanjiu (Taipei: Guiting chubanshe, 1971), 202. Also see Tang Zhenyu, “Zhongguo Huijiao congtan: jielu,” in Zhongguo Yisilanjiao shi cankao ziliao xuanbian (1911–1949), ed. Li Xinghua and Feng Jinyuan (Yinchuan: Ningxia Renmin chubanshe, 1985), 1:48–51; Bai Shouyi, Zhongguo Yisilan jingshizhuan (Shanghai: Wentong shuju, 1948). 48  See Minoru Satō, Ryū Chi No Shizengaku: Chūgoku Isurāmu Shisō Kenkyū Josetsu (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2008), 22. 49  Born in Yunnan, Ma Zhu was first educated in the Confucian system and became an officer in his early years. He started to learn Arabic and Persian when he was thirty years old and wrote down his understanding of Islamic doctrines in a Chinese book called Qingzhen zhinan. See Luo Wanshou’s entry “Ma Zhu,” in Wan Yaobin, ed., Zhongguo Yisilan baike quanshu, 352. 50  In the first scroll of Qingzhen zhinan called “Hainei zengyan” 海內贈言 (Words of advice within the country), the author Ma Zhu collected two poems written by She Qiling and Liu Sanjie respectively. At that time, Liu Zhi was about twenty-two years old and Ma

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As a contemporary of Zhao Can, Liu Zhi was not mentioned in Zhao’s Jingxue xichuanpu. However, we find several Muslim intellectuals in the genealogy of the school of Jingxue involved in Liu Zhi’s career of writing. In the beginning of the Tianfang xingli, Liu Zhi provided a list of names who had participated in jianding 鑒定 (authenticating), kaojing 考經 (examining), canyue 參閱 (reviewing), zhengwen 正文 (correcting) and jiaozi 校梓 (collating and printing) respectively, such as Yuan Ruqi 袁汝琦,51 Ma Hengfu 馬恆馥52 and so on.53 Liu Zhi’s absence from the Jingxue xichuanpu could be attributed to the criteria of Muslim intellectuals in the school of Jingxue where a qualified intellectual should not only be well-versed in Islamic doctrines but also participate in teaching. As Zhao Can said, “as a person who is pursuing his study, if he has already accomplished a great achievement in his study but is unable to teach, his instructions cannot be left to later generations. This is called stingy learning.”54 In his “Zhushushu 著書述” (An account on book writing), a preface summarising his life experience in the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu 天方至聖實錄 (Veritable Records of the Utmost Sage of Islam) finished in his last years of life, Liu Zhi described his early years: At the age of fifteen, I set my mind on studying. Studying day and night for eight years, I had read all the jing 經 (classics), shi 史 (history), zi 子 (masters), ji 集 (belles lettres) made by scholars [in the Confucian society] and the works made by zajia 襍家 (miscellaneous writers). Then I studied Islamic scriptures for six years. After that, I spent three years reading the Buddhist sutras and one year reading the Daoist scriptures.

Zhu might have met Liu Zhi in Nanjing. See Ma Zhu, Qingzhen zhinan (Qingzhen dadian, 16:492–881), 37b, 39a. 51  Born in Nanjing, Yuan Ruqi was said to be Liu Zhi’s teacher when Liu was young. Yuan Guozuo 袁国祚 (1712–?), the grandson of Yuan Ruqi, first published Liu Zhi’s Tianfang Zhisheng shilu in 1776. 52  Ma Hengfu, born in Kangcheng of Henan province, received traditional Chinese elementary training when he was young and then began to study Islamic scriptures. He was once taught by She Qiling in Kaocheng in Anhui province and was admired for his talent by She Qiling. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 152a–155b. 53  Liu Zhi, Tianfang xingli (1871 Baozhentang edition), “xingshi 姓氏” (Name), 1. Also see the appendix. 54  “如求學者, 既學已大成矣, 然而訓誨無法, 不能遺教後世, 是為嗇學 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 11a-b.

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Daoist scriptures have nothing inside. After that, I continued to read one hundred and thirty seven kinds of European books.55 From around the age of thirty, Liu Zhi travelled throughout central and eastern China including places where Muslim communities settled down and where She Qiling had travelled and taught, such as Beijing, Zhuxianzhen 朱仙鎮 (in Henan province), Bozhou 亳州 (in Anhui province) and Shouzhou 壽州 (in Anhui province). We have no indication from him that Liu Zhi ever engaged in formal classroom teaching on his journey. Instead, Liu Zhi kept on looking for original manuscripts of Islamic texts and started his career in translating and interpreting the Islamic scriptures. Unlike She Qiling, in Liu Zhi’s period of about twenty years of writing, he does not seem to have had an entourage, or disciples or colleagues to work along with him, nor did his relatives take an interest in his activities or support him. However, Liu Zhi kept on devoting his knowledge and energy to translating and writing Chinese Islamic texts alone. In the “Zhushushu,” Liu Zhi said: [I] understand thoroughly every school of thought and adapt them to the Islamic learning. I have written a couple of hundreds of scrolls, but only one tenth of them have been published, like [Tianfang] dianli, [Tianfang] xingli and so on […] but I have not stopped working hard and set my mind firmly on exploring the Islamic learning so as to make it known to average people (zhongren).56 55  “予年十五而志於學, 八年膏晷而儒者之經史子集及襍家之書閱遍, 又六年讀天 方經, 又三年閱釋藏竟, 又一年閱道藏竟, 道藏無物也, 繼而閱西洋書一百三十 七種 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 76a. We have no clue about the title and the language of these European books mentioned by Liu Zhi. As far as we know, Liu Zhi never showed his ability in reading materials written in any European languages. Since Christian missionaries like Matheo Ricci (1552–1610) had wrote and translated books in Chinese in the fields of Christianity, geography, geometry and so on, it is possible that the European books Liu Zhi mentioned were de facto written in Chinese. 56  “會通諸家而折衷于天方之學, 著書數百卷, 已刊者什一, 典禮, 性理數種而已 […] 而予孳孳之意不息, 篤志闡天方之學以曉中人 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 76a. In the Preface of his Jingxue xichuanpu, Zhao Can quoted a sentence “中人不怠, 可以寡過; 老而懋學, 謂之有終” originally written by Cui Xian 崔铣 (1478–1541), a Neo-Confucian scholar. See Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 7b. Cui Xian, Huanci (in Siku quanshu Wenyuange edition), scroll 9, 5b. According to Cui Xian’s explanation, zhongren refers to the middle-aged man corresponding to lao 老 (oldaged people). However, Zhao Can interpreted zhongren as “a person who was not better than those superior and brilliant people and was not worse than those stupid and muddleheaded people” in his Jingxue xichuanpu (“中人乃上不及於高明, 下不墮於愚

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The Tianfang dianli zeyaojie 天方典禮擇要解 (Selection of the Important Rules and Proprieties of Islam), also called as Tianfang dianli 天方典禮 (Rules and Proprieties of Islam) is a twenty-scroll text discussing the theme of Islamic law and ritual first printed in 1709.57 In the Tianfang dianli, Liu Zhi listed a bibliography of forty-five Persian and Arabic Islamic works, nineteen of which are similar to the references in the Tianfang xingli that we will discuss later. The Tianfang dianli was completed when Liu Zhi was in his forties. Liu Zhi explained the language he used in this book, as the “Liyan 例言” (Guide to the use of the book) said: The tone of this book is different from the tone used in mosque school ( jingtang yu58), which cannot avoid arousing criticism from others. However it is not necessary to criticise and this book is not written for those who do not know wen. Because those who do not know wen are taught by teachers of [Islamic] scripture based on the [Islamic] scriptures and do not need this book. Those who need this book, however, must have a thorough knowledge of three religions (i.e. Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism) but do not know the rites of our religion (i.e. Islam). By reading the wen of this book and understanding its meaning, they could gain benefit. Appreciating me or blaming me will be judged by this world.59 Corresponding to the language used in madrasas, the word of wen 文 here could be interpreted as a literary style of language developed in traditional Chinese literature, specifically shuzi 書字, the language coined by Confucian, 惑者 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 7b) In the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu Liu Zhi referred zhongren to “average people” which corresponds to Zhao Can’s interpretation rather than the original meaning of “middle-aged people.” This is a case showing Chinese Muslim intellectuals adapted the traditional Chinese classics but made their own interpretation of the original. 57  The year of completion of the Tianfang dianli is based on the acknowledged earliest preface made by Yang Feilu 楊斐菉 (dates unknown). 58   Jingtang yu is a language that fuses Persian or Arabic Islamic terminology in colloquial Chinese explanation and is only used for teaching and preaching purposes. Linguistic studies on jingtangyu shows that this language is likely a word-by-word translation of the original texts, keeping the syntactic structure and grammar of the original language. See Ding Shiren 丁士仁, “‘Jingtangyu’ de jiben tezheng he guanjian yuqi,” Xibei minzu yanjiu 1 (2008): 48–53. 59  “是書語氣與經堂語氣既不相合, 則不能不起物議. 然而無庸議也, 是書非為不知 文者作也. 蓋不知文者,經師遵經訓之, 無須是書. 而須是書者, 必通習三教, 未知 吾教之禮者也. 讀其文, 會其義, 自有稗益. 知我罪我, 聽之斯世 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang dianli zeyaojie (in Qingzhen dadian, 15:46–190), “Liyan,” 2b–3a.

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Daoist and Buddhist philosophies and used by contemporary scholars in their discourse. In the Tianfang dianli, one of Liu Zhi’s early works, his argument on his application of the literary Chinese (shuzi) above mentioned indicates that there might have been a debate on the legitimacy of applying traditional Chinese philosophical terminology in Chinese Islamic writing at that time and possibly Liu Zhi had felt pressures from the readership of the Tianfang dianli. Beyond the Muslim community, because the Tianfang dianli had once been recorded in the general catalogue prepared for the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 (Imperial Library of the Four Treasuries), Liu Zhi received a short entry in the Siku quanshu zongmu 四庫全書總目 (General Catalogue of the Imperial Library of the Four Treasuries) completed in 1789 as the only Chinese Muslim writer of the Islamic texts mentioned in this catalogue reading as follows: Islam was originally uncommon and wrong, but [Liu] Zhi was well familiar with Confucian works, so that [he] quoted numerous argumentations from Confucian classics to embellish his interpretation, and his writing reads even quite elegant and rich. However, the foundation [of his writing] is wrong from the start, so it is useless to be skilful to varnish [his writings].60 In this entry, Liu Zhi’s ability in writing in literary Chinese was confirmed by the Confucian scholars, but the content of the Tianfang dianli was criticized due to the compiler’s negative concern with Islam. The Tianfang xingli is a fifty-thousand-character Chinese text on the principles of Islam first printed in 1710. At the very beginning of the Tianfang xingli the author provided a “Caiji jingshumu 採輯經書目” (Catalogue of collected and compiled scriptures) illustrating forty Persian and Arabic texts he had referenced and annotated in the text, especially in the first part of the Tianfang xingli under the title “Benjing 本經” (Root classics) which has about 2,500 characters written in five chapters. “Benjing” is a collection focused on the interpretation of Islamic doctrines. Every passage in the “Benjing” chapter was provided by Liu Zhi with reference to seven scriptures which were Zhaowei jing 昭微經 (Scripture of Enlightening the Profound Meaning), Daoxing tuiyuan jing 道行推原經, Yanzhen jing 研真經, Feiyin jing 費隱經, Gezhi quanjing

60  “回回教本僻謬, 而智頗習儒書, 乃雜援經義以文其說, 其文亦頗雅贍. 然根柢先 非, 巧為文飾無益也 :” Yong Rong, ed., Siku quanshu zongmu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), 1085.

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格致全經61 (Complete Scripture of Studying and Acquiring), Zhenjing zhu 真經注62 (Interpretation of the Real Scripture), Tianjing qingxing 天經情性63

(The Character and Nature of the Scripture of Heaven). Among these seven scriptures the beginning of four scriptures have been identified as Persian Sufi texts, including Jāmī’s two treatises Lavāʾiḥ as Zhaowei jing and Ashiʿat alLamaʿāt as Feiyin jing, which illustrates the significance of Jāmī’s texts in Liu Zhi’s writings. We could not locate any passage of the “Benjing” in the full-text rendition of their references, even in Liu Zhi’s own full-text translation works, presumably because these interpretations in the “Benjing” were only the writer’s summarized comments inspired by the original scriptures and were not based on the existing translated works. Also written in literary Chinese (shuzi), the Tianfang xingli again saw Liu Zhi’s explanation of his language application of literary Chinese in the “Liyan”: The meaning of the language in this book is entirely derived from Islamic scriptures. Some of the original scriptures which are difficult to translate into Chinese (i.e. literal translations like the translation in colloquial Chinese [jingtangyu]) have to be delivered in another language (i.e. literary Chinese [shuzi]). Although the [literary Chinese] language does not correspond [to the original scripture], none of the meaning [written in literary Chinese] fails to match up [with the original scripture].64 Compared with the explanation on the readership of literary Chinese (shuzi) in the Tianfang dianli, in the Tianfang xingli Liu Zhi admitted the problems of the viability of literary Chinese in explaining the Islamic doctrines and pointed 61  See Donald D. Leslie, “Arabic and Persian Sources Used by Liu Chih,” Central Asiatic Journal 26 (1982): 92. 62  According to the “Caiji jingshumu” in the Tianfang xingli, there are two titles which include the name of Zhenjing zhu, which are Gazui zhenjing zhu 噶最真經注 (Chinese transcription of the original name is Tefuxi’er gazui 特福西爾噶最) and Zanxide zhenjing zhu 咱吸德真經注 (Chinese transcription of the original name is Tefuxi’er zanxiti 特福西爾咱吸堤). Zhenjing zhu corresponds to the Persian word tafsīr meaning interpretation. Liu Zhi did not indicate the exact scripture of Zhenjing zhu he referenced in the text and have not yet been identified. 63  The Chinese transcription of the original title is Ehekemu kewaqibu 额合口克[=one character]目克瓦乞卜 corresponding to Aḥkām al-Kawākib which means “provisions of the planets” (i.e. astrology). This text was presumed by Ma Jian as the same one listed in the Yuan mishujian zhi under the title Akan jueduan zhuban zaifu 阿堪決斷諸般災 福. See Ma Jian, “Yuan mishujian zhi ‘Huihui shuji’ shiyi” (Guangming ribao, July 7, 1955). 64  “是書語義, 悉本天方之經, 間有經文難於漢譯, 不得不用別文以傳之. 文雖不 合, 義無不合也 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang xingli (Taipei: Liming wenhua shiye gongsi, 1978), “Liyan,” 1–2.

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out that his text written in literary Chinese effectively interpreted the same meaning as the original scripture. As far as we are able to tell, in the two bibliographies of Persian and Arabic references in the Tianfang xingli and Tianfang dianli, Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ, also called in Chinese as Lewayihe 勒瓦一合 or Zhaowei jing 昭微經, is the only extant full-text translation by Liu Zhi. The separate edition of the translation of the Lavāʾiḥ was published under the title as Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微 in 1925. In addition to the Zhenjing zhaowei, the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu can be counted as a compiled translation completed in 1724 when Liu Zhi was in his fifties. This text was said to be based on “an original Western (i.e. Persian or Arabic) scripture which Liu Zhi got by chance on his visit from a Sai 賽 family in Zhuxianzhen.”65 Liu Zhi said in the “Fanli 凡例” (Guide to the use of the book) as follows: This record is based on Te’erzhunmo66 (namely Tianfang Zhisheng lu) and complemented with viewpoints of [other] groups, all [of which materials] are collected from the scriptures, biographies and official history books which have been identified as true and undoubted after textual criticism in order to demonstrate the meaning of “veritable records.”67 As “Zhunmo 准墨 is a book collected by Persian intellectuals,”68 it is very likely that the original text was written in Persian despite our difficulty in locating the original manuscript due to Liu Zhi’s adaptation. While compiling the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu, Liu Zhi made a further attempt in his career of Chinese Islamic writing by imitating the Chinese traditional historiography, specifically Zhu Xi’s Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑒綱目69 (Summary of the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government). In the “Fanli,” Liu Zhi pointed out that the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu “is based on the stylistic rules of [Zizhi tongjian] Gangmu70 which has also been applied in Zhunmo (the name of 65  “過朱仙鎮, 偶得賽氏家藏“至聖錄”西經原本也 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 77b. 66   This Chinese transcription is very likely the Persian word tarjuma which means translation. 67  “是錄以忒爾准墨 (即天方至聖錄) 為本, 而以羣說補附之, 皆採自經傳正史考據 真確無疑者, 以彰實錄之義 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 81a. 68  “准墨為法爾西學人所集 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 81b. 69   Zizhi tongjian gangmu is a book devised by Zhu Xi and written by his pupils. 70  “綱目史學也 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 81b.

Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper

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the Islamic historical learning).”71 By viewing the Zizhi tongjian gangmu as a model, it is fair to say that Liu Zhi was likely influenced by Zhu Xi’s sense of history to present the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu as a moralistic history work, despite the fact that we still need further investigation. Although this time Liu Zhi’s language was criticised by Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1735–1796) as “libi 俚鄙” (vulgar), the significance of the Tianfang Zhisheng shilu as a history book was recognized by the emperor: The term of shilu [veritable records] is only used for the history record of emperors […] Muhanmode [namely Muḥammad] is the king of Western regions. The stories recorded in this Shilu are based on the original Western [specifically Arabic and Persian] scriptures and have been rendered in Chinese characters. Although the style of the language is vulgar, the inside has profound principles. How could you understand thoroughly?72 The Tianfang Zhisheng shilu was translated into English by the British missionary Isaac Mason (1870–1939) in 1921 under the title The Arabian Prophet. Mason introduced this work as “a life of Mohammed from Chinese Sources”73 indicating that, like his contemporary Chinese Muslim intellectuals, he also treated Liu Zhi’s work as an original study rather than a translation. With this English translation, Mason took Chinese Islamic exegetical literature beyond the Islamic world and into the eyes of Western intellectuals. As far as we know, many other works by Liu Zhi were published and circulated widely,74 most of which were related to the elementary education in Islam 71  “是錄, 綱目為體例, 本準墨舊也, (天方史學名) 成一家綱目一家例也, 即此可見東 西同文之盛 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 81a–b. 72  “實錄字惟有帝王紀載用之. […] 穆罕默德乃西域之國王, 此部實錄紀載其事原依 西經, 用漢字譯出. 文雖俚鄙, 其內深理, 爾豈能盡悉 :” Liu Zhi, Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu (in Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365), 29a. 73  Isaac Mason, The Arabian Prophet: A Life of Mohammed from Chinese and Arabic Sources (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1921), cover page. 74  According to Liu Zhi’s “Zhushushu,” most of his works have not been published when he was alive, which has left problems for identifying the works entitled with Liu Zhi’s name but published much later after his death. For example, a Chinese text called Tianfang chunqiu 天方春秋 published around 1861 was said to “have been translated and compiled by Liu Zhi first and examined by Ma Dexin later” (“介廉劉子篡譯于前, 複初老夫子考 證于後,” Tianfang chunqiu [in Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China, Harvard-Yenching library, n.d.], 2b.) This kind of texts should be treated cautiously and I do not count them as Liu Zhi’s works in this article.

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in the field of the Arabic language such as the Tianfang zimu jieyi 天方字母解 義 (Paraphrase of the Arabic Letters); of Islamic religion such as the Tianfang sanzijing 天方三字經 (Three-character Classic of Islam);75 of Islamic philosophy such as the Wujingyue 五更月 (A Poem of the Five Positions of the Moon at Night); and of Islamic ritual such as the Wugong shiyi 五功釋義 (Paraphrase of the Five Pillars). Through the names and contents of these kinds of works, we are likely to recall popular primers in traditional Chinese education like the Sanzijing 三字經 (The Three-character Classic) corresponding to the Tianfang sanzijing, the Qianziwen 千字文 (The Thousand-character Text) corresponding to Wujingyue, the Shenglü qimeng 聲律啟蒙 (The Enlightenment of the Law of Sound) corresponding to the Tianfang zimu jieyi and so on. Such categories of works bear witness to Liu Zhi’s aspiration to broaden the readership of Chinese Islamic exegetical literature from the previous Muslim intellectuals to the zhongren 中人 (average educated people) and children. In his lifetime of writing and travelling, Liu Zhi brought his draft works along for discussion when visiting both Muslims and non-Muslims. Despite these contacts within and beyond the Muslim community, Liu Zhi’s efforts did not help him to win significant recognition from his contemporaries during his lifetime. It was only several decades after his death that he received wider recognition as an outstanding Muslim scholar. The extant evidence shows that the number of publications and readership of Liu Zhi’s works has been continuously increasing since the 1780s. His works had been reprinted in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Beijing and so on. For example, by the eighteenth century, only three editions of the Tianfang dianli had been printed, but the number of editions increased to five in the nineteenth century and then boosted to more than ten in the first half of the twentieth century. Liu Zhi’s works have been read and studied by Chinese Muslims since the nineteenth century and, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese Sufi order Xidaotang 西道堂 established in northwest China publicly considered Liu Zhi’s works as the major scriptures for this order.76 Whether inside the Chinese Muslim community or outside China, Liu Zhi is recognized as an iconic figure amongst Chinese Muslim intellectuals nowadays. Since the fifteenth century, Jāmī’s works travelled from Central Asia to China proper and finally reached the Chinese Muslims. Although Jāmī’s identity as a mediator helped him to obtain readership ranging from the royal family to the 75  Mason thinks the Tianfang sanzijing was written by Ma Fuchu. See Isaac Mason, Notes on Chinese Mohammedan Literature, 209. 76  Zheng Mianzhi, ed., Yisilanjiao jianming cidian (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1993), 304.

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common people, it seems that merchants and Sufi travellers from Central Asia played a more important role in transmitting Jāmī’s works than those religious and political organizations. From the perspective of Chinese Muslim intellectuals, a group of them realized the importance of acquiring Confucian knowledge while maintaining their Muslim identity. They called themselves the school of Jingxue. As two Muslim intellectuals belonging to the genealogy of Jingxue, She Qiling and Liu Zhi had different life-styles but both translated Jāmī’s texts into literary Chinese. They called this literary Chinese shuzi, a written language coined by the historical dimension of traditional Chinese philosophical discourse, and endowed this language with the legitimacy to interpret Islamic doctrines. She Qiling and Liu Zhi’s application and legitimization of literary Chinese (shuzi) helped to expand the readership of Islamic scriptures from only groups who could read Arabic and Persian to educated people in Chinese society more broadly, including both Muslims and non-Muslims. Along with the wide readership and the legitimacy of literary Chinese, Jāmī’s works gained their outstanding significance in competition with other contemporary Islamic scriptures and were widely disseminated and studied in China proper. 2

Introduction and Brief Comparison of Jāmī’s Two Original Texts and their Chinese Translations

As we have discussed above, although the process of dissemination of Jāmī’s texts to China proper remains open to a number of questions, there is no doubt that manuscript copies of these two texts were brought to China proper and studied by Chinese Muslim intellectuals no later than the middle of the seventeenth century. In the late seventeenth century and during the early eighteenth century, Chinese translations of both Persian texts entitled Zhaoyuan mijue 昭元秘訣 and Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微 were finalized by She Qiling and Liu Zhi respectively. In this section, Jāmī’s two original texts and their translations will be discussed and a running cross-comparison of these texts in terms of dissemination, availability, structure, content and language will be provided. 2.1 Zhaoyuan mijue 2.1.1 Manuscripts and Dissemination As mentioned above, She Qiling’s Zhaoyuan mijue was transmitted in three versions with different titles in Chinese phonetic transcription. The earliest extant manuscript dates back to 1864. It exhibits the title Zhaoyuan mijue and

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is preserved at Peking University Library in Beijing (hereafter PUL MS). It was, in all probability, copied by one hand in a neat regular script (kaishu 楷書); punctuations, annotations and Arabic sentences are in red or green ink; the manuscript is well preserved and the folios are bound in two volumes (ce 冊) and stored in one case (han 函). Unfortunately this copy is incomplete: the first volume contains the full text of the preface and the second volume includes the first to the eighth chapter which corresponds to the same chapter in the original Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt. It is unclear whether the remaining text, i.e. from chapter nine onwards, is lost or whether the copying was indeed never completed. The second manuscript copy is titled Liemu enti 咧母嗯惕, dates back to 1890, and is preserved in “The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China” in the Harvard-Yenching Library (hereafter HYL MS). This manuscript is a full copy of the original treatise. It is neat and clear to read, except for two parts where the copyist made clerical mistakes and then covered the old folio with a new one. As stated by the copyist in his preface, this manuscript was one of four copies that were produced from an earlier manuscript found in Shaanxi province.77 The third copy is known as Eshen erting 額慎口而[=one character]口亭 [=one character], a stereotype published in 1925. With regard to the chapter sequence, this edition corresponds to the other two manuscripts. It carries minor textual divergences but appears to be closer to the PUL MS than the HYL MS. 2.1.2 Comparison with the Persian Original Due to the loss of the second part of the text in the PUL MS, my text work and comparison with the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt are primarily based on the HYL MS. My reading of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt is based on the most recent edition prepared by Gawharī. The Chinese translation is divided into twenty-nine chapters. She Qiling translated the entire original treatise, including all prefaces, and he added his own prefaces. The HYL MS has an additional introduction by the copyist, a certain Li Zuolin 李作霖, dating from 1890. The Eshen erting version has three additional prefaces by the publisher and his friends. The main text of the HYL MS and the Eshen erting has an additional chapter entitled “Taiguji 太古 紀” (Chronological record of high antiquity) which depicts the history of the world from an Islamic chronological perspective. This essay is said to refer to the “European and Islamic calendar.”78 The content and the language style of 77  She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 1:3a. 78  “西洋及回回法 :” She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 2:79b; She Qiling, Zhaoyuan mijue (in Huizu diancang quanshu, 15:211–447), 106.

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Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper

this chapter are very different from the main body of She Qiling’s translation. It is very likely that this additional chapter is an original piece of work written by an anonymous Chinese Muslim intellectual who had a wide range of knowledge of geography and astronomy. The PUL MS Zhaoyuan mijue is divided into two parts. The first part consists of a preface by the copyist, a short preface (xiaoyin 小引) by She Qiling and the rendition of the first eight chapters of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt. The second part consists of the translation of chapter nine to the end of the original text. As illustrated in the following table, from chapter twenty-three to twenty-six, chapters in the Chinese translation are arranged in a different order from the original text, as the following table shows: Table 14.1 Comparison between the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and the Zhaoyuan mijue

The Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt

The Zhaoyuan mijue

chapter twenty-three chapter twenty-four chapter twenty-five chapter twenty-six

chapter twenty-six chapter twenty-three chapter twenty-four chapter twenty-five

Furthermore, the last chapter twenty-eight of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt is divided by the translator into chapter twenty-eight, chapter twenty-nine, a conclusion ( jie 結) and a part entitled “Awakening” (xing 醒), which brings the total to twenty-nine chapters in the Chinese translation. Following Chinese annotation practice, annotations to the translation appear in smaller characters half-size in two columns and on the top margin of a page in the Zhaoyuan mijue. Also, some names, terms, and phrases appear in the Chinese version written in the original language with a transliteration in Chinese script. Phrases quoted from the original text, particularly the text of ʿIrāqī’s Lamaʿāt, are de-facto Arabic phrases from the Quran and the hadith. Whereas Jāmī’s quotation from the Lamaʿāt and its commentary are not differentiated in the PUL MS and HYL MS, the 1925 edition underlines quotations from ʿIrāqī’s Lamaʿāt. This differentiation indicates that the editor must have consulted Jāmī’s original Persian text and it attests to the editor’s intent to provide convenient references to the original for his readers, especially Chinese Muslims with an interest in the original terminology but with difficulties in accessing the original Persian text. As one of the essential Islamic texts and central to the reception of Islam in China, She Qiling taught the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt in various circumstances,

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such as Shengjing (today’s Shenyang), Putuoyuan (near today’s Lintong of Shaanxi province) and so on.79 Although written in literary Chinese (shuzi), the Zhaoyuan mijue is based on and derives from his considerable experience of teaching and interpreting the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt in colloquial Chinese in classes over a considerable period of time. Therefore, we can also notice several characteristics of colloquial Chinese in the Zhaoyuan mijue. Firstly, besides the aforementioned Arabic verses that appear in his translation also as direct quotes in Arabic script, She Qiling presents most proper names, place names and book titles in the original and in phonetic transcription in Chinese script, as the following table shows: table 14.2 Proper names, place names and book titles in the original Arabic and in phonetic transcription in Chinese

Transliteration

Zhaoyuan mijue Persian/ Arabic

Maḥmūd Laylī Person’s Majnūn name Abū Yazīd Place name Book titlea

Makka Madīna Futūḥāt Fuṣūṣ

‫حم‬ ‫��مود‬

‫�لی���لی‬ ‫م ن‬ �‫� ن��و‬ ‫ج‬

‫ا ب�و ی� ز��ی�د‬ ‫��ه‬ ‫�م �ک‬

‫�م�د ��ی ن��ه‬

‫ف�ت�� ح�ا ت‬ � ‫و‬ ‫ف‬ ‫����صو�ص‬

Chinese

Modern transcription of Hanyu Pinyin (phonetic transliteration)

穆德

Mude

來拉

Laila

默直奴尼

Mozhinuni

額不亦即德

Ebuyijide

滿刻

Manke

默底納

Modina

府禿哈忒

Futuhate

府蘇速/府數速

Fususu/Fushusu

a These two titles refer to Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya and Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam. 79  “客盛京 […] 日授千言 :” She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 1:1a. Also see Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 138b, 147b.

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Secondly, we also find a few Sufi terms that appear in phonetic transcription in Chinese script, specifically in the “Foreword.” These include terms such as wazhibu 瓦直卜, which stands for the Arabo-Persian wājib (necessary) and mumuqin 牡穆欽 which corresponds to Arabo-Persian mumkin (possible). Thirdly, some sentences read in a colloquial style, such as “nengde ruci zhi xizhe, haonan haonan ya 能得如此之喜者, 好難好難呀”80 (The devotee who can achieve this, very very difficult [thing]). Moreover, it is said by Zhao Can that the poetry in the original text had already been taught in the form of a Chinese poem during his teaching.81 Although such characteristics in the Zhaoyuan mijue suggest the influence of colloquial Chinese applied during teaching practice, the whole translation text can still be considered as a Chinese Islamic writing written in the language of Chinese literati (shuzi). In the Zhaoyuan mijue, most of the original terms are translated into existing Chinese words rather than phonetic transliteration, as the following table illustrates: table 14.3 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt Transliteration sabab martaba ʿālam sakanāt

Persian/ Arabic

�‫��س�ب�� ب‬ ‫�مرت�ب��ه‬

‫ع�ا ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬ ‫�س�ا ت‬ ��‫� ک‬ �

Correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Meaning

Hanyu pinyin

Chinese

Meaning

cause

gu

故

cause

level

pin (di)

品 (第)

grade/level

world

shi ( jie)

世 (界)

world

stillness

jing

靜

stillness

For the key topic of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt—“the Oneness of Existence” and related concepts—the Chinese version finds provenances in the context of Chinese traditional philosophy, as this table illustrates:

80  She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 1:67a. 81  “日講千言, 中有拜益忒之句, 乃作詩歌以授 :” Zhao Can, Jingxue xichuanpu, 135a.

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Table 14.4 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt

Correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Transliteration

Meaning

Hanyu pinyin

Chinese Meaning

oneness existence/ being Real Real being

yi you

一 有

one existence

zhen zhenyou

真 真有

real real existence

reality

zhenben miaoben benran benti ti dongjing

真本 妙本 本然 本體 體 動靜

yong mingse biao xian li yin tong

用 名色 表 顯 裏 隱 通

bounded ai annihilation hunhua

礙 渾化

real root wondrous root root nature root substance substance/body movement and stillness function name and color appear manifest inside conceal unbounded/ open obstruct to integrate and transform

waḥdat wujūd/hastī Ḥaqq hasti-yi Ḥaqq

Persian/ Arabic

‫ح�د ت‬ � ‫�ه��ست‬/‫و� د‬ � ‫و جو‬ ‫ی‬ ‫حق‬ � � ‫حق‬ ‫�ه��س�ت‬ � � ‫ی‬

dhāt

‫�ق ق‬ �‫ح������ي��� ت‬ ‫�ذ ا ت‬ �

ṣifat

‫ف‬ �‫�ص��� ت‬

ḥaqīqat

‫ا ��سما ء‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫��ا �هر‬

asmāʾ ẓāhir bāṭin muṭlaq muqayyad fanāʾ

‫ن‬ ��‫ب�ا ط‬ ‫ق‬ �‫�م��ط�ل‬ ‫ف�م��ق����ي�د‬ ‫� ن���ا ء‬

essence attribute names manifest nonmanifest unbounded

These terms are appropriated from the Chinese context, but serve multiple institutional and ideological interests. Terms like ti 體, yong 用 and hunhua 渾 化 are the main concepts discussed by Neo-Confucians. Zhen 真, you 有 and the compound zhenyou 真有 are probably inspired by Daoist doctrines, and mingse 名色 reflects the influence of Buddhism.

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Discussing the same topic (that is, “Oneness of Existence”) as the Lavāʾiḥ, but with a different theme of “love,” the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt contains instances of Sufi terminology not mentioned in the Lavāʾiḥ. In accordance with the original, the Zhaoyuan mijue finds some Chinese corresponding terms as the following table shows: table 14.5 Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Words in the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt Transliteration maḥabbat ʿishq maḥbūb maʿshūq muḥibb ʿāshiq mumkin

Persian/ Arabic

‫م‬ � �‫ح��ب� ت‬ ‫ع��� ق‬ ‫�ش‬ � ‫م‬ � � ‫�ح� ش�بو ب ق‬ �‫م�ع���و‬ ‫م‬ � ��‫ح‬ ‫ع�ا �شب��ق‬ � ‫مم ک ن‬ ���

wājib

�‫وا ج�� ب‬

āyina faqr faqīr dafʿ

‫آ‬ ‫ف� ��ي ن��ه‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ف���ق��ر‬ ‫�������یر‬ �‫د ��ف‬ ‫ع‬ ‫�ش��رط‬

sharț

Correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Meaning

Hanyu pinyin

Chinese

Meaning

love

xi

喜

likeness/loveness

beloved

shouxizhe 受喜者

lover

xizhe

possible

mumuqin 牡穆欽

喜者

he who is liked/ beloved he who likes/lover

mirror poverty the poor repulse

wuqiu jing qiong pinzhe fangbei

無求 鏡 窮 貧者 防備

[phonetic transliteration] have desire [phonetic transliteration] without desire mirror poor the poor guard against

term

tiaokuan

條款

term

youqiu necessary wazhibu

有求 瓦直卜

In the Zhaoyuan mijue, compound words are applied in correspondence with original terms. Besides the polysyllabic Arabo-Persian loanwords like mumu­ qin 牡穆欽 and wazhibu 瓦直卜, disyllabic expression is considered to be an inevitable means for rendering a foreign word into Chinese. Some disyllable words are borrowed from the Chinese context to translate a single original word, such as xizhe 喜者, fangbei 防備 and hunhua 渾化, and some disyllable

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words correspond to nominal endocentric phrases in which each character represents an original word, like zhenyou 真有. In some cases, She Qiling creates compound words to translate the meaning of the original terms, like shouxizhe 受喜者. In the history of Chinese translation, innovating disyllabic words has been widely practised in translating Buddhist Sutras from the second century to the ninth century82 and in translating European religious and scientific texts starting from the sixteenth century. When the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw She Qiling translating Persian Islamic scriptures into Chinese, disyllabic words had already been infused into Classical Chinese. The large number of compound words in the Zhaoyuan mijue is a reflection of the oral teaching experience of the translator on the one hand, and on the other can be considered to be a continuation of a Chinese translation strategy that had been developing for centuries. In general, the Zhaoyuan mijue presents its readers with a complete picture of Jāmī’s Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt. The translator goes through every detail of the original text, the subtitle, and every Arabic and Persian poem. Even the chapter title lamʿa (flash) is translated as dian 電 (lightning). In the eyes of the translator, however, as She Qiling argues in the preface, “writing poem (shi 诗), writing literary composition (wen 文), writing Song poetry (ci 词) and writing odes (fu 赋) are not creating, [but only] developing the hidden meaning of the nature.”83 In this sense, the Zhaoyuan mijue went beyond a mere work of translation, indeed being bestowed with the legitimacy to transmit the Islamic doctrine. 2.2 Zhenjing zhaowei 2.2.1 Manuscript and Dissemination It appears that Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei, made during the early eighteenth century, is the only translation of the Lavāʾiḥ in Chinese. The Zhenjing zhaowei is also transmitted under the titles Lewayihe 勒瓦一合 or Zhaowei jing 昭微經. Although a manuscript, reportedly copied during the reign of Qianlong, appeared in an auction sale in Beijing in 2009,84 a printed copy published in Beijing in 1925 is the earliest textual witness of this text.

82  Although the imperial government continued the translation of Buddhist sutras during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the translation movement had declined. 83  “作詩, 作文, 作詞, 作賦, 亦非作也, 發揮造化之蘊也 :” She Qiling, Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue, 1:1a. 84  http://auction.artxun.com/paimai-26821-134104328.shtml.

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2.2.2 Comparison with the Persian Original Since we seem to have no information about where, when and how Liu Zhi obtained access to his manuscript copy of the Persian original, I will use Yann Richard’s edition of the Lavāʾiḥ as the main base text for this research. Richard’s edition derives from the earliest manuscripts and is considered to be the most reliable edition of Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ. A brief comparison of Richard’s edition and Liu Zhi’s Chinese translation shows that Liu Zhi’s version corresponds more to Richard’s than to Tasbīḥī’s edition. In terms of the overall structure of the book, for example, Liu Zhi’s translation in thirty-six chapters corresponds to Richard’s edition but cannot match up with Tasbīḥī’s edition, which is divided into only thirty-three chapters. The Zhenjing zhaowei does not carry Jāmī’s preface and conclusion and Liu Zhi leaves out most of the quatrains, which make up a good proportion of the original treatise. With regard to the quatrains, Liu Zhi translates only three out of a total of ninety poems in the Lavāʾiḥ.85 This omission of quatrains in the translation may be caused by their omission in the manuscript copy available to Liu Zhi, but one may equally argue that Liu Zhi does not consider them to be relevant for the interpretation of Islamic mysticism in his translation of the Lavāʾiḥ and therefore simply leaves them out in a work aiming at a more advanced readership. This approach would be consistent with the approach Liu Zhi shows in his Tianfang dianli 天方典禮 and the Tianfang xingli 天方性理 which are both written in literary Chinese (shuzi), and which also rarely include poems. Nevertheless, in works such as the Wujingyue 五更月 and the Tianfang sanzijing 天方三字經 where he aims at a more elementary education in Islamic teachings, Liu Zhi attaches great importance to verses and poems. It appears that in his writings on Chinese Islamic doctrines in the literary Chinese style, Liu Zhi may have been influenced by some of the negative views on poetry writing during the Song period. In the Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 (Classified Conversations of Master Zhu)—to name just one example of a relevant Song period thinker—Zhi Xi has the following remark on poetry writing: Today [they] say there is no point in writing poems and that it takes up too much time [that can otherwise be used] for studying. But when it comes to the extreme one should know oneself that there is really nothing to be gained from writing poems.86 85  Liu Zhi, Zhenjing zhaowei (Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1925), 40, 52. 86  “今言詩不必作, 且道恐分了為學工夫. 然到極處, 當自知作詩果無益 :” Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei, ed. Li Jingde (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 8:3333.

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For Neo-Confucians like Zhu Xi, poetry writing was a waste of time with a detrimental effect on the study of the doctrines and the ethical advancement of oneself.87 It is thus not surprising that most Neo-Confucian works were composed in prose rather than poem form. Through Liu Zhi’s preference for prose the Zhenjing zhaowei became a short five-thousand word treatise. While the Lavāʾiḥ was read by a wide audience of ordinary people in the Persianspeaking world, its Chinese translation was designed as a theoretical work that attests to the translator’s intention of writing exclusively for intellectuals in the Chinese-speaking world. In terms of the textual arrangement, Liu Zhi made slight changes to the internal structure in his translation by dividing chapter twenty-one in the Lavāʾiḥ into two chapters and combining the original chapters thirty-one and thirtytwo into one chapter, also adding chapter titles based on the main themes in those chapters. For example, the first chapter is entitled as yixin 一心 (one heart) reflecting the main topic of this chapter as “the Oneness of Existence.”88 Generally speaking, about two-thirds of the translation can be directly related to the original text on a sentence-by-sentence basis. The Zhenjing zhaowei carries no original names or phrases in Persian or Arabic, and where reference is given to Ibn ʿArabī and Maḥmūd Shabistarī in the original, the translator preferred to call them “xian 賢” (virtuous person/sage)89 or sometimes even dropped the reference to them in the Chinese text. Given that Jāmī did not highlight the reference of Naqshbandiyya teachings in the Lavāʾiḥ,90 the Chinese translation does not indicate the Naqshbandī significance. While his translation leaves out most of the philosophical quatrains and makes no reference to the well-known Sufi names, Liu Zhi takes great care in translating the terms and discussions of the Ibn ʿArabī’s school in the original texts. In the Zhenjing zhaowei we encounter a number of translation terms for original terms which were also applied by She Qiling in his Zhaoyuan mijue. These include:

87  Similar comments can be found in other Neo-Confucian works, such as “或問: ‘詩可學 否?’ 曰: ‘既學時, 須是用功, 方合詩人格. 既用功, 甚妨事:” Cheng Yi and Cheng Hao, Er Cheng ji, ed. Wang Xiaoyu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 239. 88  At the very beginning of chapter one, Jāmī quotes a verse from the Quran: “God has not assigned to any man two hearts in his breast” (33:4). Jāmī, Lavāʾiḥ, ed. Yann Richard (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Asāṭīr, 1373/1994), 51. 89  Liu Zhi, Zhenjing zhaowei (Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1925), 43, 53. 90  Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 116.

453

Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper table 14.6 Words in the Lavāʾiḥ and correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei

Words in the Lavāʾiḥ

Correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei

Transliteration Persian/ Arabic

Meaning

Hanyu pinyin

Chinese

Meaning

vaḥdat vujūd/hastī

oneness existence/ being Real Real being

yi you

一 有

one existence

zhen zhenyou

真 真有

real real existence

essence

ti

體

substance/ body appear manifest inside conceal unbounded/ open obstruct grade/ level world

Ḥaqq hastī-yi Ḥaqq dhāt ẓāhir bāṭin muṭlaq muqayyad martaba ʿālam

‫ح�د ت‬ � ‫و‬ /‫و ج�ود‬ ‫ت‬ ‫�ه��س�ی‬ ‫حق‬ � � ‫�ه��س�ت‬ ‫قی‬ � �‫ح‬ ‫�ذ‬ ‫ت‬ �‫ا‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫��ا �هر‬

‫ن‬ ��‫ب�ا ط‬ ‫ق‬ �‫�م��ط�ل‬ ‫�م��ق����ي�د‬ ‫�مرت�ب��ه‬ ‫ع�ا ل‬ ‫م‬

manifest

biao xian nonli manifest yin unbounded tong

表 顯 裏 隱 通

bounded level

ai pin (di)

礙 品 (第)

world

shi ( jie)

世 (界)

We do, however, also encounter translation terms indicating that Liu Zhi did not necessarily adhere to given Chinese translation practices. In the following table, we list examples for translation terms that are different from those used by She Qiling:

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table 14.7 Words in the Lavāʾiḥ and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt and correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei and in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Words in the Lavāʾiḥ and Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt

Correspondence in the Zhenjing zhaowei

Correspondence in the Zhaoyuan mijue

Persian/ Arabic

Meaning

Chinese

Meaning

Chinese

Meaning

sakanāt sabab ḥaqīqat

stillness reason reality

zhi 止 yuan 緣 li 理

stop reason principle

jing 靜 gu 故 zhenben

stillness cause real root

真本

miaoben 妙本

fanāʾ ṣifat

annihilation ke 克 mie 滅 attribute yong 用

subdue perish attribute

hunhua 渾化

dongjing 動靜

asmāʾ

names

(zhu) ming (every) name (諸) 名

yong 用 mingse 名色

wondrous root to integrate and transform movement and stillness attribute name and colour

Compared with the Zhaoyuan mijue, compound words occur much less often in Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei. Even though predecessors like She Qiling had already set dissyllabic words in correspondence with certain original terms, in most cases in the Zhenjing zhaowei, dissyllabic words were replaced by monosyllabic words, such as ke 克, yong 用 and ming 名. Compared with She Qiling’s full translation of the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, the Zhenjing zhaowei can be seen as a concise translation of the Lavāʾiḥ in terms of content and style. In his translation it seems that Liu Zhi tended to avoid any image that would lead the reader to associate it with the Persian original text. At the same time, Liu Zhi gives full play to his accomplished skill in referencing classical Chinese materials. In chapter eight of the Zhenjing zhaowei, he quotes a well-known sentence from the Mencius, “Wanwu jie beiyu ji 萬物皆備於己”

Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper

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(The ten thousand things are all complete within oneself), which is also widely discussed in the Neo-Confucian texts.91 We also notice that Liu Zhi titles this chapter “keji 克己” (to overcome oneself), which is considered to be a cardinal concept in the Confucian tradition. As the Analects 12.1 reads: “keji fuli wei ren 克己復禮為仁” (to subdue oneself and to return to the rites constitute humaneness), the locus classicus for the verb-object phrase “keji” is found in a reply given to Yan Yuan 顏淵 (521 BC–481 BC), a major disciple of Confucius, in a debate about the Confucian key virtue of humaneness (ren 仁). The Zhenjing zhaowei was thereby constructed with some characteristics of a classical Chinese treatise. One could say that this approach is the consequence of the translator’s preference for the appropriate phrases from the Confucian canon, mainly in the Song interpretation suggested by Zhu Xi and others. The reference to the Confucian canon conversely strengthens the claim to a higher authority for this Chinese Islamic treatise by presenting unfamiliar thought through means that would have been very familiar to his audience. As a translation made later than She Qiling’s translation and also written in literary Chinese (shuzi), the appearance of the Zhenjing zhaowei differs from the original text, but seems to be closer to a classical Chinese philosophical treatise than the former Chinese Islamic works. 3 Conclusion Jāmī devoted his life to representing and vindicating Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings. Compared with his scholarly writings on Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings, the Lavāʾiḥ and the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt are more generally accessible and aesthetically attractive than those products of pure erudition. For the Lavāʾiḥ, a treatise that aims at ordinary people, Liu Zhi transformed his translation into theoretical prose, which was considered by a reader as a text where “the composition and argument are too advanced and profound that [this text] cannot be understood by every one.”92 For the Ashiʿat ­al-Lamaʿāt, 91  Liu Zhi, Zhenjing zhaowei (Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1925), 9–10. Compared with “All the ten thousand things are prepared for me” (the Mencius, 13.4: 萬物皆備於我 矣), Liu Zhi’s writing is a partial quote since the object has been changed from wo 我 (me) to ji 己 (me). Original sentence see Jāmī, Lavāʾiḥ, ed. Yann Richard, 61. 92  “文理高深, 非盡人所能瞭解也 :” She Qiling, Zhaoyuan mijue (In Huizu diancang quanshu, 15:211–447), “Li Tingxiang xu,” 1.

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which was written as a commentary for Sufi disciples, She Qiling’s translation was assessed by the same reader as a text in which the translator “did not seek for advance and profoundness, [but] intended to be admired by both scholars and layman.”93 Both written in literary Chinese (shuzi), the Zhaoyuan mijue refers more to the original texts than the Zhenjing zhaowei in terms of structure, composition and terminology. In order to highlight the legitimacy of the text to interpret the Islamic doctrine, She Qiling instructed his readers to read the Zhaoyuan mijue beside the translation. For the interests of the readers who were familiar with Chinese contexts but did not have the ability to read the original Islamic scriptures, Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei departed from the original so as to get close to the Chinese context. Consequently, the lost contact between the readers and the original text may have caused troubles in understanding the Islamic doctrine. Alternatively, the Chinese versions could be seen as a new interpretation of Jāmī’s doctrines in particular and Sufi teaching in general, both of which were adapted to the Chinese intellectual context. Bibliography Bai Shouyi 白壽彝. “Zhongguo Yisilan jingshizhuan” 中國伊斯蘭經師傳 (The Biographies of the Chinese Muslim Masters). In Minzu zongjiao lunji, 434–92. Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001. Bouvat, Lucien. “Une bibliothèque de mosquée chinoise.” Revue du monde musulman 4 (1908): 516–21. Centenaire de l’École des Langues Orientales Vivantes 1795–1895. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1895. Cheng Hao 程顥 and Cheng Yi 程頤. Er Cheng ji 二程集 (The Anthology of Two Cheng). Edited by Wang Xiaoyu. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981. Cui Xian 崔铣. Huanci 洹詞 (Poetry of Huan). In Siku quanshu (Wenyuange Edition). Ding Shiren 丁士仁. “‘Jingtangyu’ de jiben tezheng he guanjian yuqi” 經堂語”的基本 特徵和關鍵語氣 (Basic Features and Key Mood in the Language Used in Chinese Mosques). Xibei minzu yanjiu 1 (2008): 48–53. Hartmann, Martin. “Littérature des musulmans chinois.” Revue du monde musulman 5 (1908): 275–88. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt. Edited by Hādī Rastgār Muqaddam Gawharī. Qom: Būstān-i Kitāb-i Qum, 1383/2004. 93  “不求高深, 要使雅俗共賞 :” She Qiling, Zhaoyuan mijue (In Huizu diancang quanshu, 15:211–447), “Li Tingxiang xu,” 1.

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Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Lavāʾiḥ. Edited by Yann Richard. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Asāṭīr, 1373/1994. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Lavāʾiḥ dar ʿirfān va taṣavvuf. Edited by Muḥammad Ḥusayn Tasbīḥī. Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Furūghī, 1342/1963. Jin Jitang 金吉堂. Zhongguo Huijiaoshi yanjiu 中國回教史研究 (Studies of the History of Islam in China). Taipei: Guiting chubanshe, 1971. Leslie, Donald D. “Arabic and Persian Sources Used by Liu Chih.” Central Asiatic Journal 26 (1982): 78–104. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Tianfang dianli zeyaojie 天方典禮擇要解 (Selection of the Important Rules and Proprieties of Islam). In Qingzhen dadian, 15:46–190. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Tianfang xingli 天方性理 (Natural and Principle of Islam). 1922 edition. Taipei: Liming wenhua shiye gongsi, 1978. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Tianfang xingli. 1871 Baozhentang edition. In Qingzhen dadian, 17:1–136. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Tianfang Zhisheng shilu nianpu 天方至聖實錄年譜 (Chronicle of Veritable Records of the Utmost Sage of Islam). In Qingzhen dadian, 14:1–365. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Tianfang zimu jieyi 天方字母解義 (Paraphrase of the Arabic Letters). In Qingzhen dadian, 17:480–92. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. The Arabian Prophet: A Life of Mohammed from Chinese and Arabic Sources. Translated by Isaac Mason. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1921. Liu Zhi 劉智 [Liu Jielian 劉介廉, Liu Chai-lien 劉介廉, Liu Yican 劉一參]. Zhenjing zhaowei 真境昭微 (Enlightening the Profound Meaning in the Real Realm). Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1925. In Qingzhen dadian, 19:1–20. Löwenthal, Rudolf. The Religious Periodical Press in China. Peking: The Synodal Commission in China, 1940. Ma Dexin 馬德新. Chaojin tuji 朝覲途記 (Travelogue of a Pilgrimage). In Qingzhen dadian, 20:359–63. Ma Jian 馬堅. “Yuan mishujian zhi ‘Huihui shuji’ shiyi”“回回書籍”釋義 (Explanations of the “Books of Muslim” in the Record of the Archival Bureau during the Yuan Dynasty). Guangming ribao. July 7, 1955. Ma Tong 馬通. Zhongguo Yisilan jiaopai yu menhuan zhidu shilü 中國伊斯蘭教派與門 宦制度史略 (Brief History of the Chinese Islamic Sects and the System of Chinese Sufi Sect). Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 2000. Ma Zhu 馬注. Qingzhen zhinan 清真指南 (Guidebook of Islam). In Qingzhen dadian, 16:492–881.

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Mason, Isaac. Notes on Chinese Mohammedan Literature. Reprinted from Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 56 (1925). Beijing: Wendiange shuzhuang, 1938. Mu Bai 穆白. “She Yunshan” 舍蘊善 (She Yunshan). Zhongguo Musilin 4 (1985): 18–19. Murata, Sachiko. Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Ogilvie, Chas. L. “A Classified Bibliography of Books on Islam in Chinese and ChineseArabic.” The Moslem World 8 (1918): 74–78. Rāzī, Najm al-Dīn. Mirṣād al-ʿibād. Edited by Muḥammad Amīn Riyāḥī. Tehran: Bungāyi Tarjuma-yi Nashr-i Kitāb, 1973. Rāzī, Najm al-Dīn. The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return. Translated by Hamid Algar. Delmar, N. Y.: Caravan Books, 1982. Ruan Bin 阮斌. Guanghui de shexian 光辉的射线 (The Brilliant Lights). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2001. Satō, Minoru. Ryū Chi No Shizengaku: Chūgoku Isurāmu Shisō Kenkyū Josetsu 劉智 の自然學―中國イスラーム思想研究序説 (Liu Zhi’s Learning on Nature: the Introduction Study of Chinese Islamic Thought). Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2008. She Qiling 舍起靈 [She Yunshan 舍蘊善, Ponachi 破衲癡]. Jueshi xingmi lu 覺世省迷 錄 (Record of Awakening the World and the Confuse). Beijing: Niujie Qingzhen shubaoshe, 1927. She Qiling 舍起靈 [She Yunshan 舍蘊善, Ponachi 破衲癡]. Liemu’enti: Zhaoyuan mijue 咧母嗯惕: 昭元秘訣 (Liemu’enti: Secret Key of Exposing the Origin). Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching library, 1890. She Qiling 舍起靈 [She Yunshan 舍蘊善, Ponachi 破衲癡]. Zhaoyuan mijue. Beijing: Peking University Library, 1864. She Qiling 舍起靈 [She Yunshan 舍蘊善, Ponachi 破衲癡]. Zhaoyuan mijue. In Huizu diancang quanshu, edited by Wu Haiying, 15:211–447. Lanzhou-Yinchuan: Gansu wenhua chubanshe-Ningxia wenhua chubanshe, 2008. Tang Zhenyu 唐震宇. “Zhongguo Huijiao congtan: jielu” 中國回教叢談—節錄 (The Excerpt of the Discussion of Islam in China). In Zhongguo Yisilanjiao shi cankao ziliao xuanbian (1911–1949), edited by Li Xinghua and Feng Jinyuan. Vol. 1. Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1985. Tianfang chunqiu 天方春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annuals of Islam). In Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. collection on Muslims in China, n.d. Wan Yaobin 宛耀賓, ed. Zhongguo Yisilan baike quanshu 中國伊斯蘭百科全書 (The Encyclopaedia of Chinese Islam). Chengdu: Sichuan cishu chubanshe, 1994. Warren, G. G. “D’ollone’s Investigations on Chinese Moslems.” The New China Review (1920–1): 267–89 (part 1), 398–414 (part 2).

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Hu Dengzhou

Hai

Feng Er

Feng Shaochuan, Feng Bo'an

Zhang Shaoshan

Feng Yangwu

Ma Junshi

Chang Yunhua, Li Yanlin

Ma Zhenwu

Ma Xingwu

Ma Yong'an

Table 14.8 Genealogy of Muslim intellectuals linked to She Qiling and Liu Zhi

Liu Weiyi (Guoxiang)

Wang Daiyu

She Yunshan (Qiling)

Yuan Shengzhi

Ma Hengfu (Jingxin)

Ma Xinzhe (Guangxian)

Yuan Maozhao (Ruqi)

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Appendix

part 3 Beyond the Seal of the Poets

∵

chapter 15

To Round and Rondeau the Canon

Jāmī and Fānī’s Reception of the Persian Lyrical Tradition Franklin Lewis In the early 1970s, radio stations in the United States began to apply the term “Oldies,” or “Golden Oldies,” to program formats featuring music of the 1950s to early 1960s. But how and why did disc-jockeys agree that the term “Oldies” applied to music of two decades prior and not three or four score years earlier?1 Why not reprise the nineteen-oughts, the nineteen-teens, or nineteen-twenties, when Tinpan Alley shaped the modern idiom of popular American music with shows on Broadway, under this “Oldies” rubric?2 Perhaps because those were the days of sheet music, before commercial radio had come into being, and the songs from that era had never had their day on the airwaves as contemporary popular radio programming. Then, why not the 1930s and 1940s, by which time microphones had made theatrical voice-projection in public performance unnecessary, and the more intimate style of Bing Crosby’s “crooning” replaced earlier theatrical singing (or stage-speaking) styles, which thereafter increasingly sounded unnaturally projected, or insincerely booming. Furthermore, elements of the Big Band and Swing Era dance styles of the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., Benny Goodman’s 1937 “Sing, Sing, Sing” and the 1941 Lindy Hop dance performance in “Hellzapoppin’ ”) were not so different than the Rock-and-roll dance styles of the 1950s. If these songs are not, or were not, “Oldies,” to what category, then, should these older-than-“Oldies” belong? And if “Oldies” once suggested the music of the 1950s, why did this concept embrace the songs of Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Wanda Jackson, and Patsy Cline, 1  The phrase “oldies but goodies” was originally coined by Art Laboe, an American of Armenian descent, credited as the first disc jockey to regularly play Rock-and-roll records on the radio in southern California. In 1957 Laboe used the term “oldies but goodies” on air to refer to songs from earlier in the decade that, though no longer receiving regular radio play, were still popular with listeners, who would call in to request them. When a song by Little Ceasar and the Romans called “Those Oldies But Goodies” charted in the spring and summer of 1961, it popularized the term more broadly in the meaning of “songs of the past that bring back memories of you,” as the lyrics put it. 2  Ben Yagoda, The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015) describes how “the American Standards,” popular songs of the 1920s through 1940s, were displaced by a changing musical idiom around 1950, even before Rock-and-Roll swept in a distinctively new aesthetic.

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but tend to exclude their rough contemporaries, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Vic Damone, Doris Day, Jo Stafford, and Patti Page?3 Now, forty years later, a radio station that bills itself as playing “Oldies” is likely to construe its chronological home in the 1960s to 1980s, or even the 1990s,4 proving the fluidity of such terminology, based as it is in the perspective of a particular time period. The battle of the books known as the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes was engaged well over three centuries ago, and if we continue to define the terms of their debate by the three greatest inventions that separate the modern from the ancient way of life, we will not forever identify those inventions as the printing press, firearms, and the compass.5 In the musical case laid out above, perhaps we should think of the dividers that separate the

3  Audience demographics surely accounted to a large extent for who we retroactively came to recognize as the canonical figures of early Rock-and-roll. Elvis Presley made “Hound Dog” famous in 1956, but the white song-writers Lieber and Stoller wrote it for the black recording artist Big Mama Thornton in 1952. Rhythm & Blues songs like the 1951 number “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats might be described as the first Rock-androll song, but generally Bill Haley and the Comets are recognized with this distinction in part because their 1954 song “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (a song Joe Turner sang first, but presented as the genre “Blues” or “Rhythm & Blues”), and the 1955 “Rock Around the Clock” explicitly refer to the name of the musical genre (though the Boswell Sister’s 1934 tune “Rock and Roll” uses the name, that song is not in the musical idiom that would come to be identified in that category). White artists took “race music” (a term in use from the 1920s to 1940s for styles of African-American music and the record companies that marketed to an African-American clientele), or rhythm and blues (a term that replaced “race music” in the late 1940s), and crossed over to white radio stations and audiences with music that had been earlier written and/or performed by blacks. By 1951 Alan Freed in Cleveland, Ohio was broadcasting rhythm, blues, and country genres for a multi-racial audience, which perhaps helped to mix the musical styles. Terms like Rock-and-roll, Rockabilly, Folk, Pop, etc. acquire meaning in contradistinction to one another, but often have to do not just with the instrumentation (Rock-and-roll is usually associated with electric guitars) and the style, but also with the performance venues. 4  In the current millennium, nationally syndicated “Oldies” programs (“Rock & Roll’s Greatest Hits” or “American Gold”) began including songs from the 1970s to 1980s in their oldies mix, and by 2010, retro-stations were also playing music from the 1990s, though generally under other names, such as “Classic Rock.” As disc jockey Dick Bartley explained in 2003, “This is Marketing 101. The oldies format is doing what every business has to do—follow your demographic.” Quoted in “Oldies Radio Moves into the 70s,” CNN.com, 31 October 2003. http://web. archive.org/web/20081201135222/http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/10/31/oldies.radio.ap/ index.html. 5  Levent Yilmaz, Le temps moderne: variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), describes the conflict in terms of a dynamic between the present, the future and the past, howevermuch it was also grounded in a particular political-ideological situation kicked off in 1687 by Charles Perrault’s Le siècle de Louis le Grand.

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“modern” idiom of music from the “Oldies” as the radio, the atomic bomb, and the electric guitar. Since the 1950s, musical styles may have come and gone (Rock-and-roll, Rockabilly, Doo Wop, Soul, Funk, Punk, Ska, New Wave, New Romantic, Rap, Hip Hop), but we think of these sometimes distinct styles or types of music as generically belonging to a larger unified Rock/Pop tradition, which we may perhaps categorize as the popular youth music of the post-World War II “baby boom” generation, from Bill Haley and the Comets in 1954 to the present, as opposed to Classical music, Easy Listening, or Jazz, etc.; and as distinct from Vaudeville, Ragtime, Broadway, Swing, Folk, etc., which are—though also popular music, and though also at one time the youth music of the dandies and bright young things, flappers and fops, shoulder-padders, zoot-suiters and Beats—at least in the context of radio airplay, largely partitioned into different compartments.6 In American music of the twentieth century, typically a song that proved popular would be performed and recorded by numerous singers, each creating their own version of a shared but fixed repertoire of standard familiar tunes and lyrics often referred to as “The Great American Songbook,” although no such book exists.7 Clearly this reflects a canon, a kind of consensus about which songwriters are at the center of the tradition, which individual songs have achieved lasting relevance and popularity, and have thus entered the standard repertoire one might expect most professional singers to know. 1

The Ghazal Tradition as “The Great Persian Songbook”

We may think of Persian ghazals, which are closely related to music and song,8 and which have been continuously practiced as a fixed form genre in Persian 6   Antti-Ville Kärjä, “A Prescribed Alternative Mainstream: Popular Music and Canon Formation,” Popular Music 25, No. 1 (Jan., 2006: Special Issue on Canonisation): 3–19, proposes various types of canon and the dynamic between them that shapes the process of canon formation, with regard to folk music and to rock music. 7  Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900–1950 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) makes a stab at pinning down the canon of popular song by focusing on six leading composers and about three times that many second-tier composer/ lyricists. In the final chapter he sets forth a list of canonical songs from the three decades between 1920 and 1950, not all of which were written by the canonical songwriters he identifies. Ken Bloom, The American Songbook: The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs (New York: Black Dog & Levental, 2005), organizes his “songbook” in terms of not only the canonical songwriters and canonical songs, but also the principle performers (singers and big bands). 8  See the argument and the bibliography in Franklin Lewis, “The Transformation of the Persian Ghazal: From Amatory Mood to Fixed Form,” in The Ghazal in World Literature II, ed.

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for about a millennium, as having a canon of their own—particular poems that are well known, often imitated, and frequently recited or sung. This canon was never fixed, but organically in flux, with new ghazals becoming canonical as they made a splash among poets and other literati, and the wider populace, while others lost their attraction over time as styles changed. Of course, Persian poets did not typically come to a ghazal soirée to recite the poems of the past masters, but to recite their own compositions, though this not infrequently involved consciously responding to the poems of well-known predecessors by patterning a new ghazal after some recognizable features of an older ghazal belonging to the standard repertoire. This might involve remixing some formal elements of the model poem, such as rhyme, refrain, theme and/or meter, in the hope of saying something traditional yet new. This being the case, we may pose the same set of questions about musical styles and “Oldies” to the history of Persian ghazal poetry. How can we tell when aesthetic traditions change or break apart in Persian poetry? We can be sure that before a consciously neo-classical tradition or style can begin, the classical tradition must be seen to have ended, and have receded at least one or two styles into the past. But what parts of a continuous tradition does a poet pay attention to, and what parts ignore, when he sets himself the conscious task of codifying, preserving or recovering his literary heritage? How does she consciously intervene in affirming or refining, in narrowing or expanding, the canon?9 In the case of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492), given his voracious reading and his apparent ambition to retrospectively command the entire tradition with all its forms, this may be a very difficult question to answer. How can we locate precise influences on him in the case of a ghazal or qaṣīda composed in a frequently imitated rhyme and meter? Some ghazal-structuring motifs, such as the radīf or refrain of imshab (“tonight”), or mapurs (“don’t ask”), come to constitute mini-genres all their own, practiced by dozens of poets, major and minor, over two centuries or more.10 If Jāmī consciously points A. Neuwirth, et al. (Istanbul: Beirut Orient-Institut, and Würzburg: Ergon, 2006), 121–39, and also Franklin Lewis, “Reading, Writing, and Recitation: Sanāʾi and the Origins of the Persian Ghazal” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995), chapter one, esp. 104–11. 9  David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) has helped shape my thinking on this question. 10  Paul Losensky, “ ‘DEMAND, ASK, SEEK’: The Semantics and Rhetoric of the Radīf Ṭalab in the Persian Ghazal,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21, no. 2 (Special Issue: Ottoman Poetry (Fall 1997): 19–40, traces the history of the refrain Ṭalab from the early fourteenth century through the early eighteenth century CE, discovering fifteen poets who wrote a total of twenty-eight ghazals in this mini-genre, beginning with Amīr Khusraw and Ḥasan-i Dihlavī in the fourteenth century; implicating particularly Niʿmatallāh Valī (who

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to Ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390) by default as his model for a given poem, one suspects that Ḥāfiẓ may serve as short-hand for several earlier or coeval exemplars on whom Jāmī has also had his eye.11 We may also note certain absences—structuring motifs used neither by Jāmī nor Ḥāfiẓ, nor other major poets known to influence Jāmī, though they were once quite popular, such as the refrain ātash u āb (fire and water) that appeared in numerous Persian qaṣīdas in the meter mujtathth. This particular “fire-and-water” refrain experienced a meteoric rise to popularity in the last decade of the eleventh through the first decade of the twelfth century, and travelled across most of the Persian-speaking courts until it became almost de rigueur for prominent court poets to compose a poem or two with it. Then, after about a half-century, the fad faded away to appear only rarely in the following six centuries, until it was revived as part of the neo-­classical Bāz-gasht “return” movement in the nineteenth century, by Qāʾānī (1223– 1270/1808–1854).12 A Timurid-era poet like Jāmī, looking back at the dīvāns of poets of the Ghaznavid and Seljuq periods, could presumably find that ātash u āb refrains were once all the rage. But Jāmī has apparently not written any qaṣīdas, ghazals, qiṭʿas or strophic poems, and not even a rubāʿī that tackles the challenge of this ātash u āb refrain. Perhaps he did not have access to many full dīvāns of poets of this era (encountering them instead in anthologized form), or did not look closely at the second-tier poets of earlier eras, or did not find this refrain a compelling or challenging part of the contemporary Persian poetic tradition—not enough, at least, to emulate or to pay homage to it. Even when a particular Timurid literary salon—described by Maḥmūd Vāṣifī in his Badāyiʿ al-vaqāyiʿ (written between about 1510 and 1540 CE)—discussed at one of its sessions a poem of Kātibī-yi Turshīzī (d. 839/1435) that used both tīgh (blade) and āb (water) as its leit-motif, the poets gathered there considered wrote seven such poems) and including Jāmī in the fifteenth century; Bināʾī, Shahīdī of Qum, Ahlī of Shiraz and ʿUrfī in the sixteenth century; as well as a half-dozen poets of the seventeenth century, including especially Ṣāʾib, who composed five such ghazals, until the quest for a better ṭalab refrain apparently petered out with Bīdil in the eighteenth century. 11  Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the SafavidMughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 164–75, shows examples of this with a ghazal of Ḥāfiẓ satirically imitated by Būsḥāq (d. 830/1427) within a generation or two of the former’s death, to which Jāmī later also wrote a reponse; as well as Fighānī’s response to a ghazal of Amīr Khusraw, which also has its eye on an earlier response to the same poem by Jāmī, though from somewhat different stylistic and thematic perspectives, 175–90. 12  Franklin Lewis, “The Rise and Fall of a Persian Refrain: the Radif âtash o âb,” in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed. Suzanne Stetkevych (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 199–226.

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it difficult to write a ghazal including both words in every line, apparently unaware that many poets had done it with the refrain “fire-and-water” in the much longer and therefore more difficult form of the qaṣīda.13 However much the ātash u āb refrain may have once struck a vibrant chord in the tradition, by the perspective of the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century, its currency had expired, and was no longer thought of as an emulable, living element of the poetic reservoir, if it was even remembered at all. Meanwhile, ghazals with the refrain of imshab (“tonight”) do not occur in the corpus of Ḥāfiẓ, but do occur frequently enough in other major poets (e.g., ʿAṭṭār, Mawlānā Rūmī, Amīr Khusraw of Delhi) that we will not be surprised to find them in Jāmī’s oeuvre; with a refrain like mapurs (“don’t ask!”), which Ḥāfiẓ tries out in three separate ghazals, we would find it surprising if Jāmī had not likewise tried his hand at this formula. As it happens, Jāmī attempts imshab once, and mapurs (or a variation thereof, bipurs = “ask!”), six times.14 Is the greater number of mapurs poems due to the fact that Ḥāfiẓ not only emphasized this as a structuring motif by using it in three separate ghazals, but also that these poems came to rank among the particularly famous ghazals in his oeuvre? Or is it because not only Ḥāfiẓ, but also ʿAṭṭār (d. ca. 617/1221), and Mawlānā Rūmī (604–672/1207–1273), and others organized ghazals around this radīf? Where Jāmī himself has not specified or hinted at a specific source for his emulation, is it possible to sift through all possible prior models to pinpoint Jāmī’s likely inspiration(s)? Furthermore, since we have Jāmī’s Dīvān ostensibly periodized into three different chronological eras of his career (more on this, below), will it turn out that he relied on imitation of past masters in youth when cutting his poetic teeth, but became somewhat more original in his use of prior themes in maturity? Would he not tend to develop his own voice as time goes by, such that we can expect him to turn less and less frequently to overt models of the past as they have become fully digested and distilled in his own poetic juices? The answer, as it turns out, would probably be no. Jāmī’s Dīvān contains in its early section (Fātiḥat al-shabāb), a ghazal each in the refrain bipurs and

13  Maria Eva Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate: The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 136, no. 1 (1986): 56–79; esp. 69–70 for a translation of this episode. Vāṣifī also tries to cram the four elements of earth, air, water, fire in every line of one poem, something that earlier poets had also toyed with in creating variations on the āb u ātash refrain. On the dating of Vāṣifī’s memoir, see Maurizio Pistoso, “A Taste for Ambiguity. Reconsidering Maḥmūd Vāṣefi’s Memoirs,” Oriente Moderno, n.s. 15 (76), no. 2 (1996): 165–72. 14  For the emulation of these refrains, see Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlā Khān Afṣaḥzād, 2 vols. (Tehran: Daftar-i Nashr-i Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378Sh/1999).

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mapurs.15 The middle period of his Dīvān (Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd) has neither the mapurs nor the imshab refrain, but in the late period (the Khātimat al-ḥayāt), he has one ghazal in the refrain imshab and four in the refrain mapurs.16 When, and how, does a codifier of a tradition—a collector and admirer, if that is indeed the literary mandate which Jāmī set for himself in the project of his Dīvān, at least as regards the ghazals—avoid curating repetition? Did he not feel what Jackson Bate has called “the burden of the past” bearing down upon him, or what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence”?17 In reprising a traditional image or form, one may revive or recover it where others no longer have general awareness of or access to it, effectively introducing it afresh to a new audience as if for the first time. This would not have been the case with the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ at the time of Jāmī, for whom reprising themes and motifs in the century-old ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ must have instead constituted an act of affirmation of the cultural values that held Ḥāfiẓ to stand at the pinnacle of achievement in the ghazal genre, and we may assume that, at the same time, Jāmī must have hoped to bask in the radiance of that reputation and lend his own ghazals greater gravitas. But, assuming these motivations, we may still ask: what in particular does one try to bring to a javāb, a poem visibly in response to another poem or set of poems, to make the matter of the poem new or fresh, or at least worthy of attention?18 15   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:491–92. 16   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:482 and 585–88. 17  Concepts expounded respectively by Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (New York: Norton, 1970), and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). These concerns weigh heavily on poets of the Romantic period and later, where originality is seen as the touchstone of poetic genius. 18  On the practice of the javāb (response to), and other terms associated with this practice, such as naẓīra-gūʾī (“in-the-vein-of-X”), or istiqbāl (homage, literally “welcoming” of), tatabbuʿ or iqtidā (following), an earlier ghazal in the Persian tradition, see Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate;” Riccardo Zipoli, Technique of the Ğawāb: Replies of Nawāī to Ḥāfiẓ and Ğāmī (Venice: Cafoscarina, 1993); Paul Losensky, “The Allusive Field of Drunkenness,” Three Safavid-Moghul Responses to a Lyric by Bâbâ Fighânî,” in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, edited by Suzanne Stetkevych (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), emphasizes the competitive aspect of this practice, pointing to terms like mushāʿara (poetic contest), musābaqa (competition), and muʿāraḍa (face to face engagement, or as Losensky, citing al-Jurjānī, puts it, “the imitation of a passage in point of style with a view to outdoing the predecessor”), 227–32; Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, centrally addresses the topic all throughout, but especially 100–33 and 193–249, describing these terms as branches of imitatio. See also Lewis, “The Rise and Fall.” Specifically with respect to Jāmī, see Aʿlā-Khān Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī (Tehran: Daftar-i Nashr-i Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378Sh/1999), 357–428. In the Ottoman tradition, see Walter Feldman, “IMITATIO IN OTTOMAN POETRY: Three Ghazals of

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Standing at the End of a Tradition: Jāmī’s Own Place in the “Oldies” Canon

Instead of tackling the question head-on, and scouring the dīvāns of all the major preceeding Persian poets for likely or possible exemplars for each of the vast corpus of ghazals of Jāmī (depending on the editor, Jāmī has between 1,600 to just over 1,800 ghazals),19 this article attempts a more oblique approach. Jāmī, of course, has been called “the Seal of the Poets” (khātim al-shuʿarā) on the analogy of the Prophet Muḥammad being the Seal of the Prophets (khātim al-nabiyyīn), and the analogy of other court poets holding title as poet laureate, or King of Poets (malik al-shuʿarā). Though the source of this moniker remains uncertain, Khwāndamīr (d. 941/1535), writing in the 1520s in his Ḥabīb al-siyar (Lover of Biographies) only three decades or so after the death of Jāmī, claims that his achievement in verse was of such reputation that he had made the dīvāns of previous poets—both “the ancients” and “the moderns” (or maybe “the golden oldies” and “the top 40”)—fall out of favor.20 Conversely, one might also state this negatively, accusing Jāmī of plagiarism or pastiche of his predecessors; in his nineteenth-century anthology, Majmaʿ al-fuṣaḥā (Gathering of the Eloquent), Riḍā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat (1215–1288/1800–1871) quotes, in the course of a brief (but positive) notice on the poet Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī (d. 598/1201), the following verses satirizing Jāmī, without ascribing them: ay bād-i ṣabā bigū bi Jāmī/ān duzd-i sukhanvarān-i nāmī burdī ashʿār-i kuhna vu naw/az Saʿdī u Anvarī u Khusraw

the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21, no. 2 (Special Issue: Ottoman Poetry, Fall 1997): 41–58. 19  There are 1596 ghazals in the section Ghazal-hā in the Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Jāmī, ed. Hāshim Raḍī (n.p.: Chāp-i Pīrūz, 1341Sh/1963), based on the note on page 769, which explains the printing inconsistencies in the sequential numbering of the ghazals. Aʿlā-Khān Afṣaḥzād reckons there are actually 1,608 ghazals in Raḍī’s edition (he has apparently counted a dozen—or a baker’s dozen—of the 66 poems listed by Raḍī in the Qaṣīda section as ghazals, possibly because they are relatively brief). Afṣaḥzād’s own edition of the Dīvān-i Jāmī, 1:27, gives a chart enumerating the number of poems in each of the standard forms, which reckons 1804 ghazals (though, going by the numbering of the ghazals in each section of Afṣaḥzād’s edition, there should be 1,799 or 1,800 ghazals by my count). A more recent edition, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1389Sh/2010), counts only 1,589 ghazals. 20  See Najīb Māyil Haravī, Jāmī (Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i Naw, 1377Sh/1998), 132–34. Khwāndamīr’s wording is: dīvān-i ash‘ār-i mutaqaddimīn va muta’akhkhirīn rā az daraja-yi i‘tibār sāqiṭ gardānīd.

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aknūn ki sar-i Ḥijāz dārī/v-āhang-i ḥijāz dārī dīvān-i Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī/dar Kaʿba biduzd agar biyābī21 O Zephyr, go and tell Jāmī/that robber of our celebrated orators You’ve taken poetry both old and new/from Saʿdī and Anvarī and Khusraw Now you plan to head for the Ḥijāz/and plunder tunes in the mode of ḥijāz The dīvān of Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī?/Steal that, too, if you find it at the Kaʿba! But this was a minoritarian view, and Jāmī’s friend and admirer, Navāʾī, parried such criticism in his own Chaghatay work, Majālis al-nafāʾis (Gatherings of the Precious), begun while Jāmī was still alive, and through his influential position as literary patron.22 Within eighty years of Jāmī’s death, when Ghazālī-yi Mashhadī (ca. 930–980/ca. 1524–1572), a poet who made his way from Shah Ṭahmāsp’s court in Persia to become Akbar’s poet laureate at the Mughal court in India in the late 1560s, claimed that it was he, Ghazālī of Mashhad, who had erected the edifice of poetry on the foundation laid by Saʿdī (d. 691/1292), he received the following withering reply from another Persophone poet in India, a certain Shīrī Siyālkūʾī: Saʿdī nihād kākh-i sukhan rā banā valī Jāmī bi yumn-i himmat-i ʿālī tamām kard dar fann-i shiʿr agar chi Ghazālī-st bīnaẓīr dar silk-i awliyā natavānad maqām kard23 21  Riḍā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat, Majmaʿ al-fuṣaḥā, ed. Maẓāhir-i Muṣaffā, 6 vols. (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1336–1340Sh/1957–61), 2:852. Translations of Persian passages in this article are my own, except where otherwise noted. 22  Māyil Haravī, Jāmī, 168–69 and 169n1, argues that the poet who composed this accusation of literary plagiarism against Jāmī was not Darvīsh Dahakī-yi Qazvīnī, as sometimes reported, but rather Rawghangar-i Mashhadī Hiravī, whom Navāʾī rebuked by writing a disparaging notice on him in the Majālis-i Nafāʾis. See Navāʾī, Tadhkira-yi Majālis alnafāʾis, ed. ʿAli Aṣghar Ḥikmat (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Manūchihrī, 1363Sh/1984), 290–93 on Dahakī, but no entry is given in the index for Rawghangar or Mashhadī. For other examples of how Navāʾī protected Jāmī’s reputation, see Māyil Haravī, Jāmī, 150–51. 23   Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Jāmī, ed. Raḍī, introduction, 227. In the Dīvān-i Ghazālī-yi Mashhadī, ed. Ḥusayn Qurbānpūr-Ārānī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 1388Sh/2009) there is no mention of this or of Jāmī (but as this is titled Āthār al-shabāb, or “works of youth” in one of the manuscripts, which contains his early poems up to the age of thirty or so, perhaps it does not represent the complete Dīvān of Ghazālī-yi Mashhadī). On Ghazālī of Mashhad, see Paul E. Losensky, “Ghazālī Mashhadī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet,

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Saʿdī laid the foundations for the palace of speech, but Jāmī, through his auspicious lofty effort, finished the building.24 In the art of poesy, even if Ghazālī is peerless he cannot win a place for himself among the ranks of the saints. Statements like this probably stem from suggestions planted, orally and in writing, by near-contemporaries of Jāmī, some of whom wrote notices about or even extended biographies of him—such as Dawlatshāh in his Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā (Notices on the Poets, completed 892/1486), or ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī in his aforementioned Turkic tadhkira entitled Majālis al-nafāʾis (completed 897/1492, with additions made as late as 904/1499), Kamāl al-Dīn Gāzurgāhī in his Majālis al-ʿushshāq (Gatherings of the Lovers, w. 908/1502) and Sām Mīrzā in his Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī (The Sāmian Gift, completed ca. 968/1561).25 Some of these suggested that Jāmī was beyond the need for praise, so evident was his greatness and universal recognition. This evidently extended not only to the realm of poesy, but likewise to the realm of purity and hagiography. Nevertheless, Najīb Māyil Haravī speculates that the title “Seal of the Poets” (or “Last of the Poets”) must have been formulated in this form in the later neoclassical period of the Bāz-gasht. As a critical observation, it seems to assume that something has come after the seal, and it precludes the possibility of any poets of real worth having composed after Jāmī, a polemical point resting on an ideological aesthetic premise of the neo-classical period as it looks back on the body of pre- and post-Safavid poetry.26 Regardless of when this notion took root, the association of Jāmī with the “Seal of the Poets” exercised a strong influence on how the critical tradition viewed him in the modern period. E.G. Browne logically rejected this title as hyperbolic, indicating in 1920, “I decline to regard him as the last great classical poet of Persia,” though admitting that he was “certainly one of the most talented, versatile and prolific,” in whom: … the mystical and pantheistic thought of Persia may be said to find its most complete and vivid expression; while, though he may have been Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Published online 2014. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27445. 24  Per a Persian proverb which may well be relevant here, the one who finishes a project is the one who has in fact done the work, which would suggest in this case that Jāmī get credit for the work of completing the poetic tradition. 25  Māyil Haravī, Jāmī, 132. For the notices of Jāmī by Navāʾī, see the two Persian translations (ca. 1520 CE) of Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 56 and 229–30. 26  Māyil Haravī, Jāmī, 133.

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equaled or even surpassed by others in each of the numerous realms of literature which he cultivated, no other Persian poet or writer has been so successful in so many different fields, and the enthusiastic admiration of his most eminent contemporaries is justified by his prolific and manysided genius.27 ʿAlī-Aṣghar Ḥikmat, the first to write a modern biography of Jāmī in 1941, included “khātim al-shuʿarā” in the title of his monograph, considering “Seal of the Poets” an integral part of the poet’s identity.28 He suggests that Jāmī’s reputation among the Safavids suffered because of their anti-Sunni proclivities, as compared to India, where he became more popular than in Iran.29 Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā in his three-volume anthology of Persian literature, Ganj-i sukhan, affirms ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī as “the seal of the great master poets” (khātim-i shāʿirān-i buzurg va ustād), and ticks off a short list of the ghazal poets between Ḥāfiẓ and Jāmī whom Ṣafā considers worthy of note, most of them inspired by mystical sensibility (dhawq-i ʿirfānī): Maghribī-yi Tabrīzī (d. 810/1408), ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārī (d. 840/1436), Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī-yi Kirmānī (d. 834/1431), Qāsim-i Anvār (d. 839/1435), and Amīr Shāhī Sabzavārī (d. 857/1453). Of these, only Amīr Shāhī was possibly still alive and active circa 855/1450 when Jāmī was introduced to the Timurid court of Abū l-Qāsim Bābur, the grandson of Shāhrukh Mīrzā and the son of Bāysunghur.30 Ṣafā sees the Persian ghazal evolving at the end of the fourteenth century of the common era—that is, after Ḥāfiẓ—toward increasingly complex flights of imagery (khayāl) and a plumbing of the depths of emotion, as the language of poetry grew farther and farther away from the simple idioms of speech. He associates this trend in particular with the late Timurid court under Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā at Herat (r. 873–911/1469–1506), and especially with the poets Fighānī (d. 925/1519), Umīdī (864–929/1460– 1523), and Hilālī Chaghatāʾī (d. 935/1528), in the generation after Jāmī and ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī. This, according to Ṣafā, eventually develops into the style known as 27  Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia, vol. 3: The Tartar Dominion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 507–48, covers Jāmī at great length, indeed greater length than he had initially intended, but opines that to do him proper justice would require a separate monograph (542). As far as comparing him stylistically to his predecessors, Browne, albeit through an intermediary, calls Jāmī simpler and more accessible than Niẓāmī in his narrative romances, though less deep and subtle (540–41), an assessment unlikely to stir controversy. 28  ʿAlī-Aṣghar Ḥikmat, Jāmī: Mutaḍammin-i taḥqīqat dar tārīkh-i aḥvāl va āthār-i manẓūm va manthūr-i khātam al-shuʿarā (Tehran: Bānkmillī-yi Īrān, 1320Sh/1941). 29  Ḥikmat, Jāmī, 51–54. 30  An early work of Jāmī, Ḥilya-yi ḥulal, was dedicated to the Timurid ruler, Abū l-Qāsim Bābur in 1452.

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Sabk-i hindī (the “Indian Style”), so named by its proponents, again according to Ṣafā, because of its affiliation with the Timurids, although some have preferred to call it the “Iṣfahānī style.”31 Ehsan Yarshater, in his monograph on the “Persian Poetry of the Era of Shahrokh,” written as a young man in 1946,32 agrees that the conceptual complexification of topic and metaphor that is characteristic of the Safavid era can already be seen in poets of the Timurid period and before, beginning with Amīr Khusraw (651–725/1253–1325), Ḥasan-i Dihlavī (Sijzī, 651–729/1253– 1328, or 655–737/1257–1336), and those who followed them, such as Kamāl-i Khujandī (d. 803/1401), Kātibī-yi Turshīzī (d. 839/1435), Basāṭī-yi Samarqandī (d. 814/1411), Khayālī of Bukhara (d. 850/1446), Ādharī of Ṭūs (d. 866/1462), and Amīr Humāyūn Isfarāyinī (d. 902/1496 or 910/1504)—all of which can be seen, according to Yarshater, in this line of Amīr Shāhī (766–857/1363–1453): Shāhī khayāl-i khāṣṣ bigū az dahān-i dūst chun nīst lidhdhatī sukhanān-i shinūda rā33 Shāhī, give us a special image from the mouth of the Friend Because the poetry we’ve heard already gives no pleasure. Jāmī serves as the terminal book-end to the second volume of Ṣafā’s threevolume Ganj-i sukhan (Treasure of Speech), which covers in the first volume Rūdakī to Anvarī (early tenth to late twelfth century CE), in the second from Niẓāmī to Jāmī (late twelfth to late fifteenth century CE), and in the third from Bābā Fighānī to Malik al-shuʿarā Bahār (sixteenth to twentieth century CE). The second volume opens with Niẓāmī of Ganja as the forty-second of the one hundred eleven poets covered in this anthology, and the volume closes with Jāmī as the sixty-eighth poet, suggesting that there are approximately 31  Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā, Ganj-i sukhan: Shāʿirān-i buzurg-i pārsī-gū va muntakhab-ī az āthār-i ānān, 3 vols. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Dānishgāh, 1960), citing the 2nd edition (Tehran: Ibn Sīnā, Isfand 1339Sh/1961), 1:lxx–lxxi. 32  Ehsan Yarshater (Iḥsān Yārshāṭir), Shiʿr-i fārsī dar ʿahd-i Shāhrukh (nīma-yi avval-i qarn-i nuhum, yā āghāz-i inḥiṭāṭ dar shiʿr-i fārsī, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1383Sh/2004), indicates in the unpaginated frontispiece and the beginning of his introduction to the second edition, that this book was completed as his University of Tehran Thesis in 1325sh/1946 and was ready for publication the next year, 1326Sh/1947, but because he went to study in Europe, it did not get published until 1343Sh/1955. 33  Yarshater, Shiʿr-i fārsī dar ʿahd-i Shāhrukh, 114–15. The first miṣrāʿ is perhaps ambiguous— relate something from the mouth of the friend (i.e., a description that the friend has uttered), or give some description about the friend’s mouth—though the next line seems to resolve the ambiguity in favor of the former reading.

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seventy or so “great master poets” of the Persian tradition upon whose shoulders Jāmī stands. Ṣafā does not tell us much more than this about the specifics of Jāmī’s relationship to that earlier tradition, except for the brief assertion that he follows Niẓāmī (d. 605/1209, or perhaps as late as 1217) in his mathnavīs, Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ in his ghazals, and the qaṣīda-writers of western Persia and Mesopotamia (ʿirāq) in his odes. Lest we take away the impression that his work is entirely derivative, Ṣafā adds that one should not discount Jāmī’s role as innovator with respect to certain themes or moods (maḍāmīn), his power of expression (qudrat-i bayān), and the semiotic appeal or inherent subtlety of his meanings (luṭf-i maʿānī). Thus, although Jāmī does not reach to the level of the great masters before him, he holds for Ṣafā a special place and importance in the canon of Persian poetry.34 This influential work was used as a textbook in university courses in Iran and therefore perhaps played a role in fixing the conventional wisdom about Jāmī in the thinking of a large number of Iranian Persian-speakers.35 Ṣafā gives more in-depth treatment to Jāmī in his literary history, Tārīkh-i adabiyyāt dar īrān, where he calls Jāmī “the greatest master after the era of Ḥāfiẓ” and “in the view of a great many scholars” (here, in a footnote, we are provided with about two dozen pre-modern and modern items of bibliography), “the seal of the great Persian poets.”36 A few short years earlier, Arberry had taken this quite literally, staging Jāmī as the final of sixteen chapters in his 1958 work Classical Persian Literature, separating Jāmī from the Timurid Historians (chapter fourteen) and the Fifteenth-Century Poets (chapter fifteen). These poets follow immediately on the heels of the chapter on Ḥāfiẓ (chapter thirteen), while the latter’s contemporaries appear in “Some Fourteenth-Century Poets” (chapter twelve). Jāmī 34  Ṣafā, Ganj-i sukhan, 2:288–89. 35  Afghan and Tajik textbooks may well have given a rather different impression, likely even more prominent, of the poet’s place in the literary pantheon, but I have not as yet investigated them. In Iran, Ṣafā also prepared a six-volume companion anthology for university students of Persian prose history: Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā, Ganjīna-yi sukhan: Pārsīnivīsān-i buzurg va muntakhab-i āthār-i ānān, 6 vols. (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1969; 2nd ed., Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1974). These volumes cover, respectively, vol. 1: Abū Manṣūr Muʿammirī to Abū l-Faḍl Bayhaqī, with an introduction on the historical evolution of Persian prose; vol. 2: Nāṣir Khusraw to Muntakhab al-Dīn Juvaynī; vol. 3: Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī to Mubārak Shāh; vol. 4: Minhaj-i Sirāj to Sharaf al-Dīn Rāmī; vol. 5: Sirāj-i Urmavī to ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd; and vol. 6: Faṣīḥ Khavāfī to Kāshifī-yi Sabzavārī. Since Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī (840–910/1437–1505) died at the beginning of the Safavid era, this canon effectively excludes any writers flourishing after the Timurid era, from the Sabk-i hindī period through to the modern era. 36  Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā, Tārīkh-i adabiyyāt dar īrān, vol. 4: Az pāyān-i qarn-i hashtum tā avāyil-i qarn-i dahum-i hijrī, 4th printing (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Firdaws, 1366Sh/1987), 347–48.

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then, receives a chapter of his own, distinct from his contemporaries, just like Ḥāfiẓ, who died thirty-one years before Jāmī was born. This seems not unreasonable for one whom Arberry claims is “the man universally regarded as the last eminent figure in the history of classical Persian literature”37 and “among the most erudite of Persian poets.”38 Arberry’s judgment of his lyrical poetry is that “he has dwarfed all who have come after him. Coming so late in the classical tradition, he inevitably had little new to add to what the great figures of the past had said;” this would require a new outside inspiration, but Jāmī has thoroughly studied Anvarī (d. probably after 582/1186), Khāqānī (d. ca. 595/1199), Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ, Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw, “yet he fused together these diverse elements and produced out of the amalgam an individual style of great fluency and brilliance, a diction permeated above all else by the language and the ideas of mysticism.”39 J.T.P. de Bruijn, in his concise treatment of Persian Sufi Poetry, likewise quite literally closes his book with Jāmī (primarily as writer of a heptad of mathnavīs), because he marks “the boundary we have set for our discussion,” after which ensue “dramatic changes” in the “political and cultural life of Persia” wrought by the coming of the Safavids, who brought with them “in many respects a new orientation and a shift of emphasis also in spiritual life. Since Imami Shiʿsm became the religion of the rulers and of the people, the role of Sufism became less dominating than it had been during the Middle Ages.”40 This does not mean that Sufi poetry ceased to appear in Persian altogether, but “it cannot be denied that the great Sufi poets and their works were never surpassed in subsequent centuries,” concludes De Bruijn, thus simultaneously suggesting the advent of the sixteenth century as the chronological border for the end of Sunni poetry, and the death of Jāmī as the watershed moment for the end of Sufi poetry.41 Reuben Levy does not leave Jāmī all alone at the end of his Introduction to Persian Literature; his ninth and last chapter is entitled “The Modern Era” and includes, along with Jāmī, the rather motley crew of the Safavid dynasty, followed by Qāʾānī (1808–1854), Bahār (1885–1951), Īraj Mīrzā (1874–1926), Ṣādiq Hidāyat (1903–1951) and Muḥammad-ʿAlī Jamālzāda (1892–1997). We certainly recognize this as a classicist’s view of the literary history, though even a 37  A.J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (Curzon, 1958; reprint, Oxon: Routledge/Curzon, 1994, and again digitally in 2004), 425. 38  Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 426. 39  Arberry, Classical Persian Literature, 433. 40  J.T.P. de Bruijn, Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997), 124. 41  de Bruijn, Sufi Poetry, 123–24.

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determined preference for the longue durée over histoire événementielle does not make it easy to see how to group Jāmī and Jamālzāda in one container. Levy’s book was published posthumously in 1969 (he died in September 1966), but was probably written in the early mid-1960s, while Jamālzāda was still very much alive and active. Levy has the virtue of including contemporary Persian literature in his history, which Arberry and Ṣafā, writing a decade or less before him, do not. However, it comes at the cost of effectively telescoping Jāmī into the category of a contemporary author. After describing the prodigious surviving record of Persian verse up to the period of Jāmī, Levy explains that he has presented only the “highest peaks in the great ranges of Persian poetry,” for to list the multitudinous “names of versifiers” in the tradition “would have little point.”42 But, Jāmī bears mention as having worked in the classical tradition of Saʿdi, Nizami and Hafiz. He did not achieve the standards set by his predecessors but the extent and variety of his compositions made an impression on his fellow countrymen, whose opinions were followed in the West to the extent that several of his works were translated into European languages.43 Beyond this, however, Jāmī’s Sufi connections led him to employ the obscure verbiage of his kind, allied to elaborate metaphors, flowery language, and an exaggerated accumulation of epithets. Defects of this nature, indulged in to excess in both verse and prose, became common with writers in the period following Jami, until their work became the butt of parody and ridicule.44 Here, Levy quotes in translation a passage from Jāmī’s Bahāristān which demonstrates the type of rhetorical gongorisms he has in mind, but quickly excuses our poet, saying that “this involved floweriness must not be taken as typical of Jāmī’s work in general, but it vitiated much of Persian writing, especially in India, in the three centuries after him.”45 So, for Levy, Jāmī is the plug in the dyke holding back the deluge, one whose theosophical preoccupations and encoded mysticism would have carried 42  Reuben Levy, An Introduction to Persian Literature (NY and London: Columbia University Press, 1969), 158. 43  Levy, Persian Literature, 158–59. 44  Levy, Persian Literature, 159. 45  Levy, Persian Literature, 160.

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him off into the lowland swamps of Sabk-i hindī, had he not sought the poetic high-ground of Saʿdī, Niẓāmī and Ḥāfiẓ to emulate. But except for the sheer mountain of material that Jāmī reworked, it was the quantity and not the quality of his work that justified the translation attention showered upon him by Europeans. This view is not far removed from that of Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Mu’taman, writing in 1960, that Jāmī is rather formulaic in his ghazals—which are usually seven lines long, and though not wholly devoid of charm, lacking the passion and brilliance of the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ, and the complexity and innovation of the later Indian style writers.46 Dāryūsh Ṣabūr’s 1976 study of “The Horizons of the Ghazal” covers the development and styles of the form, but does not take much note of Jāmī one way or the other, except to seemingly dismiss him as belonging to a drab era lacking innovation.47 By the time we reach Ehsan Yarshater’s 1988 edited volume on Persian Literature,48 the scholarly tradition is paying lip-service to the memory of Jāmī, though the quantity of his output no longer seems to impress as it had in the nineteenth century. Jāmī features in a two-page section, “Jāmī and Others,” toward the end of J. Christoph Bürgel’s chapter on the Romance in the Persian tradition, though the “Others” seem of greater interest than Jāmī.49 In the chapter on “Lyric Poetry,” Heshmat Moayyad describes Jāmī as a “remarkable poet,” “a Sufi scholar and prolific author, who was also a poet of love and mysticism” that “left his mark on the history of Persian literature,” but no room is given for any translated examples of his poetry. Jāmī marks the shift in style to the Indian School that reigned for the 250 years that followed him, a school in which scholarship was then beginning to take renewed interest. If literary historians have now turned to welcome and even celebrate the so-called Sabk-i hindī, or poets of various other styles, Maktab-i vuqūʿ (“Realist School”) and Tāza-gūʾī, or Shīva-yi tāza (“Fresh Style”), etc., as a critically interesting and successful direction in Persian letters, as Moayyad already suggested in 1988,50 then to the extent that Jāmī marks the boundary of the prior style (the “Oldies”), he seems certain to suffer neglect—caught at the backward edge of 46  Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Muʾtaman, Taḥavvul-i shiʿr-i fārsī (Tehran: Ṭahūrī, 1339Sh/1960; 4th printing, 1371Sh/1993), 340. 47  Dāryūsh Ṣabūr, Āfāq-i ghazal-i fārsī: Sayr-i intiqādī dar taḥavvul-i ghazal va taghazzul az āghāz tā imrūz (n.p.: Padīda, 2535 Imperial Pahlavī/1976), 564. 48   Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Columbia University/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988). 49  J.C. Bürgel, “The Romance,” in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Columbia University/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 175–76. 50  Heshmat Moayyad, “Lyric Poetry,” in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Columbia University/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 144.

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a transition period. Ehsan Yarshater, in his chapter on “The Indian or Safavid Style,” for example, makes almost no mention of Jāmī, except in a tangential context, as a model much appreciated—along with ʿUrfī, Ṣāʾib and Shawkat— for the Ottoman poets, in which opinion Yarshater follows E.J.W. Gibb’s History of Ottoman literature.51 Jan Rypka, writing in 1967, sees Herat in the Timurid era as the site where the Indian style first takes root, with the popularity of the Khamsa of Amīr Khusraw beginning to supercede that of Niẓāmī’s Khamsa, and, a tendency for poets to treat the contents of their ghazals more concretely, specifically poets like Bināʾī of Herat (Banāʾī or Bannāʾī, k. 918/1513), Jāmī, Navāʾī and Sayfī Bukhārāʾī (d. 1504).52 Thus, Herat is a locus for a change in style, a change which turns the pre-Timurid period into the “Oldies,” and the Samanid, Ghaznavid, and Seljuq periods into ancient history. Rypka also holds a positive view of Jāmī, attributing to him the virtues of “a relative lucidity and simplicity as compared with the pomposity and perverseness of the 9th/15th century,” though at the same time, he was a “brilliant epigone” who knew how to “open all the registers of an extravagant style” and to rewrite, or “bring available material elegantly into harmony with the demands of the period.” For Rypka, Jāmī aims not just to “put old stories to new tunes” (a quote from Jāmī, himself), but, and here he quotes Bertel’s: “Jāmī tried his skill at all genres of poetry … in order to prove his basic theory that a work lives not by its form, as was commonly thought at the time, but by the profundity of its content.”53

51  Ehsan Yarshater, “The Indian or Safavid Style: Progress or Decline?,” in Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Columbia University/Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 257, citing E.J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, 6 vols. (London: Luzac & Co., 1900–1909), 1:5, and 3:247–48. Yarshater also reminds us that Shiblī Nuʿmānī did not see the fifteenth century as beginning a decline in Persian poetry; if there is decline, Shiblī places it rather in the eighteenth century with poets like Bīdil, a notion which recent work by Hajnalka Kovacs, “ ‘The Tavern of the Manifestation of Realities’: The ‘Masnavi Muhit-i azam’ by Mirza Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1644–1720),” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2013); and MuḥammadRiḍā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Shāʿir-i āyina-hā: Bar-rasī-yi sabk-i hindī va shiʿr-i Bīdil (Tehran: Muʼassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Ā gāh, 1366Sh/1988) with respect to Bīdil, and Shams-i Langarūdī, Paul Losensky, Rajeev Kinra and others more generally have successfully challenged. 52  Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, edited by Karl Jahn. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 283, and 282, following the argument of A. Mirzoyev for the ghazal. On Bināʾī (Banāʾī) see 284, and especially the section on Bināʾī (Binoī) as a Tajik “Sabk-i Hindī” writer in Jiří Bečka,”Tajik Literature from the 16th Century to the Present,” History of Iranian Literature, ed. Jahn, 496–500. On Sayfi Bukhārāʾī, who came to Navāʾī’s circle at Herat as a youth, but had to leave due to bad behavior (quarrelsome drunkenness) before returning in 1510, see Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 57–58 and 230–31. 53  Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 287, quoting Bertel’s, Navoyi, 158.

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E.E. Bertel’s’ posthumously published study of Navāʾī and Jāmī (1965) makes it clear that Jāmī and Navāʾī hold a central place for him in the tradition of Persian letters; he also felt they should be treated in tandem, maintaining that their oeuvres were mutually illuminating and they could not be properly understood in isolation, as distinct figures.54 Sīrūs Shamīsā, in his history of the ghazal, briefly suggests that the oeuvre of Jāmī and other temporally proximate poets, such as Bābā Fighānī, can actually be seen as exemplifying a transitionary stage between that huge category, the “ʿIrāqī style,” and the equally capacious “Indian style” that followed it.55 This may hold out some hope for rehabilitating Jāmī’s legacy looking in a forward, rather than a chronologically backward direction. Let us then leave behind consideration of Jāmī as “Seal of the Poets,” and turn to Navāʾī, and his relationship both to Jāmī and to the tradition of Persian poetry that came before him. 3

Emulating the Canon: Navāʾī and His Homage to Ghazal Poets, Past and Present

ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī (844–906/1441–1501), the vizier of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, used the takhalluṣ of Navāʾī (“the melodious one”) when writing in Chaghatay Turkish, but signed his ghazals with the takhalluṣ of Fānī (“the effaced” or “ephemeral one”) when writing in Persian. This does indeed seem to reflect Navāʾī’s own sense of the relative station he holds in the canon of both traditions. Despite his argument for the superiority of Chaghatay poetry over Persian poetry, he was steeped in the Persian tradition, having memorized 50,000 lines of Persian verse in his youth and most of the poetry of Jāmī,56 in the compilation of which he played a central editorial role, as we shall see below. Navāʾī/ Fānī has left us a Persian dīvān containing 485 ghazals.57 As with Jāmī, seven lines is a normative length for Navāʾī’s ghazals, though he also has some as long as eight or nine lines, and some at six lines, though rarely longer or shorter than that. He often tells us via a rubric immediately preceding each ghazal whether 54  Evgeniĭ Ė duardovich Bertelʹs, Navoi i Dzhami, vol. 4 of Izbrannye trudy, ed. I.S. Braginskiĭ (Moscow: Nauka, Izd-vo vostochnoĭ lit-ry, 1965); a similar assumption is shared by Māyil Haravī in his 1998 book, Jāmī. 55  Sīrūs Shamīsā, Sayr-i ghazal dar shiʿr-i fārsī, 6th printing (Tehran: Firdaws, 1369Sh/1990), 151. 56  ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī, Muḥākamat al-lughatain, ed. and trans. Robert Devereux (Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1966), 31 and 36 in the English, 25 and 29 in the Turkish. 57   Dīvān-i Amīr Niẓām al-Dīn ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī, “Fānī,” ed. Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh (Tehran: Asāṭīr, 1375Sh/1996).

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he is composing in an original vein (ikhtirāʿ or mukhtaraʿ), or emulating another poet, signaled in the latter case by phrases such as “after X” (tatabbuʿ-i), “in the style of X” (dar ṭawr-i), or “in response to X” (dar javāb-i), etc. A tabulation of these poems shows us something significant about the way that Navāʾī/Fānī positioned himself with respect to the classical poets of the ghazal tradition, as well as a few contemporaries, and quite likely reveals, in addition, something of Jāmī’s relationship to the literary past and present (see Table 15.1: Ghazals in the Dīvān of Navāʾī/Fānī and the source of their inspiration, p. 484 below). Some of the individuals mentioned in the titles to Navāʾī’s poems were still living, and will have been people Jāmī knew, and with whom he perhaps participated in ghazal soirées. But 227 ghazals, a little under half of Navāʾī’s total output, are in conversation with poetic examples from Ḥāfiẓ (to whom Navāʾī’s Dīvān simply refers as Khwāja, “his eminence”). Clearly, from Navāʾī’s standpoint at the end of the fifteenth century, Ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390) towers above all other practitioners of the ghazal. The next most important classical poets for the later Timurid literati working in the ghazal form would appear to be Amīr Khusraw (d. 725/1325), whom Navāʾī usually just calls Mīr (short for Amīr, or “Commander,” but perhaps not unlike the obsolete British slang, “guv’nah”); the inimitable Saʿdī (d. 691/1292), whom Navāʾī refers to simply as Shaykh (“wise elder”); and Kamāl-i Khujandī (d. 803/1401), described as Shaykh-i kamāl, “The Shaykh of Perfection.”58 Together, these three (Amīr Khusraw, Saʿdī and Kamāl-i Khujandī) provide the working models for another fifty or so of Navāʾī’s ghazals (in some cases a single ghazal will follow the example of both Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ at the same time, or both Amīr Khusraw and Ḥāfiẓ).59 Saʿdī, then, is the oldest poet to whom Navāʾī turns for inspiration in the ghazal, and if Ḥāfiẓ is the most frequently imitated, Amīr Khusraw and his friend Khwāja Ḥasan-i Dihlavī (d. ca. 737/1336),60 as well as Salmān-i Sāvajī (d. ca. 778/1376),61 constitute poetic models from the era between Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ. In the generation or two after Ḥāfiẓ, that is, during the early Timurid reigns after Timur’s death, we encounter Kātibī-yi Turshīzī (d. 839/1435),62

58   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 166, 235–36, 249–50, 992. Note that elsewhere in his works Jāmī uses “Kamāl” to refer to Kamāl al-Din Iṣmāʿīl-i Iṣfahānī, as we shall see below. 59  For an example of the latter, see Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 240. 60  Aziz Ahmad, “Ḥasan Dihlawī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. Published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2765. Different dates are given by Jan Marek in History of Iranian Literature, 717–18. 61  Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 261–62. 62  I. Dehghan, “Kātibī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. Published online 2012. dx.doi. org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_4024.

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ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārī (d. 840/1436, called Khwāja ʿIṣmat by Navāʾī),63 and Amīr Shāhī Sabzavārī (d. 857/1453, called Mawlānā Shāhī by Navāʾī).64 Navāʾī seems to have admired Mawlānā Shāhī and Mawlānā Kātibī as the greatest ghazal poets of the first half of the ninth/fifteenth century,65 although Jāmī does not appear to share this view, at least for Kātibī, about whose verse Jāmī makes some dismissive remarks.66 But Navāʾī mentions even more immediate contemporaries, such as the seven poems written in response to some unnamed friends (baʿḍī yārān), dear ones (ʿazīzān), contemporaries of sensibility (baʿḍī ẓurafā-yi zamān), or a couple of examples inspired by poems of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (d. 911/1506). Then there are a handful of scattered poems, by Sayfī the Turk (i.e., Sayfī of Bukhara, d. 1504, who wrote a work on prosody just before the death of Jāmī, and was celebrated for his ghazals);67 by Mīr Suhaylī (a contemporary poet mentioned by Dawlatshāh, who is also said, like Navāʾī, to have composed dīvāns in Turkish in addition to Persian, and, like Navāʾī, to have worked as a minister for Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā);68 Mīr Vafāʾī (Mīr Ḥājjī Aḥmad);69 Ṣāḥib Balkhī (elsewhere with the takhalluṣ of Sharīfī);70 and Mawlānā Kāhī (who joined the circle of Navāʾī and Jāmī for about seven years and then later went to Akbar’s court in India).71 63  Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā, “ʿEṢMAT BOḴĀRĪ, Ḵᵛāja ʿEṢMAT-ALLĀH,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online. Last updated December 15, 1998, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ esmat-bokari. 64   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 64–65. 65  Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 284. 66  Dehghan, “Kātibī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. 67  Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 282 and 297. 68   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 62–63; Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 509–13, devotes an entry to Niẓām al-Dīn Shaykh Aḥmad Amīr Suhaylī immediately after the entries on Jāmī and Navāʾī in the epilogue (Khātima-yi kitāb). See also the notice on “(A)mīr Shaykham Suhaylī” in Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 56–57 and 230. 69   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 64. Navāʾī, in the Persian translations of his Majālis al-nafāʾis, speaks about a certain Mawlānā Zamānī who used the takhalluṣ of “Vafāʾī” until Navāʾī asked him to stop, both because his patron was Mīrzā Badīʿ al-Zamān (hence he should be using the pen-name “Zamānī”), and because another poet—apparently the Mīr Vafāʾī intended in Navāʾī’s Dīvān—had already adopted the takhalluṣ Vafāʾī. See Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 76, 252, and on 301, where this poet is associated with the court of the late Āq Quyūnlū ruler, Sulṭān Yaʿqūb. 70   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 63–64. See also Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 16n1, who indicates that Dawlatshāh calls him Sharīfī (though Navāʾī, 139, also notes a different Sharīfī from Mashhad). 71   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 65 and Jan Marek in “Persian Literature in India,” in his chapter of Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 723. The long lifespan (b. ca. 868/1464

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For all the mention of contemporaries and friends on whom Navāʾī modeled poems—and here we may speculate that this would often have happened in a literary majlis or soirée where the group of friendly rival poets gathered together to read their work—he also describes at least ninety-one poems as original to himself (ikhtirāʿ or mukhtaraʿ), presumably because he did not have in mind a specific predecessor poem as he composed it, or because the metaphorical, tropological, or rhetorical features make the poems stand out as imprinted with a new ethos. In any case, he holds some criteria in mind that sets them apart from poems acknowledged as imitations of, responses to, or compositions after the model of another poet. Some ten percent of the total output of Navāʾī’s ghazals, ­forty-six by my tally, are not connected with the name of another poet. This occurs sometimes by random accidence;72 sometimes when a new rhyme letter begins and an alphabetical heading is therefore introduced above a ghazal to mark the new section (e.g., ḥarf-i “B,” etc.);73 or when a poem is described as being in praise of the Prophet (naʿt),74 in which case there is usually no further explanation given; or when a poem is described as “also by him” (va lahu ayḍan or ayḍan lahu), a heading that presumably confirms authorship by Navāʾī, but neglects to say anything about sources of inspiration.75 A quite significant number, forty-three ghazals, are described as emulations of the poems of Jāmī (to whom Navāʾī usually refers deferentially as makhdūm, makhdūmī, or makhdūmī-yi nūrā, “my lord” or “my illumined lord”), and, in addition, Navāʾī turns one of Jāmī’s nine-line ghazals (dīdamī dīdār-i ān dildār-i raʿnā kāshkī = would that I had seen the fetching face of that heart-stopping beauty)76 into an eighteen-line strophic musaddas poem (gar dam-ī dar khāk-i kū-yi dūst ma’vā kāshkī = would there were refuge in the lane of the beloved

and d. 988/1580) accepted by Marek for Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad Kāhī seems unrealistic. See also Munibur Rahman, “Kāhī.,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. First published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_8742. 72   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 69–72, 79, etc. 73   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 85, 132, 134, 135, 193, 214–215, 222, 227, 278, 286, but not e.g., 136, 197, 201, 217, 218, 220, 260, and 293, where the first poem beginning the rhymes in “D,” “S,” “Sh,” “F,” “Q,” “K,” “N” and “Y” are “in the style of Ḥāfiẓ” (dar ṭawr-i Khwāja) or “following Ḥāfiẓ” (dar tatabbuʿ-i Khwāja). 74   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 68, 120, 221, etc. Note that at least one poem (220) is described as praise of the Prophet in the style of Ḥāfiẓ (naʿt—tatabbuʿ-i Khwāja). 75   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 103–105, 284–85, etc. Occasionally a poem (e.g., 221) is described both as “also by Navāʾī” (ayḍan lahu), and at the same time, as “in the style of Ḥāfiẓ” (tatabbuʿ-i Khwāja). 76   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:383–82.

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Table 15.1 Ghazals in the Dīvān of Navāʾī/Fānī and the source of their inspiration

Name of Poet Emulated

# of ghazals Notes

Ḥāfiẓ original inspirations of Navāʾī/Fānī [no title or unknown]

227 91

Jāmī Amīr Khusraw of Delhi

43 27

Saʿdī “various friends” Kamāl-i Khujandī Mawlānā Shāhī

21 6 5 3

46

usually referred to simply as “Khwāja” ikhtirāʿ or mukhtaraʿ

Mīr Suhaylī = Niẓām al-Dīn Shaykh Aḥmad Amīr Suhaylī

3

Mīr Vafāʾī

2

Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā Khwāja Ḥasan Salmān-i Sāvajī ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārī Mawlānā Ṣāḥib Balkhī

2 2 2 1 1

Mawlānā Kāhī

1

Mawlānā Kātibī Sayfī-yi Turk

1 1

“For various contemporaries of taste” “reply to the past poem,” or “reply to a poem of the past”

1

slightly less than 10% of the ghazals have no title or give a title with insufficient information to confidently trace a model (e.g., ayḍan lahu) often called makhdūmī or makhdūmī-yi nūrā usually “Mīr,” or occasionally “Amīr Khusraw” or “Amīr.” While other poets are called Mīr in the Dīvān, they are described with further qualifiers (see below, Mīr Suhaylī, Mīr Vavāʾī). described as “Shaykh” baʿḍī yārān or ʿazīzān described as “Shaykh-i Kamāl” probably Amīr Shāhī Sabzavārī, who died in Gorgan during reign of Sulṭān Abū l-Qāsim Bābur note that Mīr Suhaylī, Mīr Vafāʾī, and Mīr indicate different people, the latter usually Amīr Khusraw. One poem for a “dear friend” (yār-i ʿazīz, p. 62 and p. 81) may also be for Mīr Suhaylī Mīr Vafāʾī (Mīr Ḥājjī Aḥmad). Note that “Mīr” is also used for Amīr Khusraw and Mīr Suhaylī Sulṭān al-fuḍalā Ḥusaynī Khalada llāhu mulkahu likely Ḥasan-i Dihlavī, friend of Amīr Khusraw called “Khwāja Salmān” called “Khwāja ʿIṣmat” his pen-name was Sharīfī, mentioned in Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad, who joined the circle of Jāmī and Navāʾī and later went to India Kātibī-yi Turshīzī, friend of Navāʾī probably Sayfī ʿArūḍī of Bukhara, who wrote ghazals and a work on prosody in 896/1491 baʿḍī ẓurafā-yi zamān

1

dar javāb-i shiʿr-i māḍī

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but for a moment),77 and also dedicates a long tarkīb-band to eulogizing Jāmī’s death (har dam az anjuman-i dahr jafāʾī digar ast = every instant comes a new aggression from the assembly of Time).78 Even some of the poems marked as original inspirations (mukhtaraʿ) cannot help mentioning Jāmī in the takhalluṣ-line as Fānī signs off, which makes the claims of total originality less compelling.79 Indeed, Fānī often depicts himself sipping from the chalice of Jāmī, as if all poesy spilled from the latter’s cup.80 For these forty-four poems that respond to one of Jāmī’s ghazals, we may of course reasonably ask whether, when Navāʾī/Fānī draws on a Jāmī poem as model, he does not at the same time emulate, consciously or subconsciously, some other earlier poem, which Jāmī had in turn had his eye upon? For example, in the one Persian qaṣīda that survives from Navāʾī, titled Tuḥfat al-afkār (Gift of Thought),81 he follows Jāmī’s long qaṣīda called Lujjat al-asrār (Billowing Secrets).82 But at the same time, as its title suggests, Jāmī composed that poem in response to Amīr Khusraw’s ode titled Baḥr al-abrār (Sea of the Righteous). These three poems form a responsory triad, the name of each rhyming with the other (afkār, asrār, abrār), meaning that Navāʾī may here draw upon a twofold source of emulation. Navāʾī explicitly points to the intertwined intertextual currents of influence in a ghazal modeled on a poem of Ḥasan-i Dihlavī (dar tatabbuʿ-i Khwāja Ḥasan), as he calls himself out: Khusraw u Ḥāfiẓ tu rā Fānī agar hādī and payruvī-yi Jāmī-at hast bi vajh-i Ḥasan83 If Khusraw and Ḥāfiẓ are your guides, Fānī Your following of Jāmī is by means of Ḥasan. What emerges from these statistics is a very selective list of past and present poets who represent or epitomize the entirety of the Persian ghazal tradition for Navāʾī himself, and likely also for his circle. Ḥāfiẓ absolutely dominates the 77  Titled, “ghazal-i ḥaḍrat-i makhdūm ast ki bi ḥukm-i ʿālī musaddas karda shuda ast,” in Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 317–19. 78  Titled “marthiyya-yi ḥaḍrat-i makhdūm-i nūrā, lillāhi marqaduhu” in Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 319–22. 79   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 200, 225. 80  E.g., Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 201, bāda-yi Ḥāfiẓ magar az jām-i Jāmī kard nūsh = as if he drank the wine of Ḥāfiẓ from the chalice of Jāmī. 81   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 59–62. 82   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:68–77. 83   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 266. See below the section “8. The Circumscribed Catalogues of Jāmī and Fānī,” pp. 519–20 for further examples of this.

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horizon of the ghazal as a singularly towering figure of inspiration in the eyes of Navāʾī. Even though the oeuvre of Ḥāfiẓ was not large by the standard of many other poets, almost half of his corpus of under five hundred ghazals are here emulated, and nearly half of Navāʾi’s Persian Divān consciously derives, at least in part, from imitation of Ḥāfiẓ. This is to the exclusion of other ghazal poets of the era, such as Khwājū-yi Kirmānī (d. Shiraz, 1349? or 753/1352), or ʿUbayd-i Zākānī (d. ca. 770/1370), or ʿImād-i Faqīh of Kerman (d. 773/1371), names of near contemporaries of Ḥāfiẓ whom we might expect to find mentioned at least occasionally alongside Salmān-i Sāvajī (d. ca. 778/1376) and Kamāl-i Khujandī (d. Tabriz, 803/1401), a pair whom Navāʾī emulates seven times altogether. The other important classical poets, Amīr Khusraw and Saʿdī, while clearly deserving their due, are not demonstrably more important than Nava’i’s own contemporaries. Saʿdī’s ghazals receive far less attention, for example, than Jāmī’s, and there are no poets prior to the thirteenth century CE whom Navāʾī cares to acknowledge as worthy of homage. Meanwhile, Navāʾī avoids classifying Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, Mawlānā Rūmī, and ʿIrāqī (d. Damascus 688/1289)— all of them great ghazal poets of the twelfth and thirteenth century CE—as poets, because they saw themselves as mystics and not as professional poets participating in literary salons with other court poets. Although Jāmī did not avoid the company of the court, Navāʾī honors those mystics who resisted imbrication of their poetry in the political structure. But professional poets from the Seljuq era, like Anvarī (d. after 582/1186), who had a towering reputation of his own, and was quite influential over Saʿdī in the ghazal,84 are not overtly mentioned either. Anvarī thought himself inferior in the lyric to Adīb-i Ṣābir (k. sometime between 538/1143 and 542/1148), a poet of Khurasan with whose memory we might therefore have supposed Navāʾī and Jāmī to be sympatico because they hailed from the same stomping grounds. Khāqānī of Shirvān (d. Tabriz, between 582/1186 and 595/1199), as well as the father-son team from central Persia, Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Iṣfahānī ( fl. 555/1160 to 583/1188; d. before 599/1202) and Kamāl al-Dīn Ismāʿīl Iṣfahānī (k. ca. 635/1237), may have been more famous for their qaṣīdas, but nevertheless all achieved notable success in the ghazal—and yet Navāʾī engages in no act of poetic remembrance or engagement with their ghazals. Saʿdī was writing only two hundred years prior to Jāmī and Navāʾī, and considering that the ghazal tradition stretches a further two or three hundred years beyond that into the past, with some Samanid poets like Daqīqī (d. ca. 366/976) or Rūdakī (d. 329/941) composing lyrics that can be read as 84  See the evidence compiled by ʿAlī Dashtī, Qalamraw-i Saʿdī (Tehran: Kayhān, 1339Sh/1960), 131–50.

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proto-ghazals, we can hardly describe Navāʾī’s attention to the Persian lyrical tradition as an antiquarian interest concerned to recover, collect, and preserve the past, as Alan Lomax did for American Blues and Folk. Nor does he engage in a catholic effort to pay homage to the many lesser names in the tradition on the verge of oblivion. Rather, his tastes in the ghazal reflect a quite restricted classicism that looked extensively to major figures of the prior two centuries of a continuous tradition that was already a half-millennium old, with only occasional nods to secondary figures, many of whom had been friends with or members of the circle of one of the major figures (Saʿdī, Amīr Khusraw, Ḥasan-i Dihlavī, Salmān-i Sāvajī, Ḥāfiẓ, Kamāl-i Khujandī) in Navāʾī’s canon. These poets all flourished from the Mongol period onward, practicing what we have been taught to think of as the high “ʿIrāqī style,” the point at which the ghazal tradition reached its classical peak. Nevertheless, even if we add together all the other poets with whom Navāʾī consciously engages, they do not rise to the level of loving attention he lavished upon Ḥāfiẓ, whom we might justly describe as the true inspiration for Navāʾī’s Persian poetry, though we must also note that Navāʾī’s admiration of Ḥāfiẓ also reflects Jāmī’s admiration of Ḥāfiẓ. That is to say that Jāmī, who enjoyed the esteem of Navāʾī and the Timurid court (as well as that of the Āq Quyūnlū and Ottoman courts), may have himself, in the role of recognized arbiter of taste, instilled and intensified some of the love for Ḥāfiẓ that Navāʾī and the whole Timurid court felt, or even that we feel today. For Navāʾī, none among the Timurid poets compares in stature to Jāmī. Nevertheless, Navāʾī does mention several other Timurid poets, either out of true admiration for their talents and achievements, or because they belong to the immediate circle Navāʾī wishes to promote and encourage. As he modestly states in a short qiṭʿa, Navāʾī is deferential to his poetic teachers, but does not expect much result from his devotion to their example. tatabbuʿ kardan-i Fānī dar ashʿār na az daʿvī u nay az khwud-namāʾī chu arbāb-i sukhan ṣāḥib-dilān and murād-ash az dar-i dil-hā gidāʾī-st85 In composing of poems, Fānī’s following of others is neither by way of staking a claim or showing off. 85   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 326. On the literary meanings of the term tatabbuʿ (literally, “following,” both as a form of emulation and as a form of tracking or hunting something down), see Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 109–10.

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Since the lords of speech are treasures of heartful feeling, he stands at the door of hearts as a hopeful beggar. However, we must not ignore the fact that Navāʾī—or in his Persian guise, Fānī—lays claim to a large number of original poems that are his own innovations (ikhtirāʿ), not significantly indebted to any model, and very charming innovations at that.86 Those ninety-one poems represent a considerable onefifth of his output of ghazals in Persian, nearly double the amount that are said to derive their inspiration from Jāmī. Navāʾī is clearly someone who picks quite judiciously from the past, in a limited and rather classicist manner, with an aim to create original poems in a living tradition that will reflect the classic aesthetics and iconic achievements of that tradition’s past. Yet in 905/1499, looking back on his literary efforts several years after the death of Jāmī, Navāʾī writes in his treatise judging the relative merits of Persian and Turkic, Muḥākamat al-lughatayn (The Judgment Between the Two Languages, w. 905/1499), that despite the praise he received for his Persian compositions, he expects history will judge his Chaghatay works as superior in their elegance and subtleties.87 That is to say, even the nearly one hundred Persian ghazals he characterizes as innovative do not meet the originality or the achievement of his Chaghatay poems, where he stands at the beginning of a new tradition, rather than as an observer of the classical acheivements of the past 4

Curating a Ghazal Canon: Navāʾī as Compiler of Dīvāns

It is also worth pointing out that Navāʾī was a hyper-careful curator of his own, and of Jāmī’s poetic oeuvre, taking care to preserve and to package their work in an organized, one might almost say fastidious, manner. At the end of his life, Navāʾī organized his own Chaghatay Turkish dīvān, entitled Khazāʾin al-maʿānī (“Treasuries of Meaning”), by loosely grouping his poems, mostly ghazals, into four chronological periods: Gharāʾib al-ṣighar (“Curiosities of Childhood”), Navādir al-shabāb (“Marvels of Youth”), Badāʾiʿ al-vasaṭ (“Wonders of Middle Age”) and Favāʾid al-kibar (“Advantages of Old Age”).88 Jāmī had won a 86  Both in my own estimation, and in that of Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh, Dīvān-i Navāʾī, 27. 87  Navāʾī, Muḥākamat al-lughatain, trans. Devereux, 29. 88  Maria Subtelny, “Mīr ʿAlī S̲h̲īr Nawāʾī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. Published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_5208. Navāʾī was likely inspired by the example of the Dīvān of Amīr Khusraw, organized chronologically according to five periods of his life.

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reputation as a poet by early middle age, and he continued actively composing in multiple lyric forms (ghazals, qaṣīdas, qiṭʿas, rubāʿīs, muʿammāʾī riddles, and strophic poems) over a span of about fifty years. He, or his patron Navāʾī, repeatedly collected his poems into dīvān form, perhaps the earliest recension of which Jāmī dedicated circa 867/1463 to the Timurid ruler at Herat, Abū Saʿīd b. Muḥammad.89 About 872/1468, after Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā and Navāʾī came to Herat, a second expanded recension of Jāmī’s dīvān was made.90 After Jāmī returned to Herat from his extended pilgrimage journey, a third recension was made, circa 880/1475, with a new introduction. This edition perhaps constitutes what is known as the “old collected works” (dīvān-i qadīmī) of Jāmī in the manuscript tradition.91 But within five years, yet another new edition of Jāmī’s dīvān was produced and dedicated to Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā in 884/1479. This version was compiled when the poet was between sixty and seventy years of age, and contains a corpus Jāmī himself estimates at about ten thousand lines.92 At some point, his dīvān came to be organized into three books (daftar), loosely based on chronology. The first book of the dīvān is titled Fātiḥāt alshabāb, or “The Flush of Youth” (or perhaps, “The Youth’s First Victories”), something of a misnomer if it was compiled when the poet was already in his sixties. This book contains over 1,256 poems, of which 1,016 are ghazals. In about 894/1489, when Jāmī would have been seventy-five, Navāʾī had a second mature collection of his dīvān poems made; this collection may roughly correspond to the second daftar of Jāmī’s dīvān, named the Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd, or, “The Middle of the Necklace (of Life),” which contains 677 poems, of which 493 are ghazals, representing a decade’s worth of poems composed as a senior citizen. A year or two later, in 896/1491, came the third daftar, the Khātimat al-ḥayāt, or

89  Hamid Algar, Jami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 41; and Paul Losensky, “JĀMI i. Life and Works,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 14, fasc. 5 (2008): 469–75. Also available online, last updated April 10, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jami-i; and Ertuğrul Ökten, “Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat” (PhD diss, University of Chicago, 2007), 126. 90  Afṣaḥzād’s introduction to Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:8–9. 91  Afṣaḥzād’s introduction to Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:9–11. 92   ki muddat-i ʿumr az shaṣt gudhashta būd u bi haftād nazdīk gashta. See Afṣaḥzād’s introduction to Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:11, relying in part on Jāmī’s prose introduction to his Dīvān. Whether this is identical with the poems now included in the first book, the socalled Fātiḥat al-shabāb of Dīvān-i Jāmī, as most scholars have assumed, seems doubtful to Afṣaḥzād (Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:11–16). Algar, Jami, 66–67, argues that there were four recensions of the dīvān (867/1463 dedicated to Abū Saʿīd; the second in 872/1468; the third in 880/1475 and the last, dedicated to Mīrzā Ḥusayn Bāyqarā in 884/1479), all of them before it was divided into the present organization by chronological sections.

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“The Autumn of Life,” ostensibly consisting of the late poems of his dīvān, and amounting to 395 poems, 295 of them ghazals.93 Thus it was that Navāʾī oversaw or undertook the collection, recompiling and final organization of Jāmī’s Dīvān, a corpus of 2,328 poems and 16,627 lines, arranged in three roughly chronological spans corresponding to the poet’s long “youth,” his advanced “middle age,” and his closing years. In terms of length, Jāmī’s Dīvān as finally organized by Navāʾī in 1491 is a somewhat lopsided string of pearls, with the capstone third book, Khātimat al-ḥayāt (395 poems, 2,753 lines), being roughly three-fifths the size of the medial second book (677 poems, 4,478 lines), which itself is half the size of the first book, Fātiḥāt al-shabāb (1,265 poems, 9,396 lines).94 But given the extensive editorial attention devoted over many long years to the collection of this book, even if Navāʾī tweaked the organization again after Jāmī died, it hardly seems if anything much could have been overlooked, inadvertently left out, or hastily conceived. 5

Completing a Canonical Oeuvre: Jāmī Evoking Past Masters by Matching their Output

As a religious intellectual, Jāmī believed poetry was not an industrious use of his time, and yet he felt himself born to it (bahr-i īn āfarīda-and marā), inclined to it (dar sirisht-i man īn ast), and fated to it (az azal sarnivisht-i man īn ast).95 Indeed, after the 884/1479 recension of his dīvān for Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, he turned his hand to composing in the mathnavī genre, long narrative poems, some of them versified novels and others collections of anecdotes and didactic matter. He produced a truly remarkable seven of these in relatively quick succession. Already in 876/1472 he had completed a presentation copy of his first mathnavī, not a romance but a collection of anecdotes and shorter essays, the Silsilat al-dhahab, “The Chain of Gold.” Although he 93  Statistics as given by Afṣaḥzād in his introduction to Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:27. The history of the collection and recension of the dīvāns of Jāmī is pieced together from Afṣaḥzād’s introduction to the Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:7–21; Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va barrasī, 198ff.; Ökten, “Jāmī,” 126–28; Losensky, “JĀMI i. Life and Works;” Algar, Jami, 41 and 66–67; and Franklin Lewis, “Authorship, Auctoritas, and the Management of Literary Estates in Pre-Modern Persian Literature,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 45 (in preparation; special issue, edited by Julia Rubanovich and Miriam Goldstein). 94  Per the chart in Afṣaḥzād’s introduction to Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:27. 95  He tells us so explicitly in his Silsilat al-dhahab; see Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Murtaḍā Mudarris-i Gīlānī (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Saʿdī, 1337Sh/1958; reprint Tehran: Mahtāb, 1375Sh/1986), 66.

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publically circulated this 3,730-line composition,96 he eventually added two further books (daftars) to the Silsilat al-dhahab, relegating this early 1472 recension to the status of just the first daftar of three. Before fleshing out daftars two and three, however, Jāmī for a long while put aside the Silsilat al-dhahab, a work which Jāmī’s early biographer, Bākharzī, explicitly indicates was modeled on both Sanāʾī’s (d. ca. 525/1131) Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqat and Awḥadī-yi Marāgha’ī’s (d. 738/1338) Jām-i jam,97 and instead turned his attention to composing five other mathnavīs: 1. Tuḥfat al-aḥrār (“Souvenir for the Noble/Khwāja Aḥrār”) in 886/1481, with twenty loosely connected religious and moral discourses and illustrative anecdotes. In the exordium to this work, by way of a prayer seeking divine confirmation to compose the poem, Jāmī does explicitly evoke the example set for this genre by Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw, in which he clearly has in mind the former’s Makhzan al-asrār and the latter’s Maṭlaʿ al-anvār.98 The latter work is based on the former (itself under the influence of Sanāʾī’s Ḥadiqat al-ḥaqīqat, though Jāmī does not think of that here), but Jāmī thinks of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw as the outstanding representatives of hundreds or even thousands of other poets, over all of whom Jāmī prays for superiority (bar hama dar shiʿr bulandī-m bakhsh). 2. Subḥat al-abrār (“Rosary for the Pious”) in 887/1482, with forty chapters on the Sufi path and moral kingship, dedicated to Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, in an unusual meter not modeled explicitly on any predecessor (though as we shall see, it does mention a number of professional poets); 3. the famous Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (“Joseph and Zulaykha”) in about 888/1483, a continuous narrative loosely extrapolated from a Qur’anic episode in the Sūra of Joseph involving the love of the wife of Potiphar (named Zulaykhā) for Joseph, at the end of which Jāmī mentions the name of Niẓāmī, though this story is not one of the five related by the poet from Ganja;99 4. Laylī u Majnūn in 889/1484, a retelling of the legend of Qays and Laylā, made famous by Niẓāmī and frequently thereafter imitated, though Jāmī

96  Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 208–9; and Algar, Jami, 50–54. 97  ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī: Gūsha-hā’ī az tārīkh-i farhangī va ijtimāʿī-yi khurāsān dar ʿasr-i taymūriyān, ed. Najīb Māyil Haravī (Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1371Sh/1992), 141. 98  Jāmī, in the section Munājāt-i chahārum: dar iltijā va iʿtṣām bi Dhī l-jalāl …” in the Tuḥfat al-aḥrār. See Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 376. 99  Jāmī, from the penultimate section of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, titled “dar mukhāṭiba-yi nafas va taraqqī dādan-i vay …” in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 746.

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names Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw as the only specific sources of his emulation;100 5. the Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī (“The Alexandrine Book of Sagacity”) in about 890/1485, also explicitly inspired by the mathnavīs that Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw both devoted to the Alexander narrative,101 but focused more on the philosophy of sagacious rule than on Alexander’s adventurous peregrinations. Jāmī considered these five works as his Khamsa, or pentad, explicitly comparing them in his fifth and final mathnavī of this group (Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī) to the mathnavīs of both Niẓāmī of Ganja (d. 605/1209 or perhaps as late as 1217) and Amīr Khusraw, who had each produced five long narrative poems that often circulated as a set, called a khamsa, or in the case of Niẓāmī’s quintet, panj ganj (“five treasures”), a nomenclature that Jāmī appears to extend to Amīr Khusraw, as well.102 Here, at a quite mature stage of thinking back on his poetic career (the Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī was completed in 890/1485, when the poet was over seventy), Jāmī discusses the virtues of speech (sukhan), the orator’s profession (sukhanvarī), and verse (naẓm) itself, reflecting how he has mastered its various forms: zadam ʿumrī az bī mithālān mathal/surūdam bi-vaṣf-i ghazālān ghazal … dam az sāda-rūyān-i zībā zadam/ghazal rā zi mah khayma bālā zadam nimūdam rah-i rāst ʿushshāq rā/zi āvāza pur kardam āfāq rā bi-qaṣd-i qaṣāyid shudam tīz-gām/bar āmad bi-naẓm-i muʿammā-m nām zi bīchārigī-hā dar īn chārsūy/bi-qawl-i rubāʿī shudam chāra jūy kunūn karda-am pusht-i himmat qavī/daham mathnavī rā libās-i nuvī kuhan mathnavī-hā-yi pīrān kār/ki mānda-st az ān raftigān yādgār

100  Jāmī, from the final section of Laylī u Majnūn, titled “dar khatm-i kitāb va khātima-yi khiṭāb,” in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 909. 101  Jāmī, from the final section of Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī, titled “bi khatm-i panjumīn an­ ghusht-i īn panjgāna ki dast-i qavī-bāzuvān-i sukhan rā tāb mīdahad bi khātim-i khātima,” in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 927–28 and 1012. 102  Jāmī, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 927– 28, and also 1012, where he refers to his labors as “Five Treasures” (panj ganj): biyā Jāmī ay ʿumr-hā burda ranj/zi khāṭir burūn dāda īn panj ganj = “Come, Jāmī! You who’ve worked and toiled for several lifetimes/and brought out from your mind these Five Treasures.”

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agarchi ravān-bakhsh u jān-parvar ast/dar ashʿār-i naw lidhdhat-i dīgar ast103 I’ve spent a lifetime coining metaphors about the incomparable ones, composing Ghazals in description of the beautiful gazelles. I’ve rhapsodized about the smooth-cheeked beauties; I’ve built of love lyrics (ghazal) a pavilion higher than the moon; To the lovers, I’ve shown the straight path, and filled all the horizons with famous songs. I then shod my feet to tread sure-footed toward the Qaṣīda. I made a name for myself in putting Riddles (muʿammā) in verse. At this junction, straitened circumstances left me no choice, so I sought a remedy by composing Quatrains (rubāʿī). And now, I have girded my loins anew and will clothe the Mathnavī in new garments. The antique mathnavīs done in the old masters’ style, which have remained as a memento of those departed ones, though full of life-affirming spirit and fortitude, gain especial savor in poems newly coined. It would appear, then, that Jāmī was shaping his literary output quite consciously, one might almost say compulsively, and rather competitively, at that. His Dīvān has an eye on that of Ḥāfiẓ, emulating a good number of the ghazals found in the earlier Shirazi poet’s corpus (as we have also seen to be the case for Navāʾī). The arrangement of Jāmī’s Dīvān into daftars based roughly on chronological periods of the poet’s life mirrors the example set by the Dīvān of Amīr Khusraw, compiled into five books over the period 671–725/1272–1325.104 Jāmī’s first mathnavī, meanwhile, the Silsilat al-dhahab, emulates Sanāʾī’s famous Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqat, the first long religio-didactic mathnavī in Persian, written at the Ghaznavid court of Bahrāmshāh. Having completed a selfcontained portion of Silsilat al-dhahab in 1472, Jāmī next set busily about producing his own pentad of narrative poems, consciously tailoring his poetic output to conform to the established, and by then canonical, model of both 103  Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 927. 104  See P. Hardy, “Amīr K̲ h̲usraw,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, Published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_0615. For Amīr Khusraw those divisions were: Tuḥfat al-ṣighār, poems of boyhood, dated 671/1272; Wasaṭ al-ḥayāt, the prime of life, compiled in 683/1284; Ghurrat al-kamāl, the pinnacle of perfection, ca. 693/1293; Baqiyya naqiyya, the choice remainder, collected about 716/1316; and Nihāyat al-kamāl, the final perfection, collected about the year of his death, 725/1325.

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Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw. Toward the beginning of the process of writing this pentad, Jāmī already had his eye on replicating the five-fold achievement of Niẓāmī: nāẓim-i Ganja Niẓāmī ki bi-ranj/ʿadad-i ganj rasānīd bi panj (The versifier of Ganja, Niẓāmī, who strove/and made his treasure reach in number to five).105 Jāmī composed this Khamsa over a brief period of about three years, seemingly in competition with Amīr Khusraw, who modeled the five poems of his own Khamsa on that of Niẓāmī and brought them out in quick succession: Maṭlaʿ al-anvār (Dawning-point of Lights, 698/1298); Shīrīn u Khusraw (698/1298); Majnūn u Laylā (698/1298); Āʾīna-yi Sikandarī (The Alexandrine Mirror, 699/1299); and the Hasht bihisht (Eight Paradises, 701/1301).106 Only after the passage of about a dozen years, and the creation of this Khamsa of mathnavīs, did Jāmī then seriously return his attention to the Silsilat al-dhahab, completing the 1,595 lines of Book Two of Silsilat al-dhahab in 890/1485, with an indication that a third book would be forthcoming.107 Indeed, Jāmī completed Book Three, which he dedicated to the Ottoman Sulṭān Bāyazīd II, probably in 891/1486, at approximately 870 lines, rounding out the Silsilat al-dhahab, once again in a somewhat lopsided arrangement, at a total length of about 6,200 lines.108 Now, Jāmī had not just a quintet, but a septet, with the sixth narrative poem, a rather didactic one, constituting his homage to Sanāʾī, or perhaps even to the Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī of Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (though it is sparse on stories compared to the more famous Mathnavī of Mawlānā). But Jāmī was not content with a sextet, and went on to compose the philosophical allegory Salāmān u Absāl some time between 893/1488 and 896/1491, dedicating it to the Āq Quyūnlū ruler, Sulṭān Yaʿqūb,109 and thus rounding out a heptad—“Seven Thrones,” or Haft awrang.110 Here he seems 105  Jāmī, Subḥat al-abrār, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 568. 106  See Hardy, “Amīr K̲ h̲usraw,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. 107  See the closing lines of Book Two of Silsilat al-dhahab in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 258; and Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 209. 108  Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 210. See also D.S. Robertson, “The Date of Jāmī’s Silsilat aldhahab,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 2 (Oct., 1945): 165–68. 109  In this dating, I follow Chad Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 159–60. For the biography of Jāmī, see Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī-yi āthār; Algar, Jami; and Losensky, “JĀMI i. Life and Works.” 110  Jāmī references an earlier poet in a less typical way in Salāmān va Absāl, taking the content of their works as instructive: “Khwāja” Firdawsī is made a touchstone for how to talk about women, or more precisely that it is appropriate to talk about women of good character and disposition, and avoid talking about shrewish women (bad-khū, bad-gūna) altogether. See Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 331.

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to one-up (or rather, two-up) his predecessors, including Sanāʾī and Mawlānā, who each produced only one long didactic poem (composed of six books, or daftars, in Mawlānā Rūmī’s case), and lacked a khamsa, or a continuous philosophical narrative like the allegory of Salāmān and Absāl (written in the meter of Mawlānā Rūmī’s Mathnavī, it includes a quotation, or taḍmīn, from a few lines of that work),111 while on the other hand, he also outdid Niẓāmī, who produced only (!) a quintet of narrative poems. With respect to Amīr Khusraw, as we shall see below, Jāmī knew that the poet had composed additional historical mathnavīs beyond his Khamsa, and perhaps this helped motivate the Silsilat al-dhahab and Salāmān va Absāl as additions above and beyond his own quintet.112 Book Two of Jāmī’s “The Golden Chain” is about half the size (1,595 lines) of Book One (3,730 lines), which was not the original intention of the poet, who had harbored the hope of making it longer, until the pen gave out before he could complete the original scheme of the book: būd dar dil chunānki īn daftar/nabvad az niṣf-i avvalīn kamtar līk khāma zi junbish-i payvast/chun bi-dīnjā rasīd sar bishkast charkh agar bāz bugdharad zi sitīz/sāzad-am gizlik-i ʿazīmat tīz daham az sar tarāsh-i ān khāma/birisānam bi-maqṭaʿ īn nāma113 For this daftar my heart had hopes/that it would not be less than half the first, but the pen, from its ceaseless motion/snapped when it reached this point. If the heavens leave off their torment/I’ll sharpen the pen-knife of resolution, and cut the nib of this pen again/and make it write until the sign-off line of this book. Despite this promise to take up the pen and finish the work as planned, Jāmī nevertheless disavows the need for it: even should fate not afford him 111  As Ḥikmat, Jāmī, 124, points out. 112  For the historical poems, see Hardy, “Amīr K̲ h̲usraw,” Encyclopaedia of Islam; Annemarie Schimmel, “AMĪR KOSROW DEHLAVĪ,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 1, fasc. 9 (1989): 963–65. Also available online, last updated August 3, 2011. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ amir-kosrow-poet; and Paul Losensky and Sunil Sharma, trans. In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amīr Khusrau (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011). 113  This passage occurs toward the end of Book Two of Silsilat al-dhahab in Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 257–58.

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the opportunity to complete the book, the text of it as already then written should suffice for any reader of purified mind (varna ānrā ki khāṭir-i ṣāfī-st/ īnqadar ham ki gufta shud kāfī-st).114 In content, Book Two has greater focus (the topic treats of love, both physical and metaphorical), and inclines more to story-telling, so much so that it does not seem to fit well with the first book, and could easily have been made a separate work; though, given the title The Golden Chain, it seems that Jāmī may have begun the project with the intention of linking more than one daftar together. This outline plan may also reveal something about Jāmī’s view of poetic structure, or at least how one may memorably present one’s poetic compositions, with each verse conceived as a pearl strung together into a necklace on the thread of meter and form, with this second book of Silsilat al-dhahab being the centerpiece gem—just as the middle book of his tripartite dīvān had been described as the central setting on a string of pearls: Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd.115 6

Quantifying the Canon: Who Emulates Whom and How Often?

Jāmī does respond overtly to previous poets, not infrequently—though in his ghazals this relationship is not usually signalled by a convenient title, as is the case for Navāʾī/Fānī’s Persian Dīvān. For Jāmī’s ghazals, we are usually left to figure this out on our own by the internal evidence of a similar rhyme, meter and radīf; or a suggestive allusion or the obvious evocation of a recognizable phrase from the earlier poem.116 But it can be difficult to fix a precise point of emulation or source of poetic inspiration for individual ghazals of Jāmī. By the end of the fifteenth century, the repertoire of the most famous ghazals of Saʿdī, Amīr Khusraw, Ḥāfiẓ, Ḥasan-i Dihlavī and others had been repeatedly paid homage by numerous poets, beginning with those at the earlier Timurid courts, and Jāmī is no exception to this practice of emulating past masters.117 By 1525 CE, a fairly wide list of response-poems had been identified by practitioners of the tradition, pointing to a richly rhizomic network of intertexuatlity. Fakhrī Hirātī, 114  Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 258. 115  One may recall here Sir William Jones’ famous translation “Orient Pearls at Random Strung,” which does not actually render any particular line in the famous Agar ān turk-i Shīrāzī ghazal of Ḥāfiẓ, but does riff on this idea of verses as pearls strung on a necklace. For a translation history of Ḥāfiẓ, see Julie Meisami, “Hafiz in English: Translation and Authority,” Edebiyat n.s. 6, 1 (1995): 55–79. 116   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād,1:194–95, the two ghazals numbered 17 and 18 respond to the first poem in the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ without mention of him. 117  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 379–426.

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a poet at the court of the Safavid Shāhs Ismāʿīl and Ṭahmāsb, isolates a core of about 235 emulated poets to which nearly 1,400 ghazals had been composed by approximately 275 poets in response ( javābiyya) in his Radāyif al-ashʿār (or Tuḥfat al-ḥabīb).118 The oldest poem Fakhrī recognizes in this list is from Anvarī, a single poem that received seven different responses. Next oldest are four poems by Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī, which between them receive forty-three responses, from which we may conclude that poets of the twelfth century CE, with the exception of five particular poems by two authors, do not inspire new poems in the Timurid era. However, from about 1250 CE, roughly from the time of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad onward, we find a handful of poets who continue to inspire emulations: Saʿdī (thirty-one of his ghazals are imitated a collective 231 times), ʿIrāqī (one ghazal emulated five times), Humām-i Tabrīzī (d. 714/1315 has four ghazals imitated forty times), Nizārī Quhistānī (in Birjand, born 645–720/1248–1321 has ten ghazals emulated fifty-seven times), Amīr Khusraw (forty-eight poems emulated 308 times), Ḥasan-i Dihlavī (thirteen poems emulated sixty-six times), Khwājū-yi Kirmānī (a half-dozen poems emulated thirty-five times), ʿImād-i Faqīh (four poems imitated eighteen times), Salmān-i Sāvajī (seven poems imitated forty-three times), Ḥāfiẓ (twenty-three poems emulated 125 times), and at the end of the fourteenth century CE, Kamāl-i Khujandī (thirteen poems, emulated over fifty times). Reorganized not chronologically, but in descending order of popularity, we have Amīr Khusraw imitated 308 times, Saʿdī imitated 231 times, Jāmī imitated 135 times, Ḥāfiẓ imitated 125 times, and then Ḥasan-i Dihlavī, Kamāl-i Khujandī, Nizārī, Salmān, Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī, Amīr Shāhī Sabzavārī, and Humām-i Tabrīzī, all imitated at least forty times.119 Indeed, as Afṣaḥzād is at pains to argue, the scholarly characterization of Jāmī’s ghazals as derivative fails to properly appreciate the role that responsion (naẓīra-sarāʾī) plays in ghazal writing during the Timurid period.120 While one appreciates the impulse to drive a stake through narrow assumptions about what constitutes poetic creativity, by the time Afṣaḥzād wrote this, scholarship had already begun to come around to his point (witness the comments of Ṣafā or Rypka mentioned above about Timurid poetry and Jāmī). Some thirty years ago, Maria Eva Subtelny called attention to how the Timurid “concept of artistic creativity” as “an appreciation of the role of authority” in political and social life, as well as in literature: “the authority—we would be more inclined to regard it as tyranny—of established forms and themes, reinforced by the 118  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 370–74. 119  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 372–73. 120  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 357–61.

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a­ uthority of ‘the ancients,’ ” provided a shaping framework for the literary aesthetics of the period.121 Subtelny shows how the concept of takalluf, which she defines as “affectation,” constitutes an aesthetic boundary by which originality and taste can be measured or distinguished from slavish formalism, uninspired imitation, or preciosity within a tradition that observes highly developed conventions and values emulation of established masters.122 J. Michael Rogers noted a few years before Afṣaḥzād that “the artificiality of Timurid verse is now, fortunately, regarded as less of an inherent defect; nor are imitation and ingenuity peculiar to it,” and that, furthermore, in the high Renaissance, before the Romantics, such a notion would not have dominated European poetry, either: John Sparrow remarked in an essay on Latin verse of the high Renaissance: “anyone who thinks that by imitating the form of existing models a writer disables himself from sincerely expressing his own feelings or from expressing them with artistic originality, can know little of the ways in which the impulse to create fulfils itself in poetry and prose”. The Persian nāẓirah, [sic] taking the same sentiments and the same rhyme-scheme and metre but to different words, is thus directly comparable with Pope’s or Dr. Johnson’s imitations of Horace or Juvenal.123 As Marta Simidchieva argued for Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī’s (840–910/1437–1505) Badāyiʿ al-āthār (a rhetorical treatise dedicated in about 1470 to Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā in the hopes of gaining entry to his court), not unlike the ghazal poetry of the Timurid era, it consciously reworks and recombines content and form/organization from the classical works on the topic by Shams al-Qays Rāzī ( fl. ca. 601–650/1205–1260) and Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ’s (d. 578/1183), and “appears to be less concerned with imitating the classics per se, than with adapting their legacy to the needs of the moment.”124 121  Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate,” 56–79, quoting from 61. 122  Sutbelny, “A Taste for the Intricate,” 59–60. She also briefly mentions, 63, taqlīd as a term for “slavish copy,” on which term Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 108–9 elaborates. 123  J. Michael Rogers, “Centralisation and Timurid Creativity,” Oriente Moderno, n.s. 15 (76), no. 2 (1996): 533–50, quoting from 543. 124  Marta Simidchieva, “Imitation and Innovation in Timurid Poetics: Kashifi’s Badāyi’ alafkār and Its Predecessors, al-Mu’jam and Ḥadāiq al-siḥr,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (Dec., 2003): 509–30, quoting from 521. She shows not only that Kāshifī purposefully organizes the material in a new way, in an effort to improve upon or outdo his predecessors, but that the scholars who had edited the text (e.g., Musul’mankulov in 1977 and Mīr Jalāl alDīn Kazzāzī in 1990), as well as others writing on the “Indian style,” such as Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, and Natal’ya Prigarina, Indiyskiy stil’ i ego mesto v persidskoy literature: Voprosy poetiki (Moscow, 1999), had already begun a re-evaluation of the discourse on the

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To some extent, reflecting on and reworking the past seems an inevitable attraction at a late point in the development of any continuously practiced artistic form or stylistic tradition. With respect to the Timurid ghazal in particular, the intricate referentiality or intratextuality represents a “logical consequence of the traditional emphasis on the cultivation of imitation in poetry and thus could not have constituted in itself a transgression of contemporary canons of good taste.”125 But this impetus to imitatio of past masters developed centuries earlier in the tradition. What may be new in the Timurid period is a bibliophilism, a cultivation of poetry in intimate salon settings rather than as epideictic delivery at court, which had been the earlier paradigm for presentation of panegyrical qaṣīdas at court, and a social broadening of the community of practitioners of the ghazal.126 Whatever the case, poets in this era, and not Jāmī or Navāʾī alone, delighted in retrospective engagement with the tradition by looking back to old “standards” and trying to reimagine or rewrite them in improved or updated form. If they failed in that task in the case of any individual ghazal, the process nevertheless reaffirmed the canonicity of the emulated poem. Jāmī claims in a qiṭʿa that most of the poems in his dīvān are the lyrics, or love-talk (ghazal) of crazed lovers (hast dīvān-i shiʿr-i man akthar/ghazal-i ʿāshiqān-i shaydāʾī), and we can take these “crazed lovers” to mean the great ghazal poets of the past. But the thrust of this line is not to characterize his fixed-form ghazals, but rather to assert moral superiority over pens-for-hire, poets who engage in panegyrics (madāyiḥ) as a profession. Jāmī would have us know that he is motivated by sincere passion, and his words flow out like impetuous declarations of love. He does not abase himself by mentioning the base (dūnān), and only provides praise of rulers (madḥ-i shāhān) when it is requested of him (bi istidʿā), not because of his fondness for rulers, or desire for self-aggrandizement, nor out of greed or ulterior motive (taqāḍāʾī).127 Jāmī poetics of the Timurid and Safavid eras, 513–14. For the dating of Kāshifī’s treatise, see Simidchieva, 530n73. 125  Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate,” 78–79. 126  See Rogers, “Centralisation and Timurid Creativity,” on the interconnectedness of intellectual and artistic production at the Timurid court and the aesthetic impact this had on poetry, calligraphy, painting and architecture. Though this self-presentation of the Timurids as patrons of learning and literature and art was promoted with deliberate intent of propaganda, it does seem to mark a zeitgeist of sorts. See also Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 144–47 and 153. 127   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:663. For the opposition between madḥ and ghazal, and the use of ghazal to designate the mode or theme of lyrical love, rather than the fixed form ghazal, see Lewis, “Transformation of the Persian Ghazal,” and Lewis, “Reading, Writing, and Recitation.”

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does not over emphasize name-dropping of earlier poets in his dīvān, but he does boast in his autobiographical qaṣīda “Rashḥ-i bāl” (Distillations of a Mind) of his status as a poet of far-flung fame, whose ghazals are sung by qavvāls in samāʿ sessions. This claim echoes what Gulandām says in the introduction to the dīvān he collected for his friend Ḥāfiẓ after the latter’s death, about the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ being sung far and wide throughout the Persophone world.128 In fact, Jāmī compares himself, not unfavorably, to Ḥāfiẓ and Saʿdī among the poets of Fars, and to Amīr Khusraw and Ḥasan-i Dihlavī in India.129 He writes in one qaṣīda in the early part of his Dīvān a response to both Khāqānī and Amīr Khusraw,130 and to Anvarī toward the end of his life.131 He mentions both Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ in one ghazal132 and Shams-i Tabrīz and Mawlānā (Rūmī) together in another.133 Other poets receiving a nod from Jāmī in his ghazals include Rūdakī (d. 329/941) and ʿAṭṭār (d. ca. 617/1221),134 and the names of yet other poets appear in various contexts in his Haft awrang. Beyond frequency of mention, though, nitty-gritty engagement with the works of prior poets will give us a more palpable sense of their importance as poetic or stylistic influences for Jāmī. Based on the aforementioned list of Fakhrī Hirātī in his unpublished Radāyif al-ashʿār,135 we can identify a group of about 250 poets in the second half of the fifteenth century CE whom we might class as representatives, to one degree or another, of the school of Timurid Herat, especially in the ghazal. These Herat-school poets follow certain shared models, with responses ( javābs) written to a common core of ghazal poets, with Jāmī the most frequently imitated (92 of his ghazals received responses), followed in descending order by Ḥāfiẓ (65), Amīr Khusraw (58), somewhat surprisingly Bināʾī (56), Ḥasan-i Dihlavī (30), Suhaylī (24), Sayfī (15), and Navāʾī/ Fānī (15). Of these poets, five lived in the later Timurid era (at least three lived into the 1500s), indicating an active interchange among living contemporaries. Of these Timurid poets only two remain household names, Jāmī and Navāʾī, still part of the contemporary canon of classical Persian poetry. The other 128  Ḥāfiẓ, Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī, 2 vols., revised ed. (Tehran: Shirikat-i Ufsit, Sihāmī-yi ʿĀmm, 1362Sh/1983), 2:1123–25 and 1145–49. 129   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:37. 130   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:56–68, a poem he titles “Jalā al-rūḥ.” 131   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:444–46. 132   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:165. 133   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:124–25. He also takes the first line of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī as inspiration for the rhyme, radīf and meter of another ghazal, 1:378. 134  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 377–78. 135  Then held in the A.F. (?) Oriental Institute of Uzbekistan, MS. 4596, under the actual title of Tuḥfat al-ḥabīb, and discussed by ʿAbd al-Ghanī Mīrzāyuf, Banāʾī (Dushanbe, 1958), 40, per Afṣaḥzād, Naqd var bar-rasī, 370–74.

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three in the list (Ḥāfiẓ, Ḥasan-i Dihlavī, Amīr Khusraw) belong to the “Oldies,” poets flourishing more than a century before, having all died before any of the other five were born. They were clearly at that time thought of as forming a core canon of classical poets, and certainly Ḥāfiẓ and Amīr Khusraw remain much-read until today. Fakhrī also isolates eighty-five ghazals of Jāmī written in responsion to prior poets, as given in Table 15.2 below.136 The list undoubtedly contains errors, not only of omission, but perhaps also of false-positives, though in general terms it does not diverge in strikingly surprising ways from the list of poets in Table 15.1, derived from Navāʾī’s Dīvān. Both lists have considerable overlap, with Saʿdī, Amīr Khusraw, and Ḥāfiẓ toward the quantitatve top, though for Navāʾī, Ḥāfiẓ absolutely dominates the horizons of the Persian ghazal, and his importance greatly outweighs the other two. Not so for Jāmī, if we are to credit Fakhrī’s list as comprehensive, in which case Ḥāfiẓ holds no more importance for him as a poetic model than the other two. Relative to one another, the ghazals of Amīr Khusraw and Saʿdī receive a fairly equal amount of attention from both Navāʾī and Jāmī, though Navāʾī acknowledges imitating quite a few more of their poems than Fakhrī’s list attributes to Jāmī (twenty-seven of Amīr Khusraw’s for Navāʾī compared to Jāmī’s fifteen, and twenty-one of Saʿdī’s for Navāʾī compared to Jāmī’s fifteen). Of course, the total number of ghazals composed by Navāʾī (485) pales in comparison to those of Jāmī (1804),137 making the relative extent of influence upon him by these poets far greater than it would appear to be for Jāmī. Navāʾī’s list also specifies forty-three of his poems that take a ghazal of Jāmī as their model, and ninety-one ghazals which he describes as independent creations of his own; for Jāmī, we may rightly suspect that more of his ghazals emulate predecessor poems than the list in Table 15.2 indicates. In the second tier of poets after Ḥāfiẓ, Amīr Khusraw, and Saʿdī, we find Jāmī emulating Kamāl-i Khujandī seven times and Navāʾī emulating him five times. Jāmī and Navāʾī both devote three javābs each to Shāhī-yi Sabzavārī. Salmān-i Sāvajī earns five from Jāmī but only two from Navāʾī; while Ḥasan-i Dihlavī gets noticed seven times by Jāmī and only twice by Navāʾī. A handful of prior poets not expressly mentioned in the headings to Navāʾī’s ghazals find their 136  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 377. Afṣaḥẓād objects to some of these identifications, on the grounds that Jāmī had a negative opinion of Niʿmatallāh Valī and Nizārī and ʿImād. On the other hand, one may dislike Wagner generally and yet appreciate one of his arias, or his reputation, enough to borrow a few bars of his music. I suspect that, depending on the criteria one uses to characterize a ghazal as a response (javāb) to another poem, the number of responsion ghazals by Jāmī may exceed the 85 noticed by Fakhrī. 137  The numbers come from Divān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:27, and Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 316.

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table 15.2 Response Ghazals in the Dīvān of Jāmī and their authors per tabulations of Fakhrī-yi Hirātī

Poets overtly emulated by Jāmī Saʿdī Amīr Khusraw Ḥāfiẓ Kamāl-i Khujandī Ḥasan-i Dihlavī Nizārī Quhistānī Salmān-i Sāvajī Shāhī Sabzavāri Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī Humām-i Tabrīzī Khayālī Bukhārāʾī Shaykh Ādharī Khwājū-yi Kirmānī ʿImād-i Faqīh Niʿmatallāh Valī Kātibī-yi Turshīzī ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārāʾī

# of their ghazals Jāmī has emulated 15 15 14 7 7 6 5 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

way onto Fakhrī’s list of poets emulated by Jāmī, suggesting that Jāmī may have had somewhat more deliberate aims in engaging with the established canon. Jāmī emulated six ghazals of Nizārī Quhistānī according to Fakhrī—a quite sizeable number. He then emulates two ghazals apiece for a further three poets: Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī (d. 598/1201), frequently mentioned by Jāmī in his catalogues of poets, especially the panegyric poets; Humām-i Tabrīzī (d. 714/1315), whose ghazals, though overshadowed by Saʿdī’s, were critically esteemed during his lifetime; and Khayālī Bukhārāʾī (d. 850/1446), associated with ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārāʾī (d. 840/1436), who appears once in Navāʾī’s Dīvān, and twice in Fakhrī’s list of poems to which Jāmī responded (six further responsions to poems of Khayālī by other poets are also recorded). Also overlapping in both Fakhrī’s list and Navāʾī’s Dīvān is Kātibī-yi Turshīzī (d. 839/1435), who Jāmī disparages in his Bahāristān (as we shall see, below) though both Dawlatshāh and Navāʾī speak

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favorably about him.138 Jāmī has, according to Fakhrī, also devoted attention to one ghazal of each of the following poets, none of them mentioned in Navāʾī’s Persian Dīvān: Khwājū-yi Kirmānī (d. 753/1352 or earlier), ʿImād-i Faqīh of Kerman (d. 773/1371, much praised by Ādharī), Niʿmatallāh Valī (d. 834/1431, active in Kerman and Shiraz, whose ghazals are relentlessly mystical), and Shaykh Ādharī (d. 866/1462, of Ṭūs). All but the latter, who is mentioned by Dawlatshāh as a sincere and gnostic shaykh,139 remain part of the classical canon today. We might assume Jāmī would grind an axe for poets of the Khurasan region, particularly if they lived in the earlier Timurid period. But the list of his emulations notably includes poets from Shiraz, from Kerman, and from Tabriz. He does not seem to advocate on behalf of obscure or non-canonical figures from the more distant past, nor does he focus on promoting an inordinately large number of younger poets at Herat, probably because Jāmī sees the role of internationally recognized poets such as himself to affirm their betters in the poetic hierarchy, and not so much to promote their junior colleagues. Afṣaḥẓād extensively treats three of the poets whom Jāmī emulated multiple times—Saʿdī, Kamāl-i Khujandī and Ḥāfiẓ—and seeks to lay out some nuances about the stage in his career at which Jāmī engaged with these predecessors, the approach he adopts as he engages with them, and the affective attitude he displays toward them.140 The qualitative nature of this emulation should be further analyzed, as it exposes with greater specificity Jāmī’s taste and stylistic assumptions, and the relative enthusiasm with which he embraced the examples of his avowed models. However, the mere mention of their names already tells us something important about his view of the canon. Once more comprehensive research is published on the poets of the Timurid era, such as promised by Leonard Lewisohn’s project currently underway on “Classical Persian Poetry and Poets: the Timurid and Türkmen Periods,” we should be able to tell more about questions of influence.141

138  Dehghan, “Kātibī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. 139  Dawlatshāh-i Samarqandī, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará (“Memoirs of the Poets”), ed. Edward G. Browne (London: Luzac and Leiden: Brill, 1901), 10 and 11 quotes lines from Shaykh Ādharī, for whom he seems to have a special affection. 140  Afṣaḥẓād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 379–428. 141  For details of Lewisohn’s project, which has led to a 2013 Workshop at Exeter University and will lead to a book, see http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/projects?ref=AH/J00829X/1.

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Cataloguing the Classics: Roll Calls of the Poets

Apart from ghazals written in response ( javāb), in homage (istiqbāl), or in emulation (naẓīra-gūʾī) of other poets, there is a tradition of including catalogues of previous poets in a ghazal, or a section of a qaṣīda, or a passage from a mathnavī. Sunil Sharma points out that though no rhetorical term for Persian (murāʿāt al-naẓīr, tanāsub, iʿtilāf, talfīq, tawfīq, etc.) precisely isolates the device of a “roll call” or “catalogue of poets” known in western poetry, including the poet’s name and perhaps a brief characterizing comment about his achievement, the practice of providing a short catalogue of poets is nevertheless quite common in various Persian verse forms.142 ʿAṭṭār in his Muṣībat-nāma gives a Roll Call of poets whom he admires; in addition, those he mentions tend to have pen-names associated with heavenly lights, kingship or perfection. Thus, in the resulting list, it is not clear that every heavenly name identifies a poet—the names in brackets may modify or describe, and not necessarily name a particular poet: āftāb ar chi [samāʾī] gashta ast/dar sanā jins-i Sanāʾī gashta ast az [kamāl]-i shiʿr u shawq-i shāʿirī/charkh rā bīn Azraqī u Anvarī bāz kun chashm u zi shiʿr-i chūn [shikar]/dar bihisht-i ʿadn Firdawsī nigar shiʿr rā iqbāl-i [jamshīdī] bibīn/mihr rā [shamsī] u [khwarshīdī] bibīn var zi bālā sū-yi arkān bingarī/ham Shihābī bīnī u ham ʿUnṣurī var dar īn ʿilm-at kunad shāhī havas/ʿilm agar dar chīn-st Khāqānī-t bas chun bihisht u āsmān u āftāb/chun ʿanāṣir bād u ātash khāk u āb nisbatī dārand bā īn shāʿirān/pas [jahān] shāʿir buvad chūn dīgarān143 The sun, although it has become heavenly [Samāʾī], is like Sanāʾī [brightness] in luminosity. In perfection [kamāl] of poetry and zeal for the poetic craft, see Azraqī [blue-as-the-sky] and Anvarī [illuminated] up on heaven’s wheel. 142  Sunil Sharma, “The Function of the Catalogue of Poets in Persian Poetry,” in Metaphor and Imagery in Persian Poetry, ed. Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 231–32. 143  Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, Muṣībat-nāma, ed. Muḥammad-Riḍā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī (Tehran: Sukhan, 1376Sh/1997), 150.

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Open your eyes and look—from his poetry like sugar [shikar] Firdawsī [the paradisal] is in the garden of paradise. See Poesy’s Jamshid-like [jamshīdī] reception! How affection for it is sunny [shamsī] and solar [khwarshīdī]! And if you look from up there to the universal pillars you’ll see Shihābī [the meteoric] and also ʿUnṣurī [the elemental] And if in this discipline you should desire kingship [shāhī], since knowledge is “unto China,” then Khāqānī’s [the khaqan] enough for you. Since paradise and the sky and sun —like the elements earth, wind, fire, water— have a connection with these poets, then the world [Jahān] is a poet like the others. This constitutes an interesting mini-canon of poets, some of whom remain squarely in the classical pantheon, though this list rather conspicuously omits the poets of the early Ghaznavid court. It does not proceed chronologically, and does not appear to hierarchize the poets admired by ʿAṭṭār, as the poets here enumerated—with the exception of Sanāʾī, Khāqānī and possibly Firdawsī—do not share a close thematic or temperamental kinship with the poetry of ʿAṭṭār.144 We may list this mini-canon retaining the ambiguity about whether the words in brackets are intended to evoke the memory of some poets now unknown or barely-known: [Samāʾī],145 Sanāʾī, [Kamāl],146 Azraqī,147

144  Sanāʾī (d. 525/1131) is the forerunner to ʿAṭṭār in writing mystically-minded ghazals and narrative verse, and ʿAṭṭār to Jāmī in writing a hagiographical Lives of the Saints in prose. 145  If this indicates a poet’s pen-name and not just an adjective describing the “celestial” sun as opposed to the early illumination of Sanāʾī, this may intend Maḥmūd bin ʿAlī Samāʾī Marvzī, a poet of the sixth century Hijrī mentioned in Lubāb al-albāb, per the suggestion of Muḥammad-Riḍā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī in ʿAṭṭār, Muṣībat-nāma, 526. 146  If Kamāl here functions as an allusion to a particular poet, rather than as the simple noun “perfection,” it must allude to Kamāl al-Dīn Ismāʿīl Iṣfahānī (d. ca. 635/1238), who is said to have died, like ʿAṭṭār, at the hand of the Mongols (as early as 628/1231 or as late as 639/1242). 147  Azraqī-yi Hiravī flourished during the reigns of the Seljuq Shah, Alp Arslān (r. 455– 65/1063–72) and governer of Kerman, Qāvurd b. Chaghrī Bayg (d. 466/1073).

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Anvarī,148 [Shikar],149 Firdawsī,150 [Jamshīdī, Shamsī, Khwarshīdī],151 Shihābī,152 ʿUnṣurī,153 Khāqānī,154 and [Jahān].155 Sharma gives another poetic catalogue from Manūchihrī ( fl. 422/1031 to 432/1041), a Ghaznavid court poet whose eighteen-line long qaṣīda with the title “Dar sharḥ-i shikāyat” (“Laying Out the Complaint”) rues composing in the poetic genres of satire and panegyre, as the former leads to loss and the latter provides no profit. After three lines, Manūchihrī launches into a retrospective about the great Arab poets of the past and how their poems were hung in gold letters at the Kaaba. This provides us with his list, in Persian, of a sizeable canon of Arabic poets from the pre-Islamic period to his own day. It also includes what may be the earliest surviving retrospective statement of a canon of poets of the Samanid era.156

148  Anvarī (d. probably after 582/1186) had a towering reputation in panegyre, and is associated with the court of Sanjar the Seljuq. 149  No poet by this pen-name is identifiable, and it probably is not intended as a takhalluṣ. 150  The famous author of the Shāh-nāma, from Ṭūs, d. 411/1020 or 416/1025. 151  Shafīʿī-Kadkanī in ʿAṭṭār, Muṣībat-nāma, 527, cannot identify Jamshīdī (and I doubt the word evokes a particular poet), but he does suggest that Shamsī is Sharaf al-Ḥukamā Shamsī Dihistānī, mentioned in Lubāb al-albāb, and that Khwarshīdī is mentioned in alMuʿjam. These poets are wholly forgotten today. 152  No longer part of the canon, but Muḥammad ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. E.G. Browne and Mirza Muḥammad Qazvīnī, 2 vols. (London and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1906), 2:392–93, notices a Shihābī Ghazāl-i Khujandī working in Marv and Bukhara in the first half of the eleventh century CE. Another Shihābī is mentioned in passing by Niẓāmī-yi ʿArūḍī Samarqandī, Chahār maqāla, ed. Saʿīd Qara-biglū and Riḍā Anzābī-nizhād, on the basis of Muḥammad Qazvīnī’s edition (Tehran: Jāmī, 1376Sh/1997), 45. The editors of Chahār maqāla speculate, 154, that this may be Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin al-Mu’ayyad Nasafī Samarqandī, a poet of the fifth/twelfth century at the court of the Seljuq Rukn al-Dīn Masʿūd, with which ShafīʿīKadkanī in ʿAṭṭār, Muṣībat-nāma, 527, agrees. But if Shihābī could refer to Shihāb al-Dīn Adīb-i Ṣābir at the court of the Khwārazmshāh Atsiz (521–68/1127–72), killed for spying in about 542/1148, he is indeed not an obscure figure to modern readers of Classical Persian poetry. 153  ʿUnṣurī (d. 431/1040), the famous poet laureate at the court of Maḥmūd of Ghazna and then of Sultan Masʿūd. 154  Khāqānī (d. ca. 595/1199) at the court of the Shirvānshāhs and then at Tabrīz, one of the outstanding classical poets in various forms. 155  “Jahān” may be a takhalluṣ for a lesser figure whom ʿAṭṭār grudgingly agrees to anoint with the title of “poet,” but that would mean he was obscure even at that time. Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 232–33, follows the Nūrānī-Viṣāl edition of the poem, but the above identifications build on ʿAṭṭār, Muṣībat-nāma, ed. Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, 149–50 and 526–27. 156  Manūchihrī, Dīvān-i Manūchihrī-yi Dāmghānī, ed. Muḥammad Dabīr-Siyāqī (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Zavvār, 1326Sh/1948), 140.

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Although Manūchihrī’s list of poets can be cryptic, since he identifies some poets only by a short phrase from their verse or by the town from which they hailed, and not by their name, we can definitely identify the following: Shahīd of Balkh (d. 315/927), Rūdakī (d. 329/941, or slightly later), Bū Shakūr-i Balkhī (author of the Āfarīn-nāma, w. 336/948), and the Arabic-language poet of Persian origins, Bū l-Fatḥ-i Bustī (401/1010) from Khurasan.157 In addition, he mentions a Bū l-ʿAlā, a Bū l-ʿAbbās, a Bū Salīk, a Bū l-Mathal, and a Valvālij, along with a poet who came from Herat.158 Manūchihrī has a second poem in which he mentions himself and his poetic master, ʿUnṣurī, together in one line,159 while a much longer poetic catalogue appears in a third poem, this one in praise of ʿUnṣurī, beginning with a riddle (lughaz) on the candle. Many of the Arabic poets alluded to in this poem are explicitly named, though not in every case; the catalogue of Persian poets, on the other hand, feels like a crossword puzzle, with the reader expected to fill in most of the names based on the number of famous poets who hail from particular cities: in Khurasan, Bū Shuʿayb and Rūdakī are named outright, then a Bū Dhar(r), that “Turk-i kashī,” and that “ḍarīr-i pārisī;”160 two Gorganis, two from Rayy, and two Valvālijīs; three Sarakhsīs and three who live in Sughd; five from Bukhara, five from Marv, five also from Balkh, seven Nayshābūrīs, three Ṭūsīs and three named 157  Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 235–37. As Sharma notes, focusing on the Arabic canon in this poem allows Manūchihrī to omit mention of the names of his near Persophone contemporaries at the Ghaznavid courts of Sultan Maḥmūd and Masʿūd. The inclusion of the Arabophone poet Bū l-Fatḥ-i Bustī, however, drags in the names of that poet’s Persophone contemporaries, writing about a century prior to Manūchihrī, who thus form the kernel of a canon of early Persian poets. Writing his Yatīmat al-dahr at about the same time, al-Thaʿālabī (d. 429/1038) was similarly interested in enumerating and anthologizing the Arabophone poets of Persia. 158  Muḥammad Dabīr Siyāqī, the editor of the Dīvān-i Manūchihrī, 268, 282, 285, 287, identifies the first as Abū l-ʿAlā Shushtarī (from whom seven lines survive to our day); Bū l-ʿAbbās is possibly Abū l-ʿAbbās-i Marvzī or Abū l-ʿAbbās-i ʿAbbāsī or Abū l-ʿAbbās-I Rabanjanī; Bū Salīk is the Saffarid-era poet, Abū Salīk Gurgānī; Bū l-Mathal is a Samanid-era poet from Bukhara; the poet from Herat may well be Abu Shuʿayb-i Ṣāliḥ bin Muḥammad-i Hiravī; whereas the poet from Valvālij must be Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad bin Ṣāliḥ Valvālijī. Because the identification of these poets is uncertain in some cases, and because they do not figure in the other poetic catalogues appearing in Table 15.3, available online at http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004386600 they are not included there (see note 162 below). 159   Dīvān-i Manūchihrī, 109. 160  Bū Shuʿayb-i Hiravī was a successful poet during the Samanid period; Bū Dharr may point to a Persian poet and Sufi pīr who lived in the madrasa at Būzjān and died in 367/977, whom Jāmī discusses in the Nafaḥāt al-uns. The “Fine Turk” (Turk-i kashī) may further describe Bū Dharr, or may indicate another poet altogether. Likewise, ḍarīr-i pārisī may be the name of a separate poet, Ḍarīr the Persian, or it may be a modifier, “The Blind Persian,” which could allude to Rūdakī.

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Abū l-Ḥasan.161 The puzzle-like nature of this list may be in keeping with the riddle that opens the poem, or it may be a way to avoid the difficulty of making everyone’s name fit into the meter, or more likely, it may simply serve to keep an open canon, so as not to offend any poets or their descendants by omitting them from a quasi-official Ghaznavid list of prior Persian poets, while at the same time emphasizing the stature of ʿUnṣurī as the only poet (along with Rūdakī and Bū Shuʿayb) worthy of undisputable outright mention. The editor does a valiant job of trying to identify these poets, and we can probably identify a handful with relative certainty, such that they appear in the “Catalogue of Poets” (Table 15.3, available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004386600) as a question mark—not exactly named, but hinted at.162 In the thirteenth century CE, we find another interesting catalogue of the constellation of Persian poets, mixed in with the celestial constellations, this one offered in a qaṣīda by the poet laureate Farīd-i Aḥvāl Isfarāyinī (d. after 663/1264) writing panegyrics for the Āl-i Sāʿid family in Isfahan and the Salghurid court at Shiraz. This catalogue includes Azraqī of Herat ( fl. ca. 1070– 1100 CE, already mentioned in ʿAṭṭār’s catalogue), Anvarī, Athīr-i Akhsīkatī (at the court of the Seljuqs and Ildegizids of Azerbayjan, d. ca. 579/1183), ʿUnṣurī, Firdawsī, Manūchihrī, Farrukhī ( fl. at the early Ghaznavid court, 406–429/1016–1038) and Masʿūd-i Saʿd Salmān (at the later Ghaznavid court, d. 515/1122) as celestial synonyms. More poets are mentioned without celestial paranomasia: Qaṭrān of Tabriz (d. ca. 481/1088), Muʿizzī (at the Seluq court, d. ca. 520/1126), Buḥturī (anomalous in this list, but presumably the famous Arab poet, d. 284/897), Ādharī (?, clearly not the Timurid-era Ādharī of Ṭūs), Sūzanī of Samarqand (panegyrist to the Qarakhanid rulers, d. 569/1174), Rūdakī, Ashharī (of Nishapur, who left the court of the Khwarazmshahs for the Atabeks of Azerbayjan in Tabriz, d. 600/1204),163 and two poets associated with the court of the Khwārazmshāh Atsiz, Adīb-i Ṣābir (killed as a spy, ca. 542/1148), and Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ (poet, rhetorician, and secretary to both Atsiz and his successor, Īl Arslān; d. 578/1183).164

161   Dīvān-i Manūchihrī, 73–74. 162  See Dabīr-Siyāqī’s notes to this poem in Dīvān-i Manūchihrī, 250–52, which suggests that Abū Salīk-i Gurgānī may be one of the Gorganis; that the two poets of Rayy (Rāzīs) may intend Ghaḍāʾirī and Bundār/Pindār, as well as Manṭiqī-yi Rāzī or Masʿūd-i Rāzī; one of the Valvālijīs is the aforementioned Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad bin Ṣāliḥ Valvālijī. 163  ʿAlī Mīr Anṣārī, “Ashharī-yi Nayshāpūrī,” Dāʾirat al-maʿārif-i buzurg-i Islāmī, ed. Kāẓim Mūsavī Bujnūrdī (Tehran: Markaz-i Dāʼirat al-Maʻārif-i Buzurg-i Islāmī, 1367sh.-/1988-), 9:89–90. Online: http://www.cgie.org.ir/fa/publication/entryview/9716. 164  Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 237–38.

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ʿAbd al-Malik ʿIsāmī, author of the Futūḥ al-salāṭīn (Conquests of the Sultans) written in 751/1350 for the founder of the Bahmanid dynasty in Delhi ʿAlāʾ-al-Dīn Bahman Shāh (r. 748–59/1347–58), includes a poetic Roll Call that focuses on poets who achieved success with their narrative mathnavīs, mentioning Firdawsī (upon whose Shāh-nāma the Futūḥ al-salāṭīn was modeled), Niẓāmī (the first and most important author of a Khamsa, or quintet of mathnavīs), and Amīr Khusraw (who had died only a generation earlier but was already an established part of the narrative and lyrical canon).165 Another catalogue of poets, composed at a time when Jāmī was still a youth, comes in a qaṣīda by ʿIṣmat (d. 840/1436), prominent member of a circle of Timurid poets in Bukhara. The poem praises a dīvān by his patron, Khalīl Sulṭān (r. 1405–1409, grandson and successor to Tīmūr in Samarqand), thus setting the ruler’s oeuvre within the pantheon of Persian poetry. While not comprehensive, ʿIsmat’s list reflects a bit of a shift in perspective, including several poets from the twelfth through the fourteenth century. It conspicuously omits Ḥāfiẓ, king of the ghazal, who had died two generations before ʿIṣmat, possibly because ʿIṣmat is thinking primarily in terms of other genres. His register includes Anvarī, Khāqānī, Niẓāmī, Saʿdī, Ibn Yamīn (d. 769/1368, a name we have not so far encountered in this muster of poets), and Salmān-i Sāvajī.166 Fast-forward to the end of the sixteenth century, a full century after the death of Jāmī, and we find another poetic catalogue at the Mughal court in India, detailed in a poem by Fayḍī (954–1004/1547–1595) composed in response to a question from the emperor Akbar. This concerns itself with the names of particular works as much as poets, beginning with the Shāh-nāma. It excludes mention of the early Ghaznavid poets, perhaps by way of exacting retribution for their reputed jealousy toward Firdawsī, or perhaps because their narrative works have not survived. He does mention Sanāʾī, at the court of the later Ghaznavids, specifically for his mystico-didactic narrative poem, Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqat (Garden of Truth), and likewise Sanāʾī’s admirer, Khāqānī, for his Tuḥfat al-ʿirāqayn (Souvenir of Western Persia and ʿIrāq). Niẓāmī is admired for his imagery and rhetorical subtlety (he is compared in this respect to the Arabic poet al-Mutanabbī). Fayḍī gives ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-ṭayr (Conference of the Birds) a place in the pantheon, and both the Būstān and Gulistān (Herb Garden and Rose Garden) of Saʿdī. Poets not known for mathnavīs also rate mention: Anvarī, Kamāl (al-Dīn Ismāʿīl Iṣfahānī), Ẓahīr, Ḥāfiẓ. There are poets known for both ghazals and mathnavīs: Amīr Khusraw and Jāmī. Here, in answer to the question posed by Najīb Māyil Haravī about when the phrase “Seal 165  Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 234–35. 166  Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 241, citing Michael Glünz.

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of the Poets” was first applied to Jāmī, we have an early description of Jāmī which, though not using khātim al-nabiyyīn verbatim, does clearly describe him as the seal of, not only poetry, but also prose: bi jamʿiyyat-i ū baʿd az ū kasī nagdhasht zi naẓm u nathr bar ū khatm shud sukhanrānī167 None so comprehensive as him has come since then; with him, the art of speech, prose and verse, was sealed. The poet Valī Muḥammad, better known as Walī “Dakanī” (ca. 1079–1119 [?])/ ca. 1668–1707 [?]), is credited with establishing the ghazal in Urdu, and as such lived on the cusp of the emerging Urdu literary tradition.168 But he also knew the rich tradition of Persian poetry in India; Mīrzā Asadullāh Ghālib in Delhi (1797–1869) and Muḥammad Iqbāl in Lahore (1877–1938) were to come later, but Walī’s older contemporary, ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (1054–1133/1644–1721), marks an apogee of the Persian ghazal in India before the 1757 Battle of Plassey, after which the influence of Persian gradually began to wane in South Asia.169 From his early eighteenth-century perch, Walī sketches out a canon of Persian poets in one short Urdu ghazal, the first and last lines of which Annemarie Schimmel translated: Your face is oriental (Mashriqī), your beauty most beaming (Anvarī), your manifestation is that of Divine Beauty (Jamālī)/ Your eye is goblet-like (Jāmī), your forehead paradisal (Firdawsī), your eyebrow crescent-like (Hilālī)//…. 167  Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 238–39. 168  See Christopher Shackle, “Walī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_7843. 169  Ḥazīn-i Lāhījī (1103–1180/1692–1766), who fled Iran for India in 1734, about a dozen years after the death of Bīdil and a score of years after Walī died, turned away from the “oldies” style of Ṣā’ib of Tabriz (ca. 1000–1087/1592–1676), who spent seven years in India before returning to Isfahan, and Bīdil. Ḥazīn helped paved the way for an aesthetic change in Persian poetry, arguing with his slightly older Indian contemporary, Khān Ārzū (ca. 1099–1169/1688–1756) and other arbiters of taste against certain features of the mode of “Fresh Speaking” (tāza-gū’ī) known as the “Indian style.” Whether the turn away (bāzgasht) from the Persian aesthetics and poetics that had been championed for two centuries in India also contributed to the decline of Persian and the embrace of Urdu as the language of poetry during Company Rule and the British Raj in India is difficult to say. It does coincide with the emergence of nationalism, national languages and the embrace of directness as an index of modernity over rhetorical bombast.

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Valī (Walī) is longing (Shawqī) and inclined (Māʾil) to your stature and eyebrow/ So that every stich of his is sublime (ʿĀlī) and every hemistich imaginative (Khayālī).170 Eleven names are mentioned in these two lines, and the other three lines of Walī’s ghazal contain allusions to at least another dozen poets: Faṣīḥī, Zulālī, Fayḍī, Qudsī, Ṭālib, Badr, Ahlī, Ghazālī, Amīr, Shawkat, Bīdil and Viṣālī.171 Walī’s panorama of the Persian literary vista features a somewhat narrowly selected pantheon of twenty-three poets with whom he must feel a certain affinity. His manifest of poets does not follow any chronological or geographical order, or evaluative hierarchy that can be readily isolated. Most likely, the sequence is determined by meter, rhyme and other prosodic/rhetorical considerations. Both Firdawsī and Anvarī, though composing in quite distinctly different forms (epic couplets versus monorhyme panegyre and lyric), would have been considered by Walī (as also by Jāmī), among the ancients. By Amīr is intended Amīr Khusraw of Delhi, the acknowledged father of Persian poetry in India. Badr likely signals Badr-i Chāchī, a poet who came from Transoxiana to the court of the Delhi Sultan Muḥammad b. Tughluq (r. 725–752/1324–1351); his Dīvān contains panegyrical qaṣīdas for Sultan Muḥammad, who sent Badr on a diplomatic mission to the Deccan plateau in 745/1344,172 on which account Walī perhaps associated Badr with the beginnings of Persophone bardolatry in his own region of the Deccan. Badr did not seem integral to the scene at the late Timurid court in Herat, and so here we may have evidence of regional variation in the canon, just as some Canadian Anglophone writers, by virtue 170   Quoted with some adaptation and alteration of transliteration from Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (London and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 249. Schimmel mentions Garcin de Tassy’s Les oeuvres de Wali as the source of the Urdu, but gives no citation and does not mention the other three lines of the ghazal. 171  See M. Garcin de Tassy, Les oeuvres de Wali publiées en hindoustani (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1836), 107. Other words used in Walī’s ghazal may allude to yet further poets or the names of their books, e.g., gulshan to Shabistarī’s Gulshan-i rāz, or to Walī’s Sufi master, Shāh Saʿd Allāh Gulshan (d. 1141/1728); kamāl possibly to Kamāl-i Khujandī (d. 803/1401), shaydā possibly to Mullā Shaydā Fatḥpūrī (d. 1633). Another lithographed edition, Dīwān-i Walī, ed. Ḥaydar Ibrāhīm Sāyānī (Delhi: Jayyad Press, 1921), 105, gives some different readings, e.g. kamālī, āhangī, which might alter the list of poets in a couple places, but a modern edition, Kulliyyāt-i Walī, ed. Nūrul Ḥasan Hāshmi (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi, 1989), 299, confirms the readings given here. 172  M. Dabīrsiyāqī, “BADR ČĀČĪ,” Encylopaedia Iranica, Vol. III, Fasc. 4 (1988): 380–81. Also available online (last updated August 22, 2011): http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ badr-caci.

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of their origins, enjoy a cachet in Canada while remaining obscure in the United States. A number of other poets represent the intermediate tradition for Walī— poets from the two centuries prior who exemplified the founders (the “Oldies”) of Walī’s own style. From the Timurid period, Walī mentions the Sufi poet and calligrapher Mashriqī of Tabriz (d. 859/1454),173 and not surprisingly, Jāmī, himself (d. 1492). By Khayālī is meant Khayālī Bukhārī, the Timurid-era poet emulated by Jāmī, and described in a notice by Dawlatshāh (who cites one of his ghazals), in the sixth rung (ṭabaqa) of the Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā as very popular in Transoxiana, Badakhshan and Turkistan.174 The generation or two after Jāmī are also well-represented. We find Badr al-Dīn Hilālī (ca. 874–936/1470–1529), a protégé of Navāʾī in Herat, mentioned in the Majālis al-nafāʾis as a promising younger poet,175 a forecast that did indeed pan out, although Hilālī’s reputation has faded somewhat since the days of Walī. Jamālī likely intends Jamālī of Delhi (ca. 862–942/1457–1535), author of the Mirʿāt al-maʿānī (The Mirror 173  Siding with the identification of Schimmel, Two-Colored Brocade, 425n18. For a biography of this ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khalvatī Mashriqī, see Leonard Lewisohn, “The Life and Poetry of Mashreqi Tabrizi,” Iranian Studies 22, no. 2/3 (1989): 99–127. Another poet called himself Mashriqī at the Mughal court in the seventeenth century, Nūr al-Ḥaqq al-Dihlavī (d. 1073/1662), though his fame stems more from his histories and commentaries than his poetry. Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 42, 215, notes a certain Mawlānā Mashriqī from Mashhad, a potter who became a dervish and died in Herat. Only Khalvatī Mashriqī, the poet of Tabriz, belonged to a circle of poets in the fourteenth to fifteenth century CE who left a lasting mark on the canon; that Jāmī and Navāʾī do not seem to know him is in keeping with their general ignorance (or perhaps merely reticence) about the poetry circles in Tabriz. Neither mention Qaṭrān, and “Tabriz” is only mentioned in connection with poetry in Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 6, 65, 232, when it involves poets who came from Tabriz to Khurasan (Qāsim-i Anvār, Khalaf-i Tabrīzī), or who went from Khurasan to Tabriz (Bināʾī). The tacked-on eighth chapter from Muḥammad b. Mubārak Qazvīnī’s Persian translation of Navāʾī, Majālis, 339, also includes Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī in this category. 174  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 420–21. See also Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā-i Dawlatshāh Samarqandī, az rū-yi chāp-i Brawn bā muqābila-yi nusakh-i muʿtabar-i khaṭṭīyi qadīmī, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbbāsī ([Tihran]: Kitābfurūshī-yi Bārānī, 1337Sh/1958), 474, based upon Browne’s editio princeps and several other manuscripts; and the most recent and meticulously annotated critical edition, based on further manuscripts, Tadhkirat alshuʻarāʼ-i Dawlatshāh Samarqandī, ed. Fāṭima ʻAlāqa (Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ʻUlūm-i Insānī va Muṭālaʿāt-i Farhangī, 2007), 760–61. Dawlatshāh’s notice on Mawlānā Khayālī-yi Bukhārāʾī also mentions two other Khayālīs, one in Sabzavār and one in Tūn, but as Jāmī considers mention of them in the same breath with Khayālī of Bukhara unthinkable, it is quite unlikely that Walī intends either of those two. Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 12 and 188, briefly mentions this Khayālī as someone who never met Navāʾī but had sent poetry to him. 175  Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 68–69, 242 and 253.

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of Meanings), a friend or student of Jāmī, who returned to India after Jāmī’s death.176 Meanwhile, Ahlī likely refers to Ahlī of Shiraz (858?–942/1454?–1535), who may also suggestively stand in for his otherwise unmentioned Shirazi compatriot, Ḥāfiẓ.177 Walī’s catalogue also includes Faṣīḥī (ca.987–1049/1579–1639), a poet from Herat who came to be attached to the Safavid court of Shāh ʿAbbās. Also during the era of Shāh ʿAbbās we meet Zulālī Khwānsārī (d. either 1016/1607, or 1025/1616 or even as late as 1037/1628), author inter alia of a narrative poem on Maḥmūd of Ghazna and his slave-boy Āyāz. Attached to the Mughal court of Akbar was the famous Fayḍī (954–1004/1547–1595), author of the abovementioned Roll Call of poets, and younger brother of Akbar’s biographer, Abū l-Faḍl. Ghazālī points to the Ghazālī of Mashhad (d. 980/1572) mentioned earlier in this article, poet laureate at the court of Akbar. The famous Ṭālib-i Āmulī (ca. 987–1036/1579–1627) left Persia to become a later Mughal poet laureate at the court of Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627). And Qudsī likely designates Muḥammadjān Qudsī of Mashhad (d. 1056/1646 or 1065/1654).178 The other poets mentioned in the poem in question were still alive or recently deceased when Walī wrote: Shawkat from Bukhara (d. 1107/1696), was a poet attached to various courts in Khurasan, and a rough contemporary of Walī; the eminent Bīdil (1054–1133/1644–1721) outlived Walī, but was already quite famous; Shawqī may be the seventeenth-century Deccan poet Shawqī Ḥasan, or perhaps Lālā Mal Rāʾī Shawqī (d. 1119/1707), secretary to the governors of Punjab and an official of Aurangzeb who authored the Guldasta-yi 176  See Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 104–5, 104n1, and 278 for the relationship to Jāmī. For a full biography, see A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “JAMĀLI, ḤĀMED B. FAŻL-ALLĀH,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 14, fasc. c4 (2008), 438–39. Available online, last updated April 10, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamali-hamed-b-fazl-allah. 177  On Ahlī, see Paul Losensky, “Ahlī-yi Shīrāzī,”Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Published online 2008. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_26306. There is another poet with the penname Ahlī: Ahlī-yi Turshīzī or Khurāsānī (d. 1497 according to Afṣaḥzād, but 934/1527 according to the editor of his Dīvān), who is mentioned among what we might call the tertiary rung of the late Timurid/early Safavid canon of poets. See Dīvān-i-Mawlānā Kamāl al-Dīn Ahlī Turshīzī, al-maʿrūf bi Ahlī Khurāsānī, ed. Md. Shamoon Israeli (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1971). He is also mentioned in the Persian translations of Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 80 and 251. The notice in Fakhrī Hirātī’s translation of Navāʾī, dating to 928/1521, claims that several poets had devoted javābs to one of his poems. This Ahlī, however, is different from Ahlī Shīrāzī, who receives a separate notice in the eighth chapter that Muḥammad b. Mubārak Qazvīnī tacks on to his translation of Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 387. 178  Nabi Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1995), 493, gives Qudsī’s date of death as 1056/1624, but that should read 1056/1646.

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sukhan (“Bouquet of Speech”);179 ʿĀlī likely indicates ʿAlī Niʿmat Khān ʿĀlī (d. 1121/1709), another official and poet of Aurangzeb whose family had come to India from Shiraz,180 or possibly ʿĀlī Mīrzā Abū l-Maʿālī (d. 1128/1715), who, like Ḥazīn, reacted against the complexity of the style of Bīdil. Māʾil seems to point to Mīrzā Quṭb al-Dīn Māʾil of Delhi (d. 1108/1696), whose father was at the court of Aurangzeb. I am unable to identify Viṣālī.181 Walī provides one paradigm for imagining one’s own poetic lineage—not everything and the kitchen sink, not an exhaustive list of all the prominent poets whose names everyone will recognize, but a particular poetic itinerary that highlights certain stations along the track of a tradition from the beginning to the present. For today’s passengers bound for Poesy, many of these stops will not be obvious, and some are now virtually forgotten. But there is a range of famous names from the distant past, as well as a good cluster of local stations near in time to the poet’s home—close contemporaries, colleagues, members of the poet’s or his father’s literary scene and circle.

179  Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 64 and 237, also mentions a Mawlānā Shawqī among the poets of his own era, but that Shawqī seems to lack the necessary stature to have won the attention of Walī. 180  Identification per Schimmel, Two-Colored Brocade, 425n18. He was the author of a mathnavī called Sukhan-i ʿālī, which perhaps makes it more likely that he is the ʿĀlī intended by Walī; certainly more likely than the Mīr Najīb ʿĀlī who collected the Jizya for Aurangzeb at Akbarabad and Agra and composed a dīvān. On him, as well as on the two ʿĀlīs mentioned above, see Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature, 63–64. 181  The Viṣālī from Kashan mentioned in al-Qazvīnī’s translation of Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 390, comes in the chapter on earlier poets and seems to lack the necessary stature to close out this list of Walī. I have not made a wider search for Viṣālī in the tadhkira literature, where he may well be found, but he is not listed by Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature, with this takhalluṣ. Viṣālī may have been a contemporary known locally and personally to Walī. Because a poet and calligrapher of the Qajar era, Viṣāl-i Shīrāzī (d. 1262/1845), adopted a quite similar takhalluṣ only a century later, it seems unlikely that the Viṣālī mentioned by Walī could have achieved a wider reputation in the Persian tadhkira literature; though it does occasionally happen that poets recycle pennames (e.g., ʿAṭṭār of Tūn, for example, who seems to have banked on Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s reputation rubbing off on him), it is unusual for poets to repeat the takhalluṣ of an earlier canonical poet, or adopt one that could not easily be distinguished from it. On the other hand, Jāmī himself has based his own takhalluṣ on the famous popular sufi from his home region, Shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām, though the dīvān attributed to Shaykh Aḥmad may well be spurious; see Heshmat Moayyad and Franklin Lewis, eds. The Colossal Elephant and His Spiritual Feats: Shaykh Ahmad-e Jām (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004), 36–40.

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The Circumscribed Catalogues of Jāmī and Navāʾī

Although Jāmī uses the words ghazālī, hilālī, khayālī (and even ḥālī) in the rhyme position of one ghazal from the early part of his Dīvān,182 perhaps therefore dating to the 1460s or 1470s, they unfortunately cannot evoke by double-entendre (īhām) the pen-names of the poets mentioned by Walī, since with the exception of Khayālī, these poets all flourished after Jāmī’s death.183 However, Jāmī does give us a similarly witty versified list, not of poets, but of the names of various theological, exegetical, legal and medical texts, in his Tuḥfat al-aḥrār—that is from 886/1481 when he was a mature man in his sixties, and must already have long before completed his study of the canonical school books adumbrated in his rhymed and metered syllabus. This bibliographical sketch comes in the twentieth chapter of the poem, entitled “about the lives of the ʿulamā who never do anything, and the fools who are proud of their ignorance and disputation” (maqāla-yi davāzdahum dar sharḥ-i ḥāl-i ʿulamā-yi az ʿamal dūr va sufahā-yi bi-jahl va jadal maghrūr), and emphasizes the importance of inspiration and insight over book learning. It first mentions the Qānūn and the Shifā of Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) and the study of causes and symptoms, which should be rejected for the medicine of the Prophet (Ṭibb al-nabī) so that one may be healed of ignorance. Spending one’s life on the Uṣūl and Furūʿ (“roots” and “branches” of jurisprudence, which may allude to the specific titles of many works, or more generally to the generic categories of works on fiqh) will not return you to your “source and origin” (punning on the root meaning of the word aṣl, the singular form of uṣūl). When you have no comprehension of “purposes” (maqāṣid = Maqāṣid al-falāsifa, or Aims of the Philosophers, by Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, d. 505/1111), do not stop your search at the “standpoints” (mawāqif = Kitāb al-Mawāqif, a summa theologica of sorts by the Shirazi judge, Aḍud al-Dīn al-ʿĪjī, d. 756/1355). If the way is not opened to you by the “Key” (miftāḥ = Miftāḥ al-ʿulūm, or The Key of Sciences, a work on rhetoric and language by the Hanafi scholar from Khwarazm, al-Sakkākī, d. 626/1229), then beseech the “Opener” (Fattāḥ = God) to grant you the good fortune of opening/victory ( fatḥ, a word whose root f-t-ḥ, also produces the 182  From the Fātiḥat al-shabāb section of the Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:799–800. 183  Hilālī was in his early twenties when Jāmī died, and may well not yet have been born when this ghazal was composed. There is one other ghazal (Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:799) which has zulāl-ī, khayāl-ī and ʿālī in the rhyme position, but since the final -ī represents the verb “to be” conjugated in the second person singular (“you are an image/ phantom”), this does not seek to evoke the Timurid poet Khayālī, and the other two, Zulālī and ʿĀlī, lived well after Jāmī.

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morphological forms fattāḥ and miftāḥ, making an etymological pun between these three elements in the line). If your heart is not pure of impediments (mavāniʿ, which may refer to the title of a fiqh work), then “lifting” the veils (kashf ) of impediments is not within the power of the “Unveiler” (Kashshāf, a commentary on the Quran by Zamakhsharī, d. 538/1144). Do not seek the light of guidance from “The Guidance” (hidāya = al-Hidāya, a famous work on Hanafi law by al-Marghīnānī, d. 593/1197), and do not follow the final path through “the Final” (nihāya could be the name of several works, though it perhaps alludes here to al-Nihāya fī mujarrad al-fiqh wa-l-fatāwā, a work on Shiʿi jurisprudence by Shaykh Ṭūsī, d. ca. 460/1067, or much less likely, to the history al-Bidāya wa-l-nihāya of Ibn Kathīr, d. 774/1332). To give up hypocrisy and have little to do with “deception” (talbīs = Talbīs Iblīs, or Lucifer’s Deception, by Ibn al-Jawzī, d. 597/1200), you must gain knowledge from the fount of “sanctification” (taqdīs = Asās al-taqdīs, The Foundations of Sanctification, a scholastic theology by Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī, d. 606/1209). Jāmī avows that such books as these are trivial impertinences compared to what is truly important for learned men: the words of God and the Prophet.184 While this catalogue of religious-legal scholarship does not tell us much of anything about Jāmī’s view of the poetic canon, it at least shows that, like Walī, he was not above making lists. It also reflects a fairly standard selection of major works well known to most scholars, and frequently taught in madrasas. Nothing strongly indicates that Jāmī wants us to read this as a distinctly personalized list, or one in which he is attempting to show off particularly recondite erudition, or to take a tendentious side in doctrinal debates. It rather constitutes a kind of basic library, though not comprehensive, of religious works. As such, it tends to present a consensus, or put another way, a conservative canon. Can the same be said for his coterie of Persian poets—that it unquestioningly reflects the received canon? Does Jāmī do anything to bend the norms of the canon, say reviving a neglected poet of the past, or asserting a personal affinity for one of the grand masters over others, such that it palpably impacts his stylistics and aesthetics? Or does he advocate for the inclusion (or exclusion) of certain Timurid poets, from the recent past or the present, whom he feels should receive greater attention? 184  Jāmī, from Tuḥfat al-aḥrār in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 421. Schimmel, Two-Colored Brocade, 246, without giving a source, quotes an additional line (in translation) in which Jāmī rather immodestly includes his own Lavāiḥ (w. 1472), a prosimetric treatise on tawḥīd from the point of view of Ibn ʿArabī’s theosophy. However, that work does not appear in this section of Tuḥfat al-aḥrār in the Mudarris-i Gīlānī edition; indeed, it does not seem likely Jāmī would mention it in this context.

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Beyond his Dīvān, Jāmī does in a few places give us a list of poets we can examine as evidence for an answer to these questions. He gives one tailored catalogue in Book Three of the Silsilat al-dhahab that treats the topic of rulers and statecraft, presenting a kind of versified Mirror for Princes to its dedicatee, the Ottoman Sulṭān Bāyazīd II, who had tried to woo Jāmī away from Herat. Perhaps Jāmī means to suggest that the Ottoman Sultan stands in need of learning the wisdom of statecraft from Jāmī’s own ruler, Sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, and his excellent vizier, ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī. This book of Silsilat al-dhahab was completed toward the end of Jāmī’s life, in his mid-seventies, between 890 and 891 (1485–1486), advising on the kinds of officials a Sultan requires for effective government. Not unlike Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī in his Chahār maqāla (w. between 550–552/1155–1157 and dedicated to the Ghurid court), Jāmī here addresses the need of the king for various kinds of professionals to assist him, which he illustrates through the use of anecdotes involving famous viziers and rulers, including Anūshīravān, Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Sultan Sanjar, Ghāzān Khān, and a few figures of early Islam. A good king needs an intelligent counsellor of good speech and good deeds as his vizier, and wise astronomers/astrologers, and a physician (Ibn Sīnā features in an anecdote). Of course, he also needs poetry, which Jāmī divides into two kinds—one that brings peace of mind and the other that diminishes the heart. The ruler evidently must distinguish between the two and choose wisely, but at the same time, the poets are in need of the support or patronage (tarbiyat, literally “training”) of the Sultans. It is because poets praise Sultans that their names live on in the world.185 The poetic catalogue that Jāmī proceeds to lay out therefore concerns itself with “some of the panegyircal poets who came before and received support from the sultans of the past, and their names remain on the page of history because of their panegyrics for them” (baʿḍī az shuʿarā-yi mā taqaddama ki az salāṭīn-i pīshīn tarbiyat-hā yāftand va nām-i īnān bi-vāṣiṭa-yi madīḥ-i ānān bar ṣaḥīfa-yi rūzigār bimānd). If these poets are no longer with us in body, their names live on continuous: Rūdakī, who bored the pearls of speech, a whole caravan-load of poems, always panegyrizing the Samanids, and now that time has carried him off, his poems remain, his name remembered in poetic assemblies alongside that of the House of Sāmān. Next came ʿUnṣurī, a poet of pure constitution, who received from the hand of Maḥmūd of Ghazna even more than Rūdakī gained from the Samanids.186 Then there is Muʿizzī (d. ­between 185  Jāmī, Silsilat al-dhahab in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 260–309 (Daftar-i sivvum), with sections on the importance of poetry, 300–1, and the panegyrists of the past, 301–3. 186  Jāmī, Silsilat al-dhahab in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 301.

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519–521/1125–1127) at the Seljuq court, the favorite of Sanjar, whom Jāmī depicts as a sharp, eloquent panegyrist for a king who buttressed religion, and who scattered pearls on the poet in return for his praise poems. Jāmī adds that another poet praising Sanjar, was Anvarī. And then Khāqānī, praising the Shirvānshāhs. Saʿdī was associated with Saʿd bin Zangī, though the name of Saʿdī proved even more fragrant because of his Gulistān. Up to this point in the manifest, each poet has been paired with an individual patron, or a dynastic house, with Sanjar having the luxury of two poets identified with his reign. Jāmī now pivots backward chronologically (whether deliberately or because he is unclear about the chronology) from the thirteenth century to the twelfth, in order to pair two other poets who share homonymic patrons. Although Jāmī knows that the Bahrāmshāh of Sanā’ī (Bahrāmshāh the Ghaznavid, r. 511–552/1117–1157) and the Bahrāmshāh of Niẓāmī (Fakhr al-Dīn Bahrāmshāh, the Mengüjek ruler in Erzincan, r. 560–622/1165–1225) are two different persons, the conceit of treating both poets under one regnal rubric allows Jāmī to move quickly past them to get to Ẓahīr from Fāryāb, outside Balkh (d. 598/1201), who is not paired with any patron because he praised too many of them (from ʿAḍud al-Dīn Ṭughānshāh in Nishapur to the Bawandids in Mazandaran, to the Eldigüzids in Azerbaijan, as well as the Seljuq ruler, Tughril III). Indeed, the comments Jāmī makes about him here seem underhanded,187 though his comments in other places about Ẓahīr betray no scorn. There is Kamāl, meaning Kamāl al-Dīn Iṣfahānī (son of Jamāl al-Dīn, d. between 628 and 639/1231 and 1242), famous for his panegyres, which are here matched with the “Sāʿidiyān Group” (gurūh-i Sāʿidiyān), the leading Hanafi family in Isfahan, though Kamāl al-Dīn Ismā`īl of Isfahan also praised their rivals, the Shafiʿi Āl-i Khujand family in Isfahan, as well as the Zangids, Salghurids, and Khwarazmshahs.188 Finally, we reach the end of the poetic line with Salmān (-i Sāvajī, d. 778/1376), who dedicated praise poems to the Il-Khan rulers Ghiyāth al-Dīn (the son of Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb) and to Dilshād Khātūn (d. before 753/1352), the widow of Abū Saʿīd, and to her subsequent husband, 187  Jāmī speaks about Ẓahīr kissing the stirrups of his patron in order to open the doors of a living wage: now there is nothing left of his sycophancy/but tales of his stirrup-kissing (tā bibūsad rikāb-i mamdūḥ-ash/gardad abvāb-i rizq maftūḥ-ash)//nīst aknūn zi chāblūsīyi ū/juz ḥadīth-i rikāb-būsī-yi ū). On his patrons, see Clement Huart and J.T.P. de Bruijn, “Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Published online 2012. dx.doi. org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_8082. 188  A.H. Zarrinkub, “Ḳamāl al-Dīn Ismāʿīl,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. Published online, 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_3840. Note that elsewhere in the works of both Jāmī and Navāʾī the allusion to “Kamāl,” especially in relation to the ghazal, refers to Kamāl-i Khujandī of Tabriz (d. 803/1401) rather than to this Kamāl, rather more famous in Jāmī’s view for his panegyrics.

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Ḥasan-i Buzurg (d. 757/1356), founder of the Jalāyirid dynasty, and to his son Uvays (r. 757–76/1356–74). Jāmī links Salmān-i Sāvajī in this passage with Uvays and Dilshād, of whom and all their vaunted palaces nothing remains but “a few lines of verse by Salmān.”189 In the final line (maqṭaʿ) of his Persian ghazals, Navāʾī often shares the stage, giving his own takhalluṣ—Fānī—in conjunction with a mini-Roll Call of predecessor poets. This effectively sets himself within the canon, albeit as a humble follower of the masters mentioned there: Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ, Amīr Khusraw, Jāmī. The coterie of poets mentioned in his takhalluṣ lines is quite small, not a general canon of the Persian poets, and when two names are invoked together alongside “Fānī,” it is almost invariably the same two or three poets. We can therefore confidently assert that these poets represent his favorites, the forerunners of his own self-identified style in dīvān poetry: Jāmī, Ḥāfiẓ, Amīr Khusraw, Ḥasan-i Dihlavī. When three or four names share the takhalluṣ line, it amounts to a miniature catalogue: agar tu Ḥāfiẓ-i Fānī shavī az sahv dar ḥamd-at dar iqlīm-i sukhanrānī kunam ṣāḥib-qirānī-hā zabān-am gar kunī gūyā bi dastān-hā-yi ḥamd-i khwud chi Khusraw balki bā Jāmī kunam hamdāstānī-hā190 If you became an effaced Ḥāfiẓ (Fānī’s Ḥāfiẓ), the neglect of your praise would make me a Lord of Conjunction in the Clime of Speech. If you loosen my tongue to tell the legends of my own praise, I’ll make not just Khusraw, but also Jāmī, my co-stars.

…

shahī vu rafʿat agar ārizū kunī Fānī ghulām-i Ḥāfiẓ u khāshāk-i rāh-i Jāmī bāsh191 If you desire kingship and ease, Fānī be the slave of Ḥāfiẓ and the brambles in the path of Jāmī

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189   Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 302. 190   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 77. Possibly also “memorizer of Fānī”. 191   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 212.

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bi rāh-i ʿishq agar mushkilī fitad Fānī zi rūḥ-i Ḥāfiẓ u maʿnī-yi Jāmī-sh jūyam192 In the path of love, if a problem occurs, Fānī I’ll tackle it through the spirit of Ḥāfiẓ and the meanings of Jāmī

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Hast chūn jurʿa-kash-i Jāmī az ān Fānī rā midad az maʿnī-yi Ḥāfiẓ shud u rūḥ-i Khusraw193 It is because Fānī sips from the goblet of Jāmī that he gets help from the meanings of Ḥāfiẓ and the spirit of Khusraw

…

Fānī agar chi Jāmī u Shīrāziyat khwash ast natvān zi dast dād ham āyīn-i Dihlavī194 Fānī, though Jāmī and your Shirazi (Ḥāfiẓ) are so fine We can’t let go of the Delhi style [of Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī & Ḥasan-i  Dihlavī]. Jāmī, in a different genre, lists a broader canon than the personal influences given by Navāʾī in these end-lines of his ghazals. In the thirty-ninth chapter of his Subḥat al-abrār (w. 887/1482), entitled “On Advising his own Self, which is More Entangled than Anyone Else, and More in Need of Advice” (dar naṣīḥat-i nafs-i khwud ki az hama giriftār tar ast va bi-naṣīḥat sizāvār tar), Jāmī proposes another list of poets, this time not all panegyrists. It begins with Firdawsī and his Shahnāma, and then moves directly to the Khamsa of Niẓāmī of Ganja, mentioning or evoking the titles of the narratives associated with these authors. Next in line comes Khāqānī,195 then Anvarī, directly on to Ẓahīr, Kamāl (al-Dīn) of Isfahan, and then Saʿdī and from there to Ḥāfiẓ, who took the craft of speech and made it new (sākht āyīn-i sukhan rā tāza), to presage a phrase of Ezra Pound. After this, however, a decline set in (z-ān bulandī sū-yi pastī 192   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 253. 193   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 285. 194   Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 311. 195  Jāmī, Subḥat al-abrār, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 568.

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afkand), even though the turning of the heavens brought the fruit of Kamāl-i Khujandī to perfection, until time threw him on the ground of Tabriz. These two poets, Ḥāfiẓ and Kamāl-i Khujandī spread their sugar to India, like sweet-singing parrots.196 Here Jāmī positions himself as heir to the two great fourteenth-century ghazal poets in Persia (albeit he writes in Khurasan, a geographical intermediate between the poets of Shiraz to the southeast, Tabriz to the west, and the poets of South Asia to the east). This disquisition on poetry ends, followed immediately by an anecdote about a few lines of verse Sanāʾī supposedly composed at the hour of his death, a passage which emphasizes the importance of poetic speech (sukhan) achieving meaningfulness (maʿnī), or transcendence, though in this material abode it rarely reaches that level of significance, so silence would be preferable. And yet, Jāmī seems determined to test his own poetic nature against the canon, in the hopes of carrying on the tradition where Ḥāfiẓ and Kamāl-i Khujandī had left off.197 9

Catechizing the Canon: Jāmī Instructs his Son on the Poetic Tradition

Jāmī does not seem to have undergone an apprentice period as a poet; he preferred to make his mark as scholar, not as poet, and the record suggests that, were it not for Navāʾi’s encouragement and editorial services, and the requests of other royal patrons, Jāmī might not have made such a long career of composing poetry for public consumption, or at least not of assiduously packaging it for public presentation. Even if he did not necessarily aspire to stake his reputation on his verse, Jāmī certainly did have what we might today describe as a professional, or scholarly, familiarity with literary history. In his early-mid-seventies, in 893/1487, Jāmī composed an autobiographical qaṣīda entitled “Rashḥ-i bāl bi-sharḥ-i ḥāl” (Exudations of the Mind in Recounting My Life) in which he records the date of his own birth (817 of the Prophet’s hijra = 1414 CE).198 Here he clearly gives a nod to another ode, also in mujtathth meter and rhyming in *āl, that likewise gave the author’s birthdate—a famous qaṣīda written in 391/1001 by Kisāʾī (or Kasāʾī) Marvzī

196  Jāmī, Subḥat al-abrār, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 569. 197  Jāmī, Subḥat al-abrār, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 569–72. 198  For the Persian text of this 82-line poem, see Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:35–39. The translation of the title comes from Algar, Jami, 13. Kisāʾī rather forlornly fixes the age of senior citizenship at fifty years (!).

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(b. 341/953), a fellow Khurasani poet.199 Because Kisāʾī’s dīvān is thought to have disappeared by the twelfth or thirteenth century, Jāmī’s homage does not reflect a deep preoccupation with the wider oeuvre of this early poet; rather, a sense of advancing years and impending thoughts of the end of life likely occasioned it. This same theme Kisāʾī famously treats in his “lāmiyya” qaṣīda, a much-anthologized )fragment of a) poem that had already been culled as a classic on the topos of old age and passed down through the Mongol period to Jāmī’s day, for example in ʿAwfī’s lives of the poets.200 Nevertheless, at the court of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, an impulse to collect, codify and chronicle the Persian poetic tradition was palpably felt, an impulse begun already at the court of Bāysunqur, who had convened a committee of scholars to produce an edition of the Shāhnāma in 829/1426 and directed the collection of Amīr Khusraw’s large Dīvān, an undertaking repeated under ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, along with a new edition of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ.201 Jāmī’s “Rashḥ-i bāl” was under no obligation to emulate the lāmiyya of Kisāʾī, and could have chosen a much more recent model when he sat down to write his poem in 893/1487, especially insofar as he was not turning fifty, but more like seventy-five years of age; he might well have composed an autobiographical poem without gesturing toward any prior model. The year before, 892/1486, Jāmī had composed his prosimetric Bahāristān for his son, consciously invoking the model of Saʿdī’s Gulistān. As perhaps the single most widely read work in Persian, a kind of primer for secretarial prose style as well as an introduction to the Persian literary idiom, the Gulistān was no easy work to emulate. By overtly composing a work on the model of the Gulistān, Jāmī certainly meant to pay homage to it, and to Saʿdī’s acknowledged stature as a master of the reigning style, while simultaneously calling attention to his own new book, and staking a claim for it and for himself as a worthy heir of Saʿdī’s example. Meanwhile, Navāʾī was preparing a final recension of Jāmī’s collected Dīvān during this period, and in 897/1491, Navāʾī began work 199  The opening line of this mujtathth-meter qaṣīda, composed when Kisāʾī was turning fifty, dates his birth precisely to the end of the month of Shavvāl 341/middle of March 953 (bi sīṣad u chihil-i yak rasīd nawbat-i sāl/chahār shanba vu si rūz bāqī az Shavvāl). For the text of the poem, see Muḥammad-Amīn Riyāḥī, Kisāī-yi Marvzī: Zindagī, andīsha va shiʿr-i ū (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Ṭūs, 1367Sh/1988), 88–89. See also J.T.P. de Bruijn, “Kesāʾi Marvazi,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, last updated April 7, 2008, http://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/kesai-marvazi-persian-poet. 200  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:38–39. 201  Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 146. Losensky further sketches out (146ff) the project of “consolidation and codification of the tradition” (153) engaged in by poets of the Timurid-Turkmen era in the kinds of works they wrote and their concern for great classical models. See also Rogers, “Centralisation and Timurid Creativity,” 536–39.

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on his own Majālis al-nafāis,202 a vitae of both Persian and Chaghatay poets that features mostly contemporary poets. Navāʾī followed up this work a few years later with his translation and expansion of Jāmī’s biographical compendium of Sufis, mystics and ascetics, the Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds (Breaths of Intimacy from Presences of Sancity), into Chaghatay as Nasāʾim almaḥabba min shamāʾim al-futuwwa (Breezes of Affection from the Fragrances of Chivalry). While Jāmī busied himself with the Bahāristān in 892/1486, Dawlatshāh Samarqandī (d. 900/1495 or 913/1507), who had worked for a time at the court of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, completed his memorial of the poets, Tadhkirat alshuʿarā, taking the inspiration to write a useful book from a quatrain by Jāmī, and dedicating the product to Navāʾī.203 This presents an anthology of poems rather than a simple biographical dictionary of poets, both of which functions would come to be seen as the role of the tadhkira genre in Persian, a sort of “Lives of the Poets” accompanied by selected poems of each author, in which the anthologizing impetus often outweighs the biographical information, as distinct from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, with its focus on biography, intended as introductions to the editions of each poet’s work.204 This genre 202  Two Persian translations of this Chaghatay work of Navāʾī were produced within a quarter century of its completion: The first is called Laṭā’if-nāma and was done by Fakhrī Hirātī in 928/1521 for Shāh Ismāʿīl the Safavid; the other was made in Istanbul between 927–929/1520–1522 by Muḥammad bin Mubārak al-Qazvīnī for the Ottoman Sultan Selim; see the introduction to Tadhkira-yi majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, i–xxviii, which includes both translations. The latter translation appears to incorporate material from Jāmī’s Bahāristān in the chapter that it adds at the end (Bihisht-i hashtum) on poets of the past (before Sultan Selim), and a section on the contemporary poets at the court of Selim, 317ff. The ninth chapter (majlis-i nuhum) of Fakhrī Hirātī’s translation, 132–75, also constitutes a supplement to Navāʾī’s book. 203  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 11 and 14. 204  Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) undertook this work, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, published in ten volumes in 1779 and 1781, but repackaged in 1781 in six volumes under a new title, The Lives of the English Poets, or simply Lives of the Poets. This was commissioned by publishers wanting introductions to go along with editions of the collected poems of individual poets, the canon of poets included being thus not chosen by Johnson himself. It covers not the whole of English poetry, but poets who died anywhere from about a hundred years before him (e.g., Milton, 1608–1674) up to within about a decade of writing, such as Thomas Gray (b. 1716–1771), a younger contemporary of Johnson who predeceased him. Johnson thus gives us an intellectual history of the poets of his own era and the “Oldies” of the tradition to which they belonged, but excludes many far more prominent poets from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century—anyone who had died more than a hundred years before Johnson wrote (Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Richard

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would explode in popularity during the Safavid period and afterwards,205 but Dawlatshāh’s major project of collecting sample poems and brief biographical notices on about 150 poets had been attempted neither frequently nor recently in Persian. There had not been a comprehensive and canonical anthology of Persian poets since the Lubāb al-albāb (Quintessence of Intellects) of Muḥammad Sadīd al-Dīn ʿAwfī in 618/1221, which, in any case, Dawlatshāh does not mention having seen. Despite Dawlatshāh’s penchant for providing incorrect information, he did consult a few earlier works about Persian poets, which must have given him some idea of how to go about organizing a work in this genre. Browne counted 140 works mentioned by Dawlatshāh, nearly forty of which Browne considered probable sources consulted by him.206 One work to which Dawlatshāh had access, the early twelfth-century CE text Manāqib al-shuʿarā (Acts of the Poets) by Abū Ṭāhir Khātūnī, has unfortunately not survived the ravages of time, so we cannot now judge how essential this source may have been for him.207 Crashaw, Richard Lovelace). But even some poets who do belong to the chronological period covered by the series are nevertheless absent (Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughn, Anne Bradstreet). Johnson provides good biographies (but not based on original scholarly research), criticism and intellectual history, and situates the poets within the contemporary literary tradition. It was thus left for others to fill in the canon of the earlier English poets, as did George Ellis in his Specimens of Early English Poetry (1 volume of sixteenth and seventeenth-century lyric in 1790; expanded to 3 volumes tracing matters all the way back to the thirteenth century in 1801), and Alexander Chalmers, who appended—not unlike the Tatimmat al-yatīma—poets from both the era before and the era after those covered by Johnson’s Lives, in his massively expanded reworking, The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (21 volumes, 1810). 205  On the beginnings of this explosion, see Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 136–42. 206  Edward G. Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh; With Some Remarks on the Materials Available for a Literary History of Persia, and an Excursus on Bārbad and Rūdagī,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 31, no. 1 (Jan., 1899), 38. 207  Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā, “DAWLATŠĀH SAMARQANDĪ,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 7, fasc. 2 (1994): 149–50. Also available online, last updated November 18, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/dawlatsah. Abū Ṭāhir Khātūnī, the author of Manāqib al-shuʿarā, worked as a finance officer (mustawfī) for Gawhar Khātūn, wife of the Seljuk Sultan, Muḥammad b. Malikshāh (r. 498–511/1105–18). Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh speculates that the work contained anecdotes about poets and quotations from their works, perhaps more like the chapter on poets in Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī’s Chahār maqāla than the format of Dawlatshāh’s Tadhkira. See Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, “ABŪ ṬĀHER ḴĀTŪNĪ,” Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. I, fasc. 4 (1983): 387; and online, last updated July 21, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/abu-taher-katuni-mowaffaq-al-dawla-officer-famous-poet-and-author-inthe-reign-of-the-saljuq-sultan-mohammad-b. Also see both Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Dawlatshāh Samarqandī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Published online 2017. dx.doi. org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_25930, and Ève Feuillebois, “Dawlatshāh,” Encyclopaedia

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The rhetorical manual, Tarjumān al-balāgha (The Interpreter of Rhetoric) by Rādūyānī ( fl. 1100), cannot have constituted a principle guide to structuring his work, nor could Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ’s (d. 578/1183) manual of poetics, Ḥadāʾiq al-siḥr fī daqāʾiq al-shiʿr (Walled Gardens of White Magic, on the Subtleties of Poetry) filled that role (though it would have been more helpful than Rādūyānī). Shams-i Qays Rāzī’s Muʿjam fī maʿāyir ashʿār al-ʿajam (Compendium of Criteria of the Poetry of Persia), begun in Arabic on the model of Qudāma b. Jaʿfar’s (d. 337/948) Naqd al-shiʿr (The Critique of Poetry) and Ibn Rashīq’s (d. 463/1071) al-ʿUmda fī maḥāsin al-shiʿr (The Pillar of Poetry’s Beauties), but later recast in Persian and transmogrified into a new template for works in the genre of rhetorics and poetics, was completed over a fifteen-year period from about 1217 to 1232 CE. It does not aim to provide biographical information, but does touch on questions of canon by discussing the rhetorical merits and demerits of particular poems or verses, and the question of plagiarism (sariqa or sirqat).208 The “Select History” or Tārīkh-i guzīda of Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī (d. ca. 744/1343), a world history written in 730/1330 for the son of Rashīd al-Dīn, vizier to the Il-Khanids, contains a chapter at the end on poets and scholars which would doubtless have proved a quite helpful source of information. Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī’s Chahār maqāla (Four Discourses), written for the Ghurid court between 550–552/1155–1157, discusses poets and their craft discursively, rather than in the format of a biographical dictionary or anthology, delineating a small but influential coterie of poets who lived before the middle of the twelfth century, including Rūdakī, Firdawsī, Farrukhī, ʿUnṣurī, Amīr Muʿizzī, Masʿūd-i Saʿd-i Salmān, ʿAmʿaq-i Bukhārī, Azraqī-yi Hiravī, and Rashīdī-yi Samarqandī.209 of Islam, THREE, ed. by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Published online 2015. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_25930. 208  Natalia Chalisova, “Persian Rhetoric: Elm-e Badi’ and Elm-e Bayân,” in General Introduction to Persian Literature, ed. J.T.P. de Bruijn (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 158–65. Zipoli, Technique of the Ğawāb, 8, notes that in contrast to plagiarism, or sariqa, which is defined in a detailed and terminologically technical way by the rhetorical tradition in Arabic, the Persian practice of javāb is more loosely defined and theorized. Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 108, succinctly distinguishes sariqāt (plagiarisms, thefts) from imitation in the literary world along the axis of form and content. Plagiarism in the ghazal involves the “relationship between the author and the conventional corpus of poetic themes and topoi” in which the author adopts the “theme of a model” while changing its form. Imitation, or istiqbāl, on the other hand, maintains “the formal constraints of rhyme and meter,” while reworking the theme. 209   Private miscellanies, such as the Safīna-yi Tabrīz (facsimile reproduction, Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Dānishgāhī, 1381Sh/2002), copied out by Abū l-Majd Muḥammad b. Masʿūd-i Tabrīzī during the years 721 to 723/1321 to 1323, also collected selections from a wide variety of poets, according to the taste of the miscellany’s owner. But these are

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Here, then, is one statement of the canon that may well have guided Dawlatshāh in thinking about the Persian poets of the tenth to twelth century CE. Nevertheless, Dawlatshāh stakes a claim, not unreasonably, that his work fills an important gap in the literature, and he gives us a glimpse into the procedure he used to piece it together. As Browne charmingly translates it: [couplet]: All that now remains untreated, all that’s still to do on earth, Is to write the poets’ lives and strive to fix the poets’ worth. For men of learning, notwithstanding their skill and attainments, have not condescended to take this trouble; while other persons have not been favoured by opportunity, or, perhaps, have lacked the necessary attainments. In short, not a creature amongst the men of letters has recorded the history, biography, and circumstances of this class. If, therefore, you can produce a worthy volume on this subject, it will assuredly be a work of utility. I perceived that this quarry had indeed hitherto escaped the nets of the huntsmen of this craft, and that this door had remained shut in the faces of all seekers. Therefore I made a compilation of the notes which I had taken at odd times during my life, and of the sheaves which I had gleaned from the harvests of men of honourable repute, from accredited histories, the dīvāns of past masters, the poems of the ancients and moderns, miscellanies, books of anecdotes, and the like, of whatever bore reference to the history, gests, and circumstances of the great poets, who are well known by their works or their reputation and remembered throughout the climes of the world; introducing also into this my Memoir, as occasion offered, somewhat of the histories of the great kings, from the beginning of the Muhammadan era until our own time, in whose reigns illustrious poets have flourished; and further incorporating in my book so much as I was able, according to the measure of my power and capacity, of the compositions of the most eminent writers, and of entertaining unlikely to have been influential in Dawlatshāh’s approach, as miscellanies typically accrued their material in a haphazard manner and were not reorganized later, did not often include biographical information about the authors included, and were not intended for distribution or the equivalent of “publication.” See A.A. Seyed-Gohrab and S.McGlinn, eds., The Treasury of Tabriz: The Great Il-Khanid Compendium (Amsterdam and West Lafayette, IN: Rozenberg Publishers & Purdue University Press, 2007).

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anecdotes concerning the great poets, besides sundry data for a critical knowledge of topography.210 Of course, prior to the few Persian examples that Dawlatshāh could draw upon, numerous Arabic poetry anthologies (mukhtārāt, muntakhabāt), biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt) of poets or scholars, and encyclopedic works, etc., had staked out the generic expectations for how a work like Dawlatshāh’s might be organized.211 Of particular relevance, one might mention the following Arabic works: the biography of poets by Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī (d. 231/845), Ṭabaqāt alfuḥūl al-shuʿarā (Generations of Gallant Poets); the Kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarā by Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), which, as its title suggests, centers on poetry, poets and literary criticism; the list of songs/poems and related anecdotes about musicians, poets, and patrons provided by Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (d. ca. 363/972) in his Kitāb al-aghānī (Book of Songs);212 the geographically organized anthology of poems and prose by al-Thaʿālabī (d. 429/1038), Yatīmat al-dahr (Unique Pearl of the Age), and its supplement, Tatimmat al-yatīma (Completion of the Unique Pearl), which include many poems in Arabic composed in Buyid and Samanid Persia; the Dumyat al-qaṣr (Statue of the Palace), a continuation of the Yatīmat al-dahr by al-Bākharzī (k. 467/1074); the Arabic geographical encyclopedia, Āthār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-ʿibād (Monuments of the Lands and Stories of Men, w. 661/1263 and revised ca. 674/1276) by Zakariyyā al-Qazvīnī (d. 682/1283), which actually includes information about a number of Persian poets;213 and the biography of deceased scholars by Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), Wafayāt al-aʿyān (Deaths of the Noteworthy).214 Given this better-established 210  For the English translation, see Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 44–45, and for the Persian, Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 13. 211  ʿAwfī also claimed his Lubāb al-albāb as the first Lives of the Poets work in Persian, though as Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 47, points out, ʿAwfī did acknowledge several Arabic authors of works of this genre, including Ibn Sallām, Ibn Qutayba, Ibn al-Muʿtazz, al-Thaʿālabī, al-Bākharzī and a certain Shams al-Dīn Andakhūd, who authored a work called Zīnat al-zamān. See ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 1:10. 212  Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 46, calls ʿAwfī’s Lubāb al-albāb the Kitāb al-aghānī of Persia. 213  The Persian poets in Qazvīnī’s canon include (according to Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 51), Abū Saʿīd-i Abī l-Khayr, Anvarī, ʿAsjadī, Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī, Bārbad, Fakhr-i Gurgānī, Farrukhī, Firdawsī, Jalāl-i Khwāri, Khāqānī, Abū Ṭāhir al-Khātūnī, Mujīr-i Baylaqānī, Niẓāmī, Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ, Sanāʾī, Shams-i Ṭabasī, ʿUmar Khayyām, and ʿUnṣurī. 214  See Julie Meisami and Paul Starkey, eds. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), including the entries on various authors, as well as those on “anthologies, medieval,” “biography, medieval,” “encyclopedias, medieval,” and “manāqib literature.”

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Arabic tradition of Lives of the Poets, we will not find it surprising that Dawlatshāh begins his Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā with an introduction featuring ten Arab poets, from Labīd (a contemporary of the Prophet) to al-Maʿarrī (the blind Syrian poet, d. 449/1058), before moving on to the Persian poets. Meanwhile, the generally more comprehensive hagiographical compendia in the Lives of the Saints genre, including, in Persian, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyā (Memorials of the Saints) from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and in Arabic, Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya (The Generations of the Sufis) by al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) provided another potential organizational model for both Dawlatshāh’s Tadhkira, as well as for Jāmī’s own Nafaḥāt al-uns (Breaths of Intimacy), written in 881/1476 at the request of ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī.215 The latter includes many poets of mystical bent, whom Jāmī wishes to separate categorically from professional poets.216 This exercise of Jāmī in composing a hagiographical Lives of the Saints did influence Dawlatshāh’s Lives of the Poets a decade later,217 though Dawlatshāh’s work, in turn, may have led Jāmī to reflect upon what to include in his primer on Persian poets and poetry for his son, and what to leave out. After his preamble on Arabic poets, Dawlatshāh provides seven chapters on Persian poets, organized ostensibly by succeeding generations (ṭabaqāt), each featuring twenty poets. He covers about eighty pre-Timurid poets,218 from Rūdakī to ʿUbayd-i Zākānī (d. ca. 772/1371), whereas both Salmān-i Sāvajī (d. 778/1375), and Ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390) are grouped among a score of poets living in the era of Timur (r. 771–807/1370–1405), even though both achieved their fame before his reign. Two separate chapters are then devoted to the earlier 215   For a history of the Persian hagiographical tradition, see Jawid Mojaddedi, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Ṭabaqāt Genre from al-Sulamī to Jāmī (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001). 216  Jāmī openly acknowledges the Ṭabaqāt of al-Sulamī as an influence on the Nafaḥāt in the introduction; see Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasī, 184. In order to fully grasp his view of the canon of Sufi saints and theosophy, as well as his view of the distinction between poet and mystic composing in verse, Jāmī’s various treatises on Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Mawlānā Rūmī, Amīr Khusraw, the Naqashbandiyya tradition, Khwāja Pārsā, must be taken into account; see Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasi, 172–88, for a basic description of the names, range and concerns of these treatises. 217  Dawlatshāh’s introduction to his Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 13, specifically mentions ʿAṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyā as a source, as long ago pointed out by Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 44. 218  By contrast, ʿAwfī covered about 120 royals, nobles, statesmen and scholars who wrote occasional verse, and about 160 professional poets, of whom thirty come from the earliest periods through the Samanids, a roughly equal number from the Ghaznavid peiod, fifty from the Seljuq era, and a little over fifty from his contemporaries. Browne, “The Sources of Dawlatshāh,” 46–47.

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poets of the Timurid age, from the reigns of Shāhrukh and Sulṭān-Ḥusayn, including Qāsim-i Anvār (d. 837/1433), Kātibī Turshīzī (d. 838/1435) and Amīr Shāhī Sabzavārī (d. 857/1453), as well as a number of other poets who do not rate mention in the dīvāns of Jāmī or Navāī. Six of Dawlatshāh’s contemporaries, naturally including Jāmī himself and Navāʾī, populate the epilogue, with a dedication to the reigning prince Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā. Jāmī wrote two works expressly as primers for his son, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf, born in 882/1478 and deceased twenty years after his father, in 919/1513. Because two previous sons had died in infancy, and a fourth would also die one month after birth in 891/1486 (just one year before Jāmī embarked on the Bahāristān), Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf was especially dear to his father, both as a spiritual, and as a flesh and blood heir. Jāmī took special care in his son’s education and wrote two works explicitly toward that end. The second of these, Favāʾid-i Ḍiyāʾiyya (The Bright Benefits [or Ḍiyā’s Benefits] of Explaining the Kāfiyya), a commentary on a treatise on Arabic grammar and syntax by Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 645/1248), titled al-Kāfiyya fī l-naḥw (Grammatical Sufficiency), became a widespread textbook for learning Arabic in the Persianate world.219 Jāmī penned this in Ramadan 897/June 1492, when Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn was about fourteen years of age, and Jāmī himself was only about four months away from the end of life. Jāmī, a man in his mid-seventies, designed the Bahāristān (w. 892/1487), the first book he wrote for Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf, as a kind of primer of Persian literary culture for a then ten year-old boy, but with a nod to men of letters more generally, and a dedication to Sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqarā. Though professedly modeled on the Gulistān of Saʿdī,220 the impetus for the Bahāristān feels more instructional than entertaining, and less witty. As Paul Losensky indicates, both of Jāmī’s books for Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn have the feel of educational manuals,221 and were often employed as text books. On the other hand, in terms of rhetorical complexity and the subtlety of some its ideas, Jāmī has thought beyond his son to the erudite courtly audience of which he was the leading literary and scholarly figure.222 G.M. Wickens finds some justification in the Bahāristān for Jāmī’s reputation as: 219  See Algar, Jami, 30–31, and Afṣaḥzād, Naqd va bar-rasi, 167–68. 220  On which see Franklin Lewis, “GOLESTĀN-E SAʿDI,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 11, fasc. 1 (2001): 79–86. Also available online, last updated February 14, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/golestan-e-sadi. 221  Losensky, “JĀMI i. Life and Works,” Encyclopaedia Iranica. 222  The Kitāb al-ikhtiyārāt, or “Choice Selections,” an anthology of pre-Islamic poems prepared by al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḍabbī (d. ca. 163/780) at the request of the Abbasid Caliph al-Manṣūr, who wanted through it to teach his son, al-Mahdī, proper Arabic, provides one earlier example of a poetic anthology commissioned as a pedagogical manual that

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a gifted and versatile, but somewhat unoriginal reworker of old themes (e.g., Laylī o Majnūn, Yūsof o Zolayḵā), old genres, and old styles…. It is a clever work, but the work of a man in his seventies, and an inadequate indication of his characteristic skill and periodic profundity…. Certain characteristics of Jāmī’s professional posture can be seen in the Bahārestān. There is, for example, an enormous self-assurance and a sense of his own worthiness; if he does sometimes write here as a mystic, it is with singular coolness and self-control. He is above all a scholar and an artist, with a linguistic sense that is both erudite and delicate, and usually unforced.223 Rypka describes “The Spring Garden” as a “masterly but affected imitation of the Gulistān,” seeking to draw attention to its “excellent chapter (the seventh) on the history of literature.”224 10 The Bahāristān Canon of Oldies Following Saʿdī’s example, Jāmī organizes the Bahāristān in eight thematic chapters, which he calls, in keeping with the Spring theme of the title, gardens (rawḍa). The seventh “garden” is dedicated to poets, under the title “Stories about the Rhyme-kenning Birds of the Rosebowers of Oration and the Ghazal-singing Parrots of the Sugarcane Fields of Versification” (Dar dāstān-i murghān-i qāfiya-sanj-i sarābustān-i sukhanvarī va ṭūṭiyān-i ghazalsarā-yi shikkaristān-i naẓm-gustarī).225 Jāmī quotes from a multitude of poets, in the course of the Bahāristān, but here treats poets as a historical cadre and poetry as a craft and profession. He opens the chapter with a fairly precise

was however put to wider uses, and came to be known simply by the author’s name, al-Mufaḍḍaliyyāt. 223  G.M. Wickens, “BAHĀRESTĀN (1),” Encyclopaedia Iranica 3, fasc. 5 (1988): 479–80. Also available online, last updated August 23, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ baharestan-spring-garden. 224  Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 287. 225  Most of the other chapters take as their focus topics similar to what is found in the Gulistān, but the flowery and ornate titles which Jāmī gives them do not readily reveal their content. More pithily, Wickens, “BAHĀRESTĀN (1),” Encyclopaedia Iranica, characterizes their content as: “1. words and deeds of the mystics; 2. wisdom of the sages; 3. justice and statecraft; 4. munificence and generosity; 5. love (of various kinds); 6. jest and merriment (some obscene and acerbic material here); 7. poetic composition (with plentiful examples and criticism); and 8. animal fables.”

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definition of poetry,226 from which he goes on to discuss the fixed forms of Persian poetry: qaṣīda, ghazal, mathnavī, qiṭʿa and rubāʿī. Some poets, Jāmī explains, endeavor to compose in all the genres of verse, whereas others only incline to specific genres (clearly Jāmī identifies with the former category). The ancients (mutaqaddimān), for example, were fond of the panegyric and homiletic qaṣīda, whereas others among them inclined to the mathnavī. This contrasts with the modern, or “recent,” poets (muta‌ʾakhkhirān), who practice largely in the ghazal. Jāmī must see himself as a recent rather than an ancient poet. These latter day poets, the ghazal-composing group, are practically innumerable (ʿadad-i in ṭāyifa az ḥadd u ḥaṣr bīrūn ast) and detailed mention of them would exceed the bounds of Jāmī’s work, so he will, perforce, mention briefly only a few of the most famous of them (bar dhikr-i chandī az mashāhīr-i īshān iqtiṣār karda mīshavad).227 Here, then, an acknowledgement of the obvious—that the constraints of space mitigate against comprehensive inclusivity for any canon. The aim in culling or gleaning some poets and their works from among the whole is ipso facto selective, calling attention to some, which inevitably means also ignoring others. A modern literary history may certainly attempt broad and varied coverage, and the canons shaped since the 1970s tend to add neglected figures from the past. Though they may not explicitly remove an equal number of figures who had previously featured in the canon, newly or recently introduced figures are often heralded with passionate fanfare or revisionist advocacy, all of which necessarily shifts to some degree the focus away from some elements of the older received pantheon.228 This is true even when the critic is careful not to stigmatize the older pantheon of poets and writers as less worthy of 226  See Justine Landau, De rythme & de raison: Lecture croisée de deux traités de poétique persans du XIII e siècle (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2013). 227   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlā Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrāth Maktūb, 1379Sh/2000), 123. An earlier edition appeared in the Soviet Union as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Bahāristān: Matn-i ʿilmī intiqādī az rū-yi panj nuskha az qadīmtarīn nusakh-i mawjūda (Moscow: Idāra-yi Intishārāt-i Dānish/Glavnaia Redatsiia Vostochnoi Literatury, 1987), 120–21. 228  For historical and theoretical approaches to the canon, and the culture wars surrounding them, see inter alia, Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 195–99, 211–23, 259–61; Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Virgil Nemoianu and Robert Royal, eds. The Hospitable Canon: Essays on Literary Play, Scholarly Choice, and Popular Pressures (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991); William Casement, The Great Canon Controversy: The Battle of the Books in Higher Education (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1996). For an overview of how, and for how long, the canon has been debated, see the reader of Lee Morrissey, ed. Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafisi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). With respect to the reform of the canon of Classical Composers and

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attention than their reception heretofore suggested (e.g., “dead white males”). We will not learn everything Jāmī knows about the poets, and perhaps not learn about all the poets he otherwise may feel deserving of mention. Certain criteria of selectivity are essential to the elaboration of any canon. Jāmī presents his poets in more or less chronological sequence, and unsurprisingly, standing at the head of his canon, as also in the catalogue of poets Jāmī gives in Silsilat al-dhahab (mentioned above), and per the sequence of notices in Dawlatshāh, is none other than Rūdakī, who composed prolifically and profoundly—Jāmī says that after him no poet possessed such powerful ability (hīch shāʿirī īn muknat na-būda). Jāmī expresses some skepticism about the report that Rūdakī had composed a hundred albums (daftar) of poetry (he says, the responsibility for the veracity of that is with the one who reported it, wa l-ʿuhda ʿalā l-rāvī), though he goes on to quantify the amount of verse at more than a million lines (hizār hizār u sīṣad).229 Jāmī now quotes three lines of qiṭʿa from Rūdakī: ān ʿaqīqī may-ī ki har ki bidīd/az ʿaqīq-i gudākhta na-shinākht har du yak jawhar-and līk bi ṭabʿ/īn biyafsurd u ān digar bigudākht tā bisūda du dast rangīn kard/nāchishīda bi tārak andar tākht230 That carnelian wine which no one who lays eyes on it can tell from molten carnelian Each are one element, but by nature/this one congealed and that one melted As soon as it is crushed, it tinges both hands red/ as yet untasted, it courses through the pate Jāmī does not seem to ever use this rhyme in any of his ghazals or qaṣīdas (though perhaps it is there, hidden behind a radīf ). The rhyme does appear once in a qiṭʿa placed in the Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd book of Jāmī’s Dīvān,231 ostensibly therefore a poem of Jāmī’s middle age, but it bears no relation to the Rūdakī poem. At an earlier point in his life, Jāmī also used this rhyme in a rubāʿī which appears in the Fātiḥat al-shabāb, or “conquests of youth,” section of his Dīvān:

correcting for gender bias, see Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 229   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 124. 230   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 124. 231   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:396 (al-Muqaṭṭaʿāt, #4).

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miskīn dil-i man bar ātash-i ʿishq gudākht/v-andar ṭalab-i tu naqd-i hastī dar bākht ākhar khwud rā bi-vaṣl lāyiq nashinākht/binshast u bi-dāgh u dard-i dūrī dar sākht232 My poor heart melted on the fires of love and in search of you, it wagered away all being. In the end, thinking itself not worthy of union, it dropped to the ground and suffered the searing pains of separation. Two of the rhyme words are the same, though neither the theme nor the meter matches Rūdakī’s poem, making it difficult for us to see any possibility of deliberately conscious emulation here. Not surprisingly, Jāmī quotes Rudaki’s famous bū-yi jū-yi mūliyān āyad hamī, in six lines, though with a less sonorous variant opening (bād-i jū-yi mūliyān). Jāmī may have known the poem orally, or have seen it in Dawlatshāh’s Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā or in Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī’s Chahār maqāla, which quotes a few lines from this poem dedicated to Naṣr b. Aḥmad the Samanid, characterizing them as excerpts from a quite long qaṣīda.233 ʿAwfī in Lubāb al-albāb does not mention this poem, but Dawlatshāh confirms it had been a long qaṣīda, beyond the scope of his own work to relate it in full, giving us to believe he had seen the whole thing.234 Since both Dawlatshāh in the Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā, and Luṭf`ʿAlī Bayg Ādharbaygdilī in his anthology, Ātashkada (w. 1174/1760, which denigrates poets of the sabk-i hindī style and promotes the Bāz-gasht movement), repeat only those six lines which had already been singled out by Niẓāmī ʿAruḍī in his Chahār maqāla, the latter work evidently served as the locus classicus of this poem for the subsequent tradition.235 Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī points out that “No one has yet answered ( javāb gufta ast) this qaṣīda, for no one has seen any possibility of coming out free (or noble, āzād) from its narrow straits (maḍāyiq),” most likely an allusion to the constrictions of this particular radīf. When the gifted prince of poets, Muʿizzī, had been asked by Zayn al-Mulk Abū Saʿd Hindū l-Iṣfahānī to compose a poem in

232   Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:853 (Rubāʿiyāt, #23). 233  Niẓāmī-yi ʿArūḍī, Chahār maqāla, ed. Saʿīd Qara-biglū and Riḍā Anzābī-nizhād, 49. 234  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 32. 235  Saʿīd Nafīsī, Muḥīṭ-i zindigī va aḥvāl va ashʿār-i Rūdakī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Ibn-i Sīnā, 1336Sh/1957), 249–69. For the locus classicus, see Niẓāmī-yi ʿArūḍī Samarqandī, Chahār maqāla, ed. Saʿīd Qara-biglū and Riḍā Anzābī-nizhād (on the basis of Muḥammad Qazvīnī’s edition) (Tehran: Jāmī, 1376Sh/1997), 47–50.

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answer to it, Muʿizzī demurred, saying “I don’t know how.” After much insistence, Muʿizzī came up with a few lines, including this one: Rustam az Māzandarān āyad hamī Zayn-i Mulk az Iṣfahān āyad hamī Rustam is coming all the while from Mazandaran, Zayn-i Mulk is coming all the while from Isfahan. Whereupon Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī opines that the wise are all aware of the difference in quality between this effort and Rūdakī’s, the sweetness of which cannot be emulated.236 Though Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī took a stab at it and ­managed rather well, emulating the poem quite directly in the first three lines (an indication that the actual poem must have been before his eyes or well ingrained in memory), before veering off in his characteristic mystical/homiletic turn, preserving the rhyme, but using rhyme words that do not appear in the original model preserved by the Chahār maqāla.237 In the fourteenth century, Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī238 retells the story of the Amīr of Bukhara and this poem in his Tārīkh-i guzīda (Select History), but Jāmī evidently found it the better part of valor not to take up the gauntlet of this Rūdakī poem, other than to repeat the fragments of the original poem and the circumstances of its composition in the Bahāristān.239 Jāmī sources this story to various unnamed histories (dar baʿḍī tavārīkh), but then appears to disavow the attribution of this poem and the story pertaining to Rūdakī and Naṣr b. Aḥmad the Samanid, seemingly privileging other histories that attribute the tale to Sultan Sanjar and Muʿizzī. Rūdakī represents an easy, not to say lazy, starting point for Jāmī’s introduction to the lives of the Persian poets; Dawlatshāh had called Rūdakī the obvious starting point for the history of Persian poetry, explaining that he knew of no Persian poet before him who possessed a dīvān.240 On the other hand, ʿAwfī gives a much fuller account of the Samanid poets, mentioning six poets before coming to Rūdakī (Ḥanẓala al-Bādghīsī, Fīrūz-i Mashriqī, Shahīd-i Balkhī, Muḥammad bin Mūsā al-Farālāvī and Abū Shuʿayb Ṣāliḥ bin Muḥammad of 236  Niẓāmī-yi ʿArūḍī, Chahār maqāla, ed. Qara-biglū and Anzābī-nizhād, 50. 237   Mawlānā Jalāl al-Din Rūmī, Kulliyāt-i Shams yā dīvān-i kabīr, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, 10 vols. (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1340Sh/1961; 3rd. ed., Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1363Sh/1984), 6:171–72 (Ghazal #2897). 238  As cited in Nafīsī, Muḥīṭ-i zindigī, 253–54. Jāmī must have been familiar with Tārikh-i guzīda. 239   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 124–25. 240  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 31.

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Herat).241 And, as we have seen above, some catalogues of poets include other poets, both Arabophone and Persophone, active in the Samanid period. We may conclude that Jāmī either did not know much about other Samanid-era poets (though he clearly knew Kisāʾī’s poem on reaching fifty), or did not feel his son or any other reader of a primer on Persian poetry, need know more than Rūdakī. Immediately after this in Jāmī’s Bahāristān we meet with Daqīqī (d. ca. 366/976), described as an oldies poet, one of the poets of yore (shuʿarā-yi mā taqaddama), asserting that he wrote nearly 20,000 lines of the Shāh-nāma before Firdawsī took on the job of completing it.242 This estimate of Jāmī derives from ʿAwfī’s entry on Firdawsī, which ascribes the same number of lines (20,000, a round number which may simply stand in for a very large amount) to Daqīqī, with an additional 60,000 lines ascribed to Firdawsī.243 Interestingly, the extra chapter added by Muḥammad b. Mubārak Qazvīnī to his translation of Navāʾī’s Majālis (since Navāʾī does not himself devote entries to the pre-Timurid poets), corrects the mistake of ʿAwfī and Jāmī, indicating that Daqīqī had composed a thousand lines of the tale of Gushtāsf [sic], and that Firdawsī (as he himself states in the Shāh-nāma) included this material from Daqīqī to demonstrate the superiority of his own verse.244 Although ʿAwfī indicates that Daqīqī enjoyed fame for his qaṣīdas, and quotes twenty-seven lines from ten different Daqīqī poems, Jāmī does not say anything about this, although he selectively quotes two lines each from two of the samples that ʿAwfī gives.245 Dawlatshāh, on the other hand, does not devote an entry to Daqīqī in the Tadhkirat alshuʿarā, though Daqīqī does make a furtive appearance in one line of a qaṣīda

241  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:1–5. 242   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 125–26. On Daqīqī, see Djalal Khaleghi Motlagh, “DAQĪQĪ, ABŪ MANṢŪR AḤMAD,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 6, fasc. 6 (1993): 661–62. Also available online, last updated November 14, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ daqiqi-abu-mansur-ahmad-b. 243  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:33. In fact, Firdawsī includes only about a thousand lines from Daqīqī, and although Firdawsī pegs his Shāh-nāma at 60,000 lines of verse, early surviving manuscripts and modern critical editions contain about 48,000 to 52,000 lines. 244  Muḥammad b. Mubārak Qazvīnī in Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 334–35. Unlike the Bahāristān or Lubāb al-albāb, this quotes one line directly from the Shāh-nāma, but follows the Bahāristān in the choice of two other brief quotations it includes; therefore, Qazvīnī likely consulted both the Bahāristān and the Shāh-nāma. 245  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:11–13.

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by Pūr-i Bahāʾ Jāmī, a panegyrist to several officials of the Il-Khan court in the later seventh/thirteenth century, to whom Dawlatshāh does devote an entry.246 Pūr-i Bahāʾ Jāmī performs a catalogue of Mongol terms and words (dar iṣṭilāḥ va lughat-i Mughūlī) in a qaṣīda dedicated to the governor (vazīr) of Khurasan, Vajīh al-Dīn Zangī (executed 685/1287), as quoted by Dawlatshāh, who finds this poem suitably impressive and quotes an extended passage from it, including three lines toward the end (after the duʿā), that supply us with yet another catalogue of poets, this one quite compressed and organized into three classes. Pūr-i Bahāʾ seems to identify with the first group as master exemplars of the immediately preceeding hundred to two hundred years: Niẓāmī, Qaṭrān, Anvarī. The second group are poets from the distant classical past who never used such terms in their verse (har giz nagufta-and dar īn iṣṭilāḥ shiʿr): Firdawsī, Daqīqī, Pindār, or ʿUnṣurī. Finally, he asserts that the people of Arabia and Persia had never heard a qaṣīda like this from Muʿizzī or Buḥturī.247 Does the fact that Dawlatshāh passes over Daqīqī impel Jāmī to include him, drawing on the information in ʿAwfī, for his son’s edification in the Bahāristān? Jāmī then passes on to a rather obscure poet by the name of ʿAmmāra, about whom he has very little information, other than that he was another of those poets “of yore” (az mutaqaddimān), that he lived in the Samanid era, and had a poetic gift, illustrated by Jāmī with quotations of two lines each from two separate poems by him. This ʿAmmāra, or ʿAmāra Marvzī,248 lived into the era of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, and is therefore more or less a contemporary of Firdawsī. Dawlatshāh does not notice him, but ʿAwfī does,249 another indication that Jāmī likely had access to ʿAwfī, and in this instance engaged in a deliberate act of information recovery, a display of antiquarian erudition or sly superiority over Dawlatshāh. It otherwise seems an odd choice of poets to mention from the Samanid era, when others not mentioned by Jāmī (e.g., Shahīd-i Balkhī) 246  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 181–85. See Table 15.3 of poetic lists, available online. 247  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 184. Pindār, also Bundār-i Rāzī, a poet from Rayy who died around the turn of the millennium and composed poems in Fahlaviyāt as well as in Persian; Niẓāmī ʿArūḍī, Chahār maqāla, ed. Qara-biglū and Anzābī-nizhād, 45 and 153, places him in the Buyid era, a contemporary of Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995) and Majd al-Dawla Daylāmī. 248  See Jalāl Matīnī, “ʿAMĀRA MARVAZĪ,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 1, fasc. 9 (1989): 924–25. Available online, last updated August 2, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ amara-b. 249  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 83, does mention in passing that the master who chose Anvarī’s takhalluṣ for him was a certain ʿAm(m)āra, but ʿAwfī, Lubāb alalbāb, ed. Browne, 2:24–26, gives a full notice about him, from which Jāmī seems to draw his info and the verses he quotes.

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enjoyed greater fame. However, Jāmī does associate ʿAmmāra directly with the art of the ghazal and the qavvālī minstrel tradition: he tells a little vignette about how a line of ʿAmmāra was sung before the mystical quatrain writer, Abū Saʿīd-i Abī l-Khayr: andar ghazal-i khwīsh nihān khwāham gashtan/tā bar lab-i tu būsa zanam chūn-sh bikhwānī (I will hide within my own ghazal/so that I may kiss your lips as you sing it). Abū Saʿīd, very much pleased by the line, asks who composed it, and upon learning it was ʿAmmāra, decides to pay him a visit with all his disciples in tow250—a kind of parallel to the tale about Rūdakī and the Amīr of Bukhara, only this time a poem moves a mystic instead of a monarch. Next comes ʿUnṣurī, the panegyrist for Maḥmūd of Ghazna, whom Jāmī considers the leading poet of his age, though in fact he says quite little about him. We are treated to samples of two lines of a panegyrical qiṭʿa, and a rubāʿī, and then Jāmī reports that ʿUnṣurī had composed mathnavīs—Vāmiq u ʿAdhrā, for example—but that no trace of these had survived to Timurid times. Jāmī does not here restate the pecuniary suggestion he had earlier made, in the Silsilat al-dhahab, that ʿUnṣurī had been richly rewarded by Maḥmūd, but he does say that Maḥmūd looked upon ʿUnṣurī with the eye of favor.251 This echoes, though more mutely, what Dawlatshāh says: that ʿUnṣurī was the chief companion (nadīm) of Sultan Maḥmūd and head of the contingent of poets at his court, who judged their works and entrée to the court, that he composed 30,000 lines, including chronicling in verse the many conquests of Maḥmūd, and then got caught in the political struggle between Masʿūd and Muḥammad after Maḥmūd’s death.252 Dawlatshāh includes a long excerpt (twenty-eight lines) of just one qaṣīda by him, whereas ʿAwfī includes quotations from more than a dozen ʿUnṣurī poems in different genres, but not the qaṣīda chosen by Dawlatshāh.253 Both ʿUnṣurī poems quoted by Jāmī come from ʿAwfī’s selections, and ʿAwfī mentions ʿUnṣurī’s narrative poems Vāmiq and ʿAdhrā as well as Khing but u surkh but, which seems to inspire Jāmī to mention the former of these romances in his notice. Then the Bahāristān presents another panegyrist in the circle of Maḥmūd, ʿAsjadī (d. ca. 434/1043), the opening line of whose congratulatory ode to the Ghaznavid Sultan on his conquest of India is quoted, along with a couple of 250   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 126–27. Muḥammad b. Mubārak Qazvīnī’s translation of Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 335, also notices this poet, for which Qazvīnī may well have taken his information from the Bahāristān. 251   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 127. 252  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 44–47. 253  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:29–32.

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lines from another poem by him in praise of melons.254 Both of the sample verses Jāmī relays from ʿAsjadī are also among those given by ʿAwfī,255 whereas the rubāʿī Dawlatshāh relates from ʿAsjadī appears neither in ʿAwfī nor in Jāmī (nor in Qazvīnī)—another indication that Jāmī relied on ʿAwfī as a major source and as a deliberate corrective to Dawlatshāh, at least partly in this case because, according to Dawlatshāh, ʿAsjadī’s dīvān (even though he had been a local boy from Herat) was not available (mutaʿārif ), and his verses were only to be seen in anthologies and treatises.256 With the exception of the first verse example in this chapter of the Bahāristān, the six-line excerpt from Rūdakī, none of the poems so far quoted by Jāmī in association with these early poets extends beyond two lines. Did Jāmī decide to quote no more than two lines, or was this all he knew of those particular poems? It may well be that he does not know more of these poems than what he quotes. He does not cherish these poems well enough to emulate them, it would seem; except for the case of direct quotation (taḍmīn), two lines would not constitute enough of a sample to convincingly trace whether anything in Jāmī’s Dīvān consciously responds to them or not. Jāmī gives a five-line quotation to Farrukhī, the last of the triumvirate of famous panegyrists of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, from a mujtathth-meter qiṭʿa, a poem associated with a mishap suffered by Farrukhī in Samarqand.257 Despite this longer sample, the poem does not seem to have elicited any obvious response from Jāmī in his Dīvān. Here Farrukhī is the poet in particular associated with the monetary richess of Maḥmūd,258 a factoid Jāmī seems to take from ʿAwfī, who says that Farrukhī found ease and significant wealth through Sultan Maḥmūd.259 Compared to Dawlatshāh’s much fuller and more historical remarks, and much longer sample quotation from Farrukhī, we are left with the impression that Jāmī’s aim for this notice is to furnish his son with a bon mot or critical dictum to orally relate should he ever find himself in a discussion about Farrukhī. Dawlatshāh demonstrates more biographical and critical interest; his claim that Farrukhī’s dīvān is not readily available in Khurasan, 254   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 127–28. 255  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:50–53. 256  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 47. Qazvīnī’s translation of Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 341, mentions ʿAsjadi only in passing, in the entry on ʿUnṣurī, repeating a version of the story that Dawlatshāh tells about. 257  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:47–48 gives the narrative in fuller detail. The poem in question begins hama naʿīm-i Samarqand sar-bi-sar dīdam/naẓāra kardam dar nāgh u rāgh u vādī u dasht. 258   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 128. 259  ʿAwfī, Lubāb al-albāb, ed. Browne, 2:47.

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but remains popular in Transoxiana, where Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ considers him the Mutanabbī of the Persians, may even suggest that Jāmī, in Herat, may not have had access to it.260 This inference receives some confirmation from the account of Farrukhī in Qazvīnī’s supplementary chapter to his translation of Navāʾī’s tadhkira of Timurid poets, which tells the same anecdote about Farrukhī being robbed outside of Samarqand that Jāmī tells, and quotes the same five lines.261 Rounding out the Ghaznavid poets, Firdawsī appears at relative length in the Bahāristān,262 though it is not primarily his poetry that occupies Jāmī’s attention. True, Jāmī says that anyone who composes verses like Firdawsī has no need of the praise of others, but he goes on to focus on the legends associated with Firdawsī—how he proves his worth to the jealous circle of Ghaznavid court poets, how the insufficient reward of Maḥmūd causes him to give away the money at the baths and compose a satire, and how Maḥmūd later has a change of heart and decides to fully recompense Firdawsī, only to find that he has died. None of this provides any material for emulation, and while Jāmī certainly pays lip service to Firdawsī’s greatness, there is nothing in his own oeuvre that can be said to emulate the Shāh-nāma; Jāmī overtly strives to create not only a Khamsa of romances like Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw, but also a didactic poem like Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqa, and a philosophical/mystical narrative, Salamān and Absāl, perhaps meant partly as an homage to ʿAṭṭār’s allegorical narratives. But Jāmī has no hand in epic or versified chronicle. While Jāmī also did not compose a long poem of anecdotes and homilies like the Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī of Mawlānā Rūmī, Jāmī shows abiding admiration for and engagement with that work in several places throughout his oeuvre. The same cannot equally be said for the Shāh-nāma, a work almost neutralized through zealous praise, as well as repeated commissions to royal ateliers to produce illustrated versions. In fact, it is reported that as Jāmī trained his nephew, Hātifī, in the poetic craft, he had him imitate Firdawsī’s satire on Maḥmūd, rather than Firdawsī’s battle passages, nature descriptions, psychological dramas, or love episodes.263 Dawlatshāh lavishes even more effusive praise on Firdawsī, going so far as to claim that no creature ever born in this world could match his oratory and eloquence, and that for the past five hundred years no one has been nor is 260  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 55–57. 261  Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 245–46. 262   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 129–31. 263  According to the late report of Riḍā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat in Majmaʿ al-fuṣaḥā, as reported by Browne, Literary History, 4:227–28.

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now able to successfully respond to the Shāh-nāma (yārā-yi javāb-i Shāh-nāma nabūda). One might even conclude, as Dawlatshāh does, that Firdawsī had divine guidance (hidāyat-i khudāʾī).264 Dawlatshāh belabors the point, comparing the outstanding poets in various genres: truth be told, one can consider Khāqānī’s qaṣīdas equal to Anvarī’s, more or less, and the ghazals of Amīr Khusraw are similar to those of the great Shaykh Saʿdī. This would seem to insinuate that the unmentioned Ḥāfiẓ stands alone at the top of the heap, especially in view of the preponderant emulation of Ḥāfiẓ in Navāʾī’s Dīvān, and despite the fact that most of the examples of javāb responsions pointed out in Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis emulate Amīr Khusraw, whom Subtelny calls the Timurid’s undisputed “darling of the age.”265 This perhaps became even more true after the death of Jāmī and Navāʾī; according to Paul Losensky’s reading, Fighānī (d. 925/1519) in his Dīvān responded to poems of Amīr Khusraw thirty-five times, to Kamāl-i Khujandī seventeen times, to Saʿdī about fifteen times, and to Ḥāfiẓ only about a dozen times, though this is more than the three emulations of Amīr Shāhī.266 But returning to the ­Shāh-nāma, Dawlatshāh goes on to propose another narrative poet— the great, grandiloquent and profound Niẓāmī—as an equal to Firdawsī, but if judged fairly, Dawlatshāh tells us, the comparison does not hold.267 This could dissuade the most ambitious of poets from trying her hand, except that Firdawsī’s narrative ends with the Arab conquest of Persia, whereas quite a few events of state had occurred since the coming of Islam to Persia, and any of that subsequent history might easily be made the matter of heroic narrative. Perhaps Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī cornered the market for emulation of the Shāh-nāma with his long verse history, Ẓafar-nāma (w. 735/1354), inspired by Firdawsī, and followed in the Timurid era by a Ẓafar-nāma genre of historical chronicles in verse (and in prose) about Timur and his successors, iterations of which Niẓām al-Dīn Shāmī (w. ca. 806/1404), Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū (w. 814/1412), Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (w. 828/1425), and Jāmī’s own nephew, Hātifī (d. in 927/1521), all composed. The poets up through Firdawsī constitute the oldest generations—the Samanid and first Ghaznavid poets. A further untwining of the intertextual relations between the Bahāristān chapter on poets and all the existing anthologies, histories, and Lives of the Poets works of the pre-Timurid era would undoubtedly bring into sharper resolution our picture of which “Oldies” poets, 264  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 49–50. 265  Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate,” 65–66. 266  Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 115 and 115n40. 267  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 50.

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and which of their poems, were actually read by the generality of Timurid poets, and which were admired by reputation, through anthologies, or in the abstract. But here, we have no room for more than a bare-bones inventory of the rest of the poets described in the Bahāristān. Jāmī calls Nāṣir Khusraw (b. 394/1004, d. ca. 471/1078) an expert poet and thinker, though one accused of a proclivity for heresy (zindaqa va ilḥād). Jāmī quotes a six-line qiṭʿa by him, which he admits having found in ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī’s Zubdat al-ḥaqāyiq (written in Arabic ca. 514/1120, though his Persian Tamhīdāt, w. 521/1127, was also confusingly called by this same title). This poet we have not met before in any of our lists, and his marginal place in the canon may be due in part to this reputation as an Ismaili, though it doesn’t seem to bother Jāmī overmuch. Despite the longish quotation, the lines do not seem to have inspired Jāmī to imitate them, and because Jāmī favorably mentions Nāṣir Khusraw’s Safar-nāma, but erroneously states that it presents the conversations with men of letters he met on his travels in verse (muḥāvirātī ki bā afāḍil karda dar ānjā bi-naẓm āvarda), one may wonder how familiar he actually was with the Dīvān or the prose of Nāṣir Khusraw.268 Of Azraqī-yi Hiravī, an accomplished poet and systematic thinker from Herat, a longish anecdote is related along with a shortish three-line quotation from a qiṭʿa on wine.269 The entry on Muʿizzī talks about his station at the Seljuq court, and argues that he achieved the same position among the Seljuqs (Sanjariyān) that ʿUnṣurī had enjoyed at the Ghaznavid court and Rūdakī at the Samanid court, thus suggesting the existence of a pantheon of early Persian poet laureates— Rūdakī, ʿUnṣurī, Muʿizzī, also singled out by Dawlatshāh as the triumvirate of poets of yesteryear, superior in quality to the poets of today, which perhaps Jāmī, as the obvious primus inter pares of the Timurid court of Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, would interpret as a slight.270 The tradition agrees, then, that everyone should know (if not necessarily read) these three poets, thus fixing a kind of seal on panegyrical Persian qaṣīda poetry with Muʿizzī, from whom Jāmī quotes three lines of what may be a ghazal, plus four more from a qaṣīda.271 About ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Jabalī (d. 555/1160), a poet from Gharchistān to the east of Herat, Jāmī seems to have little personal information, other that he 268   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 131. Jāmī, Dīvān, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:651–52, does have one poem in the same rhyme, infinitive verbs in -īdan, with several of the same rhymes as the sample quoted from Nāṣir Khusraw. However, this is in a different meter, and the common use of these verbs in the language makes it difficult to isolate a precise source of influence. 269   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 132. 270  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 10. 271   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 133–34.

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composed in Arabic as well as in Persian. We know he did stints at the courts in Khwarazm and Ghazna before joining the Seljuq court. But Jāmī’s concern is to emphasize the difficulty of successfully emulating one particular qaṣīda of his, the opening line of which he quotes, and the challenge of responding to which had apparently been taken up by many.272 Meanwhile, for Adīb-i Ṣābir from Tirmidh, Jāmī seems to have special regard, quoting two selections from him and a line by Anvarī which suggests that Anvarī thought himself an equal to Sanāʾī but not to Adīb-i Ṣābir.273 About Anvarī himself, Jāmī specifically states that his poems are famous and his dīvān is extant in written form, which tends to suggest that many or even most of the verse examples cited from the poets so-far mentioned in the Bahāristān were accessible to him only in anthologies, and do not represent a selection actively culled by himself from a wider body of verse. Anvarī gets the longest verse quotation (ten lines of a ghazal) so far, from a poem about the profession of poetry (specifically love lyrics, panegyre and satire), and a longish anecdote about the consolidation of his patronage relations with the ruler of Herat are confirmed there.274 Jāmī describes Rashīd-i Vaṭvāṭ as a poet of Transoxania, in fact the leader of the poets of his day, and author of the rhetorical manual Ḥadāʾiq al-siḥr. Keeping with the patronage theme of the anecdote about Anvarī, Jāmī quotes two lines about the propriety of patrons rewarding poets, and two rubāʿīs, quatrains being a convenient size for presentation of a complete poem in a short anthology entry, but also the type of verse that one might remember from having heard it, rather than from reading it out of a poet’s dīvān.275 Another Transoxanian poet, ʿAmʿaq of Bukhara, also the leader of the poets of his day, composed a qaṣīda, which Jāmī professes to greatly admire, and from which he quotes five lines playing on the contrast between the ant (mūr) and a hair (mū).276 However, he apparently never tried to emulate this himself.277 To Sūzanī, said to hail from Nasaf and to have studied in Bukhara, Jāmī devotes a long but not entirely approving entry. Sūzanī supposedly fell in love with an apprentice needlemaker, which apparently accounts for his pen-name (The 272   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 134. Not, however, by anyone on Fakhrī Hirātī’s list as early given from the Radāyif al-ashʿār. 273   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 134–35. 274   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 135–37. 275   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 137–38. 276   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 138–39. 277  I find no qaṣīdas or ghazals in Jāmī’s Dīvān which follow both the rhyme (-ān) and radīf (dārad) of this poem, so he was not tempted to responsion. There is one ghazal in this rhyme and meter with a slightly different radīf (dāram), but that does not seem closely related to ʿAmʿaq’s poem. Jāmī, Dīvān, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 2:293.

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Needler), though as Jāmī explains, by temperament he inclined to satire (hazl), on which account he talked a good deal of delirious nonsense. Jāmī presents a very generous six samples of his poems, the first two in condemnation of his bad behavior, and others showing his innovation in rhetorical devices (e.g., mawqūf ).278 Jāmī describes Khāqānī as the Ḥassān ibn Thābit279 of the Persians, due to his perfection in the arts of poesy, by which he clearly means ethical and didactic, even religious poetry, in which Khāqānī followed the example of Sanāʾī, but stole the show. Jāmī quotes two lines in which Khāqānī compares himself to Rūdakī and ʿUnṣurī, and also to “the Sage” (Ḥakīm), a title used for both Sanāʾī and Firdawsī. Two more lines in praise of him follow from Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ, calling Khāqānī a philosopher who increases faith and dispels unbelief. Two more samples of Khāqānī’s verse follow, including a handful of lines from the mathnavī titled Tuḥfat al-ʿirāqayn, which Jāmī mentions by name.280 Jāmī seems convinced that Fakhr-i Jurjānī (now spelled Gurgānī), author of Vīs u Rāmīn, stood out for his erudition among the people of those days, though Jāmī reports that the book has become quite difficult to find (mahjūr va nāyāb), implying that he may not have been well acquainted with it, or even with the story it relates, beyond the eight lines he quotes.281 On the other hand, Jāmī quite explicitly has looked through the dīvān of Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī, which he describes as well known (mashhūr), with many of the poems of Ẓahīr recited by heart. “All of his poems are pleasing” declares Jāmī, and all have won critical acceptance for their grace and mellifluousness. After quoting two rubāʿīs that won Ẓahīr considerable reward from a patron (Atābak Abū Bakr), Jāmī gives us five lines in mathnavī form by him. Jāmī then goes on to state that Ẓahīr’s excellence can be measured by the fact that the poets of old (shuʿarā-yi mutaqaddim) had an ongoing debate over the superiority of Anvarī or Ẓahīr, which Jāmī invites us to answer by quoting a verse that poses the question of who is the better poet, and promises the reader that her answer will decide who reigns in the domain of eloquence. Jāmī then quotes a response in verse from Imāmī of Herat, who protests it is impossible to choose between a ḥūrī and a parī, between the moon and the stars. However, Jāmī concludes this discussion by quoting a direct answer in verse, unascribed but presumably reflecting Jāmī’s own view, that says preferring the poetry of Ẓahīr 278   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 139–41. 279  Ḥassān ibn Thābit, the poet attached to the Prophet Muḥammad, practicing ethical, religious poetry in contrast to the other poets contemporary with the Prophet. 280   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 141–42. 281   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 142–43.

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over that of Anvarī would be akin to preferring magic and the golden calf over the miracle of Moses.282 Jāmī’s assessment of Niẓāmī of Ganja reminds us somewhat of his judgement on Firdawsī. No one needs to explain the obvious achievement of this poet. His narrative quintet, “The Five Treasures” (panj ganj) contains more eloquence, subtlety and truth than anyone else can ever manage, indeed, than is humanly possible. He seems to freeze here, unable to pick a favorite mathnavī passage to quote from, or even name the poems, which obviously exist in his mind as a pentad, and as a single book. Outside of this book (bīrūn az īn kitāb), Jāmī tells us, little of his poetry has been transmitted (rivāyat karda and), though Jāmī does give us one of Niẓāmī’s ghazals. That five-line ghazal ( jaw bi-jaw miḥnat-i man z-ān rukh-i gandumgūn ast) seems to be the very first poem quoted in full in the Bahāristān chapter on poets, and it must have fired Jāmī’s poetic admiration or fueled his creative juices enough to emulate it. One of the ghazals from the earlier part of Jāmī’s career as contained in the Fātiḥat al-shabāb follows a very similar meter (both are varieties of ramal) and uses nearly all the same rhymes in a quite similar order, though Jāmī disguises the relationship by changing the radīf slightly, from ast to zada-st.283 Jāmī, while describing Kamāl-i Ismāʿīl-i Iṣfahānī as an original and creative poet, quotes no selections from his verse, although his dīvān was well known. While no other ancient or modern poet can match him for the meaningful subtleties he creates, Jāmī feels that Kamāl can become recherché and lose fluidity and comprehension. Perhaps Jāmī chose to punish him for that by refraining from quoting a sample of his verse.284 Jumping a century forward now, we come to Salmān-i Sāvajī, who in contrast to Kamāl, produces mellifluous poetry with rhetorically effective eloquence. In the qaṣīda, Salmān had a particular proclivity for responsion ( javāb) to poems of the past, often surpassing the model, sometimes matching it, and sometimes falling short. He has meaningful subtleties, like Kamāl, and Jāmī suggests that he even skirts the bounds of plagiarism, but in coming up with better form and greater flair, he manages to avoid blame on that score. Jāmī illustrates this point with a quotation from an unattributed qiṭʿa (by Salmān?) about dressing up meaning in fine new silk to replace old wool cloaks. Salmān seems to have gotten under Jāmī’s skin a little more than other poets, and indeed, from Kamāl onward, the judgments grow harsher for the poets Jāmī sees as almost Timurid-era contemporaries, whom he regards as 282   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 143–45. 283   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 145 and Jāmī, Dīvān, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 1:330–31. 284   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 146.

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fallible peers rather than grand past masters. Or perhaps Jāmī just knows more of their oeuvre—from the juvenilia and mediocre matter to the highlights, whereas only the highlights would survive from the ancients. Of the two mathnavīs Salmān composed, Jāmī finds Jamshīd u Khwarshīd spoiled by preciosity (takalluf ), whereas the Firāq-nāma is elegant poetry. Although Salmān has numerous ghazals—many fine, pleasant examples of that genre—Jāmī says that they lack the flavor of love and affection, which are the staple ingredients of the ghazal, and therefore do not impress the cognoscenti (as we have seen, a quite similar charge has been leveled at Jāmī’s own ghazals by some modern scholars). He closes the entry with a three-line quotation from Salmān on contentment, which may be included simply as a succinct summation of the theme of ambition/desire versus dervish-hood, or it may contain barbed overtones of a moral critique about Salmān.285 Jāmī knows Muḥammad ʿAṣṣār-i Tabrīzī as the author of a mathnavī titled Mihr u Mushtarī [a tale of the spiritual bond between the son of a king and the son of a vizier, w. 778/1436], and seems to have read it through with approval. He quotes two passages from it, one describing the beloved’s nose, the other meditating on the fickleness of people and the futility of setting store by the world.286 To some extent, this entry feels as if Jāmī were curating a lesser-known author, an impression somewhat heightened by the fact that in his supplement to the Persian translation of Navā’ī’s tadhkira, Qazvīnī, while borrowing from this entry of Jāmī, makes even more extravagant claims for the unparalleled beauty of Mihr u Mushtarī.287 The entry for Shaykh Saʿdī-yi Shīrāzī seems overly curt, but makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in length. Jāmī names Saʿdī the “paragon of the practitioners of the ghazal” (qudva-yi mutaghazzilān), no one having devoted more attention to the form before him. His verse manages to impress every sector of society (hama ṭavāyif ), says Jāmī. As an unnamed poet has truly put it, three people can be considered as prophets among the poets (even though there is no prophet after Muḥammad): for narrative description (awṣāf ), Firdawsī; for the qaṣida, Anvarī; for the ghazal, Saʿdī.288 Jāmī says nothing about his Būstān or Gulistān here, which might serve to increase our estimate of Saʿdī’s stature. Surely though, the reader would not forget that the Bahāristān in which he 285   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 146–47. 286   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 147. 287  Qazvīnī in Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 354. 288   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 148. Here we may note that although the characterization of the Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī of Mawlānā Rūmī as the “Quran in Persian” and its author as “not a poet, but possessor of a Book” is often attributed to Jāmī, here Jāmī names three other poets as virtual prophets.

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reads these comments takes the Gulistān for its model. The entry for Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī also leaves us with somewhat thwarted expectations in that no sample of his verse appears, not even verses about him. Jāmī calls the majority of his poetry elegant and pleasing, some of it virtually inimitable. Compared to other poets, his ghazals have a mellifluous quality reminiscent of the qaṣīdas of Ẓahīr. His poetic sensibility (salīqa) reminds Jāmī of the sensibility of Nizār-i Quhistānī (who receives no entry of his own in Jāmī’s catalogue), except that Nizār sometimes bogs down or strikes the wrong note, in contrast to Ḥāfiẓ. Because there is no trace of affected formalism (takalluf ) in his poetry, he is known as the “Tongue of the Invisible” (Lisān al-ghayb). Weighing the two entries, the one for Saʿdī leaves us with a taste of unmitigated praise, whereas the critique of Nizārī, and the comparison thus struck, tend to muddy the impression Jāmī leaves of Ḥāfiẓ. Of course, no reader of Jāmī’s era would come to the book without having read many a ghazal by Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ, and heard them recited or sung. Jāmī gives us a much longer entry for Shaykh Kamāl-i Khujandī, who in his estimation reached the nec plus ultra of elegance and subtle meanings, except that a tendency to excess mars the fluidity of his verse so that it feels lacking in love and affection (ʿishq va maḥabbat). Here Jāmī waxes more technical and precise, saying that Kamāl-i Khujandī follows Ḥasan-i Dihlavī in his inclusion of amthāl (= adages, comparisons, parables, similitudes?), the use of light meters, and the choice of unusual rhymes and refrains, all of which is a sign of “inimitable simplicity” (sahl va mumtaniʿ). But the meanings (maʿānī) created by Kamāl are more delicate than those of Ḥasan (about whom a separate entry will come shortly). This emulation (tatabbuʿ) would explain why, says Jāmī, that some consider Kamāl to have stolen from Ḥasan (Jāmī has seen multiple copies of the dīvān of Kamāl, and in some of them, there is a single verse indicating that Kamāl has never been blamed for anything except for stealing from Ḥasan). He leaves the topic with a barb: the spiritual thinkers (ʿārifān) who met both Kamāl-i Khujandī and Ḥāfiẓ described the former’s company as better than his poetry, and the latter’s poetry as better than his company.289 Khusraw-i Dihlavī is a master of many genres of poetry, having perfected the qaṣīda, the ghazal and the mathnavī. Jāmī considers him a follower of Khāqānī, having not attained his stature in the qaṣīda, but having surpassed him in the ghazal. His ghazals please everyone with their accessible meanings (maʿānī-yi āshinā), which the folk of love and affection deeply ken. No one has emulated ( javāb) the Khamsa of Niẓāmī better than he, and beyond these he has other 289   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 148–49.

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mathnavīs as well, that are both adorned and pleasing.290 Here we may assume the knowledge that Amīr Khusraw had composed more than a quintet of mathnavīs motivated Jāmī to produce more than a pentad of narrative poems; not to be outdone, this led to the final two poems of his heptad. Ḥasan-i Dihlavī is the penultimate poet before we reach Jāmī’s Timurid near-contemporaries. He combines tight rhymes (qāfiya-hā-yi tang), unusual refrains and pleasing meters, the observance of which is what poetry is all about, especially as concerns the ghazal. The combination of these factors gives his poetry a quality that appears easy, while in fact it is difficult to compose. This is why they say his poetry is characterized by “inimitable simplicity” (sahl-i mumtaniʿ). He was a contemporary of Amīr Khusraw, and the two were intimate friends. Jāmī then quotes a couple of lines by Ḥasan about the relationship between his poetry and that of Amīr Khusraw. The generation of ghazal poets born before the Timurid age comes to an end with the following: ʿImād-i Faqīh from Kirman, a shaykh who ran a khānaqāh. Since he recited his poetry to all and sundry that came to his khānaqāh, asking them to point out how to improve the poems, we can say that all of Kirman are the authors of his ghazals. Khwājū, also of Kirman, strives mightily in the adornment of his phrases and the beauty of his expressions, and for this reason he is called the “The Poets’ Fashioner of Flowers” (nakhlband-i shuʿarā). In Transoxania there is Nāṣir-i Bukhārī, whose verses have a flavor of sufism. Then there is Khwāja ʿIṣmat-i Bukhārī, who follows Amīr Khusraw in the ghazal. The verse of Basāṭī-yi Samarqandī is not without charm, though it is devoid of the mark of acquired learning. Khayālī has some moving poems, Jāmī tells us, as he quotes two lines from him.291 Among the poets of Khurasan we find Ādharī-yi Isfarāyinī who has many ecstatic Sufi utterances (ṭāmāt, also meaning jibberish, bravado), and Jāmī quotes one of his praiseworthy opening lines to a ghazal.292 Jāmī introduces Kātibī-yi Nayshāpūrī as a poet who creates very particular meanings (maʿānī) 290   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 149. Jāmī must therefore have heard of, but apparently never read, the historical verse chronicles of Amīr Khusraw, Qirān al-saʿdayn, Miftāḥ al-futūḥ, Duvalrānī Khiḍr Khān, Nuh sipihr, and the Tughluq-nāma, on which, see Sunil Sharma, “Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. Published online 2017. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_23805. 291  Bahāristān va rasā’il-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 150. These two lines are often attributed to Shaykh Bahā’ī. 292  Bahāristān va rasā’il-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 150. Navā’ī, Majālis al-nafā’is, ed. Ḥikmat, 10 and 185, describes him as having gained fame for his poetry, then turned to the Sufi path in old age, at which point he went for pilgrimage to Mecca and then took a trip to India, where he met many of the nobles and Sufi shaykhs, such that all the kings of the dominion

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and presents them in a good style, except that they are not uniform in quality, being a kind of hybrid animal (to wit, a camel-cat).293 Shāhī-yi Sabzavāri has uniformly very fine verse with clear meanings and expressions, full of flavor. Finally, there is ʿĀrifī-yi Hiravī, author of Gūy u chawgān (Ball and Polo Stick) which is his best work; Jāmī quotes six lines from it in description of a polo horse.294 Jāmī concludes the chapter on the poets with a dedication to and encomium of Mīr Navāʾī. While he is a great patron and man of state, and not properly a poet, yet he shows a keen interest in poets and poetry, such that wherever poets gather, he is their leader. Jāmī describes him as capable in both Persian and Turkish verse, though his poetic temperament inclines toward the Turkish over the Persian, for which Jāmī expects he will wind up with more than 10,000 Turkish ghazals. One assumes that Jāmī and Navāʾī had likely agreed on this point previously, in conversation, and Navāʾī was not hearing for the first time that he was destined to leave a greater mark on Turkic than on Persian poetry.295 Jāmī goes on to say that Navāʾī had written almost 30,000 lines of narrative mathnavīs (in Persian) with an eye on (dar muqābila-yi) Niẓāmī’s Khamsa.296 Meanwhile, Jāmī quotes a line from a qaṣīda by Navāʾī, written in response to a poem of Amīr Khusraw (though as Jāmī knows, it also imitates a qaṣīda by Jāmī, itself written in imitation of a poem by Amīr Khusraw).297 Jāmī closes believed in him and became his disciples. But he returned to Isfarāyin and wrote and performed devotions. His dīvān was available to Navā’ī. 293  By contrast, Navā’ī, Majālis al-nafā’is, ed. Ḥikmat, 10–11, describes him as peerless among his contemporaries in multiple forms, especially the qaṣīda. Although he also has several mathnavīs, and set out to emulate the Khamsa (of Niẓāmī or Amīr Khusraw) his ghazals and qaṣīdas came out better. 294  Bahāristān va rasā’il-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 151. 295   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 151–52. 296  See Subtelny, “Mīr ʿAlī S̲h̲īr Nawāʾī,” who indicates that these would include Navāʾī’s Ḥayrat al-abrār (w. 888/1483), based on the Makhzan al-asrār of Niẓāmī, the Maṭlaʿ al-anvār of Amīr Khusraw and the Tuḥfat al-aḥrār of Jāmī; Farhād u Shīrīn (completed 889/1484), in emulation of Niẓāmī’s Khusraw u Shīrīn and the Shīrīn u Khusraw of Amīr Khusraw; Navāʾī’s Laylī u Maj̲nūn, modelled on poems of the same name by Niẓāmī and Amīr K̲ h̲usraw; the Sabʿa-yi sayyār (completed about 889/1483), in response to Niẓāmī’s Haft paykar and Amīr Khusraw’s Hasht bihisht; and the Sadd-i Iskandarī (completed about 890/1485, the same year that Jāmī finished his own Alexander narrative, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī), written in response to Niẓāmī’s Iskandar-nāma and Amīr Khusraw’s Āyina-yi Iskandarī. After Jāmī’s death, Navāʾī added a sixth poem, his Lisān al-ṭayr (w. 904/1499), in response to the Manṭiq al-ṭayr of ʿAṭṭār. See Subtelny, “Mīr ʿAlī S̲h̲īr Nawāʾī.” 297  For Jāmī’s Lujjat al-asrār ode, in responsion with (dar javāb-i) a poem by Amīr Khusraw, see Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:68–77. For Navāʾī’s reply to both poems, see Dīvān-i Navāʾī, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh, 59–62.

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out the chapter with three quotations of rubāʿīs sent to Jāmī by ʿAlī-shīr in his own handwriting.298 11

Conclusions: Cannibalizing and Closing the Canon

As we have seen, Jāmī mentions the models for his “Alexandrine Book of Sagacity” (Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī), composed in about 890/1485, as Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw, and talks in terms of having composed a “Five Treasures” (panj ganj) collection of his own to match theirs. He again mentions the panj ganj and Khamsa of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw in his literary history chapter in Bahāristān. He sees the poetry he composes in their mold as a creative act, one that furthers the interests of the cosmic and transcendental art of Speech (sukhan), an essence that has descended from the heavens (sukhan z-āsimānhā furūd āmada-st) into the domain of living souls (iqlīm-i jān-hā) with overpowering potential, an ethereal substance from a vast expanse ( fazā-yi farākh) penetrating the narrow passage of the ear (bi-dihlīza-yi tang-i kākh-i ṣamākh) and brightening the eye, causing the enlightened heart to rejoice at its arrival (zi dhawq-i qudūm-ash dil-i tīz-hūsh). As it thus manifests itself, Speech creates the world through the Pen of Command, bringing the sun and moon into being.299 Speech, then, is Logos, a kind of music of the spheres. As Jāmī explains it, Speech is magical and casts spells, especially when metrical. Jāmī claims that he several times repented and swore off dabbling in the magic arts of poesy. However, as poetry is kneaded into his nature, he therefore practiced poetry in all its forms—ghazals, qaṣīdas, muʿammā riddles, rubāʿīs, and now mathnavīs. Why? To what practical end? kuhan mathnavī-hā-yi pīrān-kār/dar ashʿār-i naw lidhdhat-i dīgar ast bi-chandīn hunar pīr ārāsta-st/valī nay chu khūbān-i naw khāsta-st dil-i naw-niyāzān-i kūy-i umīd/khaṭ-i sabz khwāhad na mū-yi sipīd300 The old mathnavīs worked by the elders gain greater pleasure in the form of new verse. An elder is adorned with many arts, 298   Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Afṣaḥzād, 152–53. The three quatrains did not make their way into Navāʾī’s edited Dīvān, ed. Humāyūn Farrukh. 299  Jāmī, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī in Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 926–27. 300  Jāmī, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī in Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 927. He continues on 927–28 to acknowledge his debt to Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw.

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but does not look like a fair-faced newcomer. The hearts of those newly in need in the quarter of Hope want fresh writ [also: a dark new growth of beard], not hoary hair. In some real cosmic sense, then, Jāmī sees himself as participating in the renewal or refreshing of Speech. But refreshing the poetry of which elders of Speech? He composed this Alexandrine Book of Wisdom, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī, in the same meter as Amīr Khusraw’s “Alexandrine Mirror” and also that of Niẓāmī’s “Book of Alexander.” He acknowledges the first two, and the subject matter of this poem of Jāmī matches those two. Yet it is also in the meter of Firdawsī’s Shāh-nāma, who covers inter alia the story of Alexander, from which both Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw may be said to derive a part of their inspiration for their Alexander recitals. In this particular case, however, we may conclude that the influence of Firdawsī on Jāmī is attenuated; it comes, if it comes at all, only second-hand. Jāmī does not mention Firdawsī in this Alexandrine Book of Wisdom and gives no overt indications that he read directly from Firdawsī’s version of the Alexander narrative as he was composing his own. Firdawsī is not, then, one of the elder “oldies” Jāmī likely has in mind in his comments about renewing the verse of the mathnavīs of yore—his models of the classic Oldies of narrative verse are Niẓāmī, writing about three hundred years before him, and Amīr Khusraw, writing two centuries prior. If Firdawsī is no longer part of the current era of poetry for Jāmī—that portion of the narrative corpus that can stimulate the desire to imitate and produce new narratives—he is nevertheless clearly integral to the canon. As far as Jāmī is concerned, we may imagine Firdawsī’s place as more often acknowledged than read, a classic book with somewhat archaic language and style, to keep on the shelf or in the mind, but not one read with an eye to emulation. In the Bahāristān, the legend of Firdawsī among the Ghaznavid court poets holds more interest than analyzing the product of his pen. On the other hand, in an egregiously misogynistic section of Salāmān and Absāl (an anecdote about Solomon and Bilqīs that follows immediately after a section reproaching Womankind as the locus of lust), Jāmī cites “Khwāja Firdawsī” as an authority on how to speak badly of women.301 While this evocation of Firdawsī, dating to within a few years of the Bahāristān, appeals to Firdawsī’s rhetorical and social authority as an expert on women, not only does it arguably misread Firdawsī’s view (as opposed to that of his characters’) toward women, it does not concern 301  Jāmī, Salāmān u Absāl in Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Mudarris-i Gīlānī, 330–31. Interestingly, a careful reading of the Shāh-nāma often shows Firdawsī as narrator undermining or contradicting the virulently misogynistic assumptions of his male characters.

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itself with his poetics, any stylistic particulars, or assign distinctive importance to the Iranian national epos, either on its own terms or as source of the basic matter for tales elaborated by later authors (the Alexander, Khusraw and Shīrīn, and Bahrām-i Gūr narratives). Jāmī also mentioned Firdawsī twice in the poetic catalogue produced in Subḥat al-abrār (w. 887/1482), five years before the Bahāristān (w. 892/1487), so when he thought about the canon late in his life, he certainly did think of Firdawsī, though not very specifically about the qualities of his verse, his skill as a story-teller, or the content of the tales. We may conclude that Firdawsī held a unique place in the pantheon—only Anvarī is mentioned as frequently by the ten poets in Table 15.3 who enumerate a canon of Persian poets. No other epic (ḥamāsa) poets rate a place at the banquet of Persian bards, though several others composed mutaqāribmeter mathnavīs like Firdawsī’s: Asadī-yi Ṭūsī (d. 465/1073) with his Garshāspnāma, Īrānshāh Abī l-Khayr with his Bahman-nāma (w. within a decade or so of 1100 CE), and the anonymous author of the Farāmarz-nāma (composed ca. 1050–1125 CE). And the ten poets who authored Poet Roll Calls, as detailed in Table 15.3, themselves refrain from writing in the epic vein, with the notable exception of ʿIsāmī, who produced a historical chronicle modeled on the Shāh-nāma. Firdawsī has cornered the market for epic in the traditional canon. Manūchihrī may not have wished to speak the name of Firdawsī aloud in a poem devoted to the praise of ʿUnṣurī, but then he created a canon of Persian poets identified not primarily by name but by town, and it seems likely that he intends to include Firdawsī among the three poets from Ṭūs (Firdawsī therefore appears as a question mark for Manūchihrī in Table 15.3). The one author who omits Firdawsī from his Roll Call of poets, ʿIṣmat, has a rather delimited genre of poetry in mind for his canon, and mentions no one writing before the mid-twelfth century, while also conspicuously omitting Ḥāfiẓ, who had died only about twenty years earlier. Ḥāfiẓ is likewise missing from Walī’s list, though this should not be read as a wider falling out of the canon for Ḥāfiẓ among the eighteenth-century Indo-Persian poets, as Khwushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiẓ confirms the continuing power of his literary presence.302 Ḥāfiẓ predates most of the other authors of poetic canons in Table 15.3, so obviously cannot appear nearly as often as some of the earlier poets. As we saw from the beginning, Ḥāfiẓ informs the Dīvān of Navā’ī as the central “Golden Oldie” of the Persian ghazal tradition, second only to Navā’ī’s friend and living poetic mentor, Jāmī. We find many obvious responsions to Ḥāfiẓ in the Dīvān of Jāmī, 302  See Prashant Keshavmurthy, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi. Building an Ark (London and New York, Routlege, 2016), 151–67, for the canon as given by Khwushgū, writing from Delhi between 1724 and 1735, and Ḥāfiẓ’s still central place in it.

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and Fakhrī Hirātī places Ḥāfiẓ fairly high among Jāmī’s sources of imitation in the ghazal. Navā’ī also repeatedly points to ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ emulated by the various poets with longer entries in his Majālis al-nafāʾis. Nevertheless, modern Iranian assumptions about the unmovable position of Ḥāfiẓ at the top of a more or less unchanged list of most admired Persian ghazal poets, where he has supposedly remained from late in his own lifetime until the present day, require some modification. Naturally enough, as styles changed in the Safavid-Mughal period of Persian poetry—a change already underway in the Herat of Jāmī and Navāʾī—the models chosen for emulation also changed. As Losensky describes the attitude of Naẓīrī (d. ca. 1021/1613) toward Ḥāfiẓ: Ḥāfiẓ was both dead and alive. He would write no more poems, and the circumstances that nurtured his genius were irrevocably past. His absence is to be mourned. At the same time, Ḥāfiẓ is ever present. For a reader such as Naẓīrī, Ḥāfiẓ lives on in his works as a glorious creative force, but for most others, Ḥāfiẓ’s words have been reduced to mere clichés. A new Ḥāfiẓ is needed to lay the old to rest …303 At the same time, Naẓīrī uses Ḥāfiẓ as a touchstone by which to judge the literary possibilities of himself and his contemporaries in love poetry, finding the aleady blazed highway of literary exploration leads to an aesthetic dead-end. In a response poem riffing on Ḥāfiẓ’s famous ghazal beginning yārī andar kas namībīnīm yārān rā chi shud (“We find no friendship in anyone, what has come over our companions?”), we find indication that by about 1600 CE the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, whom Jāmī had called the “tongue of the invisible world” (lisān alghayb) in his Bahāristān, was already used to take omens ( fāl), as it still is, at least mock-ritually, today: ḥasb-i ḥāl-i khwush kas az majmūʿa-yi yārī nakhwānd/ Ḥāfiz-i Shīrāz rā dīvān-i farrukh-fāl kū// bar khayāl-ash rāh-i āmad-shud Naẓīrī basta shud304 No one reads happy accounts in the anthology of any colleague; where is the Dīvān of Ḥāfiz of Shiraz with its auspicious omens? Its/his spectre has blocked off the road of our coming and going, Naẓīrī. 303  Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 208. 304  Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 356 and 209. This modifies Losensky’s translation to bring out the present context and the response-relation to Ḥāfiẓ’s poem.

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The career of Naẓīrī-yi Nayshāpūrī, a poet from Khurasan who went for a time to Kashan in the center of Persia before going off to India and the Mughal court (he died in Gujarat), also reminds us of something about the transnational network of Persian poetry. Jāmī and Navāʾī in Herat; Ḥāfiẓ in Shiraz; Niẓāmī in Azerbayjan; Amīr Khusraw, Ḥasan and later Bīdil in Delhi; all are known and admired across the Persosphere, but may nevertheless stand in slightly different relation to regional and trans-regional hierarchies of admiration. This seems more particularly true for the ghazal tradition, which has the lowest barriers of entry to participation: ghazals are a short form to which several different poets can contribute in a single evening of a literary salon, they do not necessarily require a patron the way a long mathnavī might, and they can be sung or recited in non-formal as well as formal occasions. While the composition of romances did not, of course, come to an end after Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw, the canon may be more recalcitrant to change in this genre than in the ghazal, in part because the canonical status of the Khamsa romances qua texts is buttressed by frequent illustration of their Khamsa manuscripts, whereas not so very many mathnavī writers were able to produce a set of five equally compelling and capitaviting long narrative poems, and secure the necessary royal patronage for illustrated copies to be commissioned. Hence, the position of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw in the canon as authors of narrative romances was not generally challenged by other mathnavī authors, though some individual romances, especially Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, did manage to squeeze their way into the repertoire of frequently read texts. By contrast, the style and stature of ghazal poets changed more substantially over the Timurid period and especially in the Safavid and Mughal eras. As ghazal authors, Amīr Khusraw and Ḥasan-i Dihlavī occupy a more central place in the canon for Jāmī and Navāʾī than they do today. Amīr Khusraw has retained that status in South Asia, perhaps in greater measure because of his mathnavīs than the ghazals; he is less central in Iran. Ḥasan-i Dihlavī meanwhile is far from a household world even though his association with the Chishtis will keep his memory perennially alive.305 Already in this list, his place appears subordinate to Amīr Khusraw, delimited to mentions by Jāmī and Navāʾī. Table 15.3 (available online) shows that Amīr Khusraw was on the mind 305  It seems that Ḥasan-i Dihlavī’s station in the pantheon of Persian poetry diminished so much by the nineteenth century that he missed out on the Romantic-era translation wave, so that his ghazals have been little known in English until recently; see Hasan Sijzi of Delhi, After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems, trans. Rebecca Gould (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016). Ḥasan does not appear so far to even rate a separate entry in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. We have already noted the recent translation of Amīr Khusraw, In the Bazaar of Love, trans. by Losensky and Sharma.

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of canon-creators (with the exception of ʿIṣmat) from less than a century after his death clear through to the eighteenth century. Jāmī remembers him explicitly in his mathnavīs (Tuḥfat al-aḥrār, Laylī and Majnun, Khirad-nāma-yi Iskandarī), and responds to him in his Dīvān, as does Navāʾī in his Dīvān (mentioning him as well with respect to particular emulated poems in his Majālis alnafāʾis), and Fakhrī in his list, and the Persian supplements to Navāʾī’s Majālis (See Tables 15.1, 15.2 and 15.3). Jāmī mentions him in the Bahāristān as a master of the qaṣīda and the ghazal (comparing him judiciously to Khāqānī in both forms), as well as a master of the mathnavī. Amīr Khusraw remains influential for the ghazal in the generations after Jāmī, still important as a source of emulation even for Ṣāʾib in the latter half of the seventeenth century. According to the detailed chart of the “Sources and Imitations of Fighānī” which Losensky presents, of the 536 ghazals of Bābā Fighānī, fifteen emulate specific poems by Saʿdī, thirty-six poems by Amīr Khusraw, seventeen by Kamāl-i Khujandī, a dozen by Ḥāfiẓ, fifty-two by Jāmī and another thirty-six by Ahlī of Shiraz.306 Of those thirty-six times that Fighānī responds to or imitates an Amīr Khusraw ghazal, about two dozen times an Amīr Khusraw poem is the only earlier model, meaning that the responses to it by Jāmī, Navāʾī, and/or Fighānī himself, respond directly to Amīr Khusraw and no other intermediary. The authority for these ghazals inheres in Amīr Khusraw alone, and does not require the reflected light of other master poets to identify them as ghazals worthy of imitation. In the other dozen times, Saʿdī or Kamāl-i Khujandī or Ḥāfiẓ had also composed a poem that might have influenced the responses by Jāmī, Navāʾī, or Fighānī.307 From this list of poets emulated by Fighānī (Saʿdī, Amīr Khusraw, Kamāl-i Khujandī, Ḥāfiẓ, Jāmī and Ahlī of Shiraz) we may exclude Jāmī and Ahlī, as near contemporaries of Fighānī, alive through at least part of the latter’s career. This leaves us four older poets who constitute a rather predictable coterie of well-emulated ghazal poets, whom we may christen the central canonical ghazal poets: Saʿdī, Amīr Khusraw Kamāl-i Khujandī and Ḥāfiẓ. In fact, in the Qazvīnī translation of Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis, the supplemental chapter on older poets covers Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī, Kamāl-i Khujandī, Khusraw-i Dihlavī, Ḥasan-i Dihlavī, Mīr ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī, and Jāmī in immediate succession, as if gathering the authors to whom we need pay special homage as the golden oldies of the ghazal, all together in one place in the book, leaving only Saʿdī out of place (oddly covered much earlier, right after Rūdakī), as the oldest poet in the

306  Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 327–42. 307  Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 327–42.

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list.308 In Jāmī’s Bahāristān, however, Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ, Kamāl, Amīr Khusraw, and Ḥasan all follow one another in immediate succession, bringing Saʿdī within the tight orbit of the Oldies canon, though Jāmī otherwise tends to generally proceed chronologically. Just before this list of core ghazal masters begins, we find Muḥammad ʿAṣṣār of Tabriz, an earlier Timurid poet, for whom no especially extravagant claims are made, and whom he remembers for his mathnavī; surely Jāmī does not mean to rank him with this centrally canonical group of ghazal poets, but to mark the periphery. After the presentation of the five canonical ghazal poets, we turn to ʿImād-i Faqīh, who perhaps more reasonably, from a modern vantage point, ought to come next to Salmān-i Sāvajī, whose entry however comes right before that of ʿAṣṣār. These are all fourteenth-century poets, but ʿImād is an odd-man out, director of a Kirmani Sufi lodge, whose poetry Jāmī mildly disparages. Then comes Khwājū, another thirteenth-century Kirmani, followed by four Transoxanians: the first is also fourteenth-century, the Bukharan Nāṣir; then come three Timurid contemporaries, Iṣmat from Bukhara, Basāṭī from Samarqand, and Khayālī from Bukhara. Then follow four Khurasanis: Ādharī from Isfarāyin, Kātibī from Nayshapur or Turshiz, Shāhī from Sabzavār and ʿĀrifī from Herat. Jāmī admires some of these and critiques others, but clearly does not see them among the grand masters. One senses that some effort is being made to represent an equal number of poets from different regions, and to round out the canon to forty poets. From the late Timurid vantage point, we may conclude that the Samanid poets and even the Ghaznavid and Seljuq poets, from Rūdakī all the way to Anvarī, while certainly admired, do not for the most part constitute a productive part of the canon, meaning that active poets no longer derive direct inspirational DNA from these canonical but mummified forebears, any more than modern English poets are likely to follow the metrical models of John Skelton or Gerard Manley Hopkins.309 Rūdakī appears infrequently in the poet Roll Calls; Jāmī mentions him more than once, and in the Bahāristān he anchors the beginnings of Persian verse and serves to set the Samanid poetry scene. Even for Manūchihrī, writing within only a hundred years of Rūdakī’s death, the stylistic changes of the first few decades of the Ghaznavid court may have already made it difficult to emulate Rūdakī’s poems. By the late Timurid era, Dawlatshāh wonders how the famous poem about the Amir of Bukhara could 308  Navāʾī, Majāli al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 337 and 454–58. 309  On Skelton, see http://www.skeltonproject.org/skeltonics/; on Hopkins’ Sprung Rhythm, see Elisabeth Schneider, “Sprung Rhythm: A Chapter in the Evolution of NineteenthCentury Verse,” PMLA 80, no. 3 (June 1965): 237–53.

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have been thought good poetry, devoid as it is “of artifice and innovation and gravitas” (ṣanāyiʿ va badāyiʿ va matānat). A verbal artifact of that sort, opines Dawlatshāh, had it been offered in the literary salons of the Sultans and rulers of the current era of discourse (in ruzigār-i sukhanvarī), would be roundly rejected by everyone (mustawjib-i inkār-i hamginān shavad).310 ʿUnṣurī and Anvarī both receive frequent mention in the Catalogues of Poets, though with the waning of the qaṣīda as the prestige form of poetry, ʿUnṣurī begins to appear less frequently. Anvarī, however, is still widely invoked in these lists in Table 15.3, from the thirteenth century into the Timurid era (with the exception of ʿIsāmī, who mentions only three poets, all of them narrative), and on into the Safavid era and beyond.311 Stylistically, Anvarī is less distant from the Timurids or the Indian Style poets than ʿUnṣurī or Rūdakī. He is a past master, but perhaps one of the productive moderns, rather than a fossilized ancient. With the exception of the one poem by Kisāʾī on old age (though Jāmī does not overtly acknowledge him as the source for his “Rashḥ-i bāl” ode), we may deduce that Ẓahīr-i Fāryābī and Niẓāmī, in the qaṣīda and mathnavī, and Saʿdī in the ghazal, are the earliest poets to whom Jāmī actively responds, meaning that Jāmī reads them as poets participating in a near enough style and mode for their poems to potentially inspire and productively inform his own. As noted above, the ghazal Jāmī quotes from Niẓāmī in the Bahāristān seems to receive a response from Jāmī in ghazal form, the first poet in that collection to be honored with a response, I think, marking the boundary of the Golden Oldies whose style seems desirably emulable to Jāmī. Perhaps not accidentally, Niẓāmī stands right in the middle of the Bahāristān, as entry number twenty; twenty more poets follow after him, with Navāʾī a forty-first entry, skipping Jāmī himself. But Jāmī enjoys special mention in Navāʾī’s Lives of the Poets, at the head of the Third Majlis, or Paradise, where Navāʾī confirms that Jāmī stands at the head of the poets of his era (those mentioned in Navāʾī’s book), and that his verse (naẓm), dīvān, and the collected compositions (kulliyāt-i taṣānīf ) are so famous among all and sundry that no examples need be included.312 Dawlatshāh dedicates a brief poet’s Roll Call to him, in which Jāmī is established as the superior to Kamāl (-i Khujandī), Saʿdī and Amīr Khusraw:

310  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 33. 311  In addition to the information in the online “Catalogue of Poets” (http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1163/9789004386600), Sharma, “Function of the Catalogue of Poets,” 243–44, shows that Ādharbaygdilī in the eighteenth century (Firdawsī, Anvarī, Saʿdī, Niẓāmī) and Malik al-shuʿarā Bahār in the twentieth (Firdawsī, Saʿdī, Farrukhī, Anvarī) both include Anvarī among the four principle poets of the Persian tradition in their poet Roll Calls. 312  Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. Ḥikmat, 56 and 229.

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jām-i jān-afzā-yi Jāmī jurʿa-yi tawfīq yāft shūrish-i ū burd dhawq az shiʿr-i shīrīn-i Kamāl kawkab-i saʿd-i vay āmad thānī-yi Saʿdī bi-nūr kard najm-i ṭāliʿ-ash bā sahm-i Khusraw ittiṣāl ḥāliyā ān Khusraw-i faḍl ast māḍī dīgarān pīsh-i dānāyān zi māḍī hast vāḍiḥ faḍl-i ḥāl313 The soul-quickening cup of Jāmī was graced with confirmation The stir it caused washed away the sweet verses of Kamāl (perfection) His auspicious star glowed bright, second only to Saʿdī His rising star-sign matched the destiny of [Amīr] Khusraw Now, he is the Ceasar (Khusraw) of virtue, all others are in the past The wise know that by the past are the present’s virtues made evident Jāmī is the Lord of erudition (Khusraw-i faḍl) for the present, and all others are in the past, while the cognoscenti know that the past makes the erudition of the present evident. Jāmī, then, completes the canon. He himself matches the output of earlier poets in the variety of forms and the amount of compositions, as well as commanding the field when it comes to style and achievement in his age. In this respect, he does round out and rondeau the canon. After Dawlatshāh, Jāmī, and Navāʾī wrote their three different Lives of the Poets collections/anthologies, the composition of tadhkiras became far more central to literary endeavor. While these new biographical and anthological works did generally rehearse the literary past back to the Samanids, the main function seems to have been to compile and categorize notices on relatively contemporary poets, thereby establishing the compiler of the work as an authority on the contemporary poetry scene, and setting him up as an arbiter of taste. Beyond the rhetoricians’ aim of pointing out and critiquing stylistic and technical features, and the anthologist’s service of preserving samples of work by poets who did not have dīvāns in circulation and introducing some famous poems (or making some poems famous by introducing them in a widely read format), the tadhkiras provided readers with some specific biographical data, presumably enhancing the enjoyment of each poet’s oeuvre. In this way, the tadhkiras implicitly laid claim that the enterprise of poesy stood on equal footing as an intellectual enterprise with jurisprudence, theology, or mysticism, which already had a well-established tradition of biographical literature (kitāb al-rijāl or ṭabaqāt al-rijāl) and hagiography (manāqib, or tadhkira for saints). Doubtless knowing the local salons, networks, regional affiliations and stylistic schools 313  Dawlatshāh, Tadhkiratu ‘sh-shuʿará, ed. Browne, 483, and in the ʿAbbāsī edition, 547.

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to which the many contemporary poets across the Persosphere from Bosnia to Bengal belonged had become more important. This knowledge confirmed judgments about the canon of the ancients and older moderns, while introducting or situating new poets, thus negotiating and renegotiating the canon. We may then ask, to what purpose did Jāmī present the Bahāristān? It hardly seems like a primer from which his son might learn the poetic arts (Jāmī elsewhere wrote on rhyme and prosody). Nor does it necessarily provide the examples of the best poetry around. The mostly short quotations of sample verses do not usually provide enough fodder for emulation, or even to discover the traces of likely emulation in Jāmī’s own verse (excepting the example of Niẓāmī’s ghazal). These are often chosen from ʿAwfī, are often entirely omitted for certain important poets (like Saʿdī or Ḥāfiẓ), and frequently serve to set up biographical information rather than illustrate the subtle qualities of the distinctive artistry of the particular poet under discussion. When Jāmī introduces the names of poets who do not regularly appear in other lists of canonical poets (including, as Table 15.3 shows, ʿAsjadī, Nāṣir Khusraw, ʿAmʿaq-i Bukārāʾī, ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Jabalī, Imāmī-yi Haravī), we have the sense he may do so because they appear in Dawlatshāh, or sometimes (e.g., ʿAmmāra, Fakhr-i Gurgāni/Jurjānī) because Dawlatshāh has neglected them. While Jāmī’s inclusion of Fakhr-i Gurgānī as author of “Vīs and Rāmīn” seems an intelligent act of recovery (Dawlatshāh listed a Faṣīhī-yi Jurjānī as author of a “Vāmiq and ʿAdhrā” romance, but misses out Vīs and Rāmīn, today considered an important canonical romance, the origins of which date to the Parthian period), his other choices do not always seem original or compelling. Perhaps Nizārī-yi Quhistānī or Khwājū-yi Kirmānī or ʿImād-i Faqīh truly inspired Jāmī in some way that most other authors in Table 15.3 did not feel. But Jāmī appears to have consciously shaped his list (either paring it down, or filling it out) to reach the round and conventional number of forty, the number of poets with entries, not counting Navāʾī, who constitutes the last and forty-first entry. We might think of Navāʾī as the patron-poet who rounds out the canon, or allows it to be recited from a new vantage point, which in his case also marks the project of creating a canon of Chaghatay poets. Both he and Jāmī thus create prose works that describe a canon, though not the same canon. Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis mostly ignores the pre-Timurid Persian poets until it gets translated into Persian with supplemental chapters around 1520 CE. In the case of Jāmī, that canon includes a fair number of recent poets from just before or during the Timurid era, poets unlikely to even be considered for inclusion among the top forty of any modern canon of Persian poetry not focused on the fifteenth and sixteenth century: ʿAṣṣār-i Tabrīzī, Basāṭī, Kātibī, ʿIṣmat (himself a creator of a canon as well as an item in the canons of

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Jāmī and Navāʾī), possibly also ʿĀrifī and Shāhī, though the latter two might make honorable mention. This telescoping of the importance of recent poets of the Timurid era is one way that Jāmī and Navāʾī rounded out and reshaped a forward-looking, rather than a backward-looking canon. The productive “Oldies” go back no further than two hundred years, and include many recent practitioners who today seem marginal. Part of the problem with the Bahāristān and other such lists of poets is that they do not comprehensively address everyone who composed poetry. Certain authors, like Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, Mawlānā Rūmī, Maḥmūd-i Shabistarī, etc., belong to a different category of non-professional poet in the mind of a writer like Jāmī, and he therefore places them not in his Lives of the Poets chapter of the Bahāristān, but in his Lives of the Saints work, Nafaḥāt al-uns. This appears to be a shared understanding across many of the authors of Poet Catalogues in Persian, and ideally, to form a more comprehensive picture of the canon, we should recognize the apples-to-oranges quality of comparing a work like the Bahāristān with a poetic catalogue in a qaṣīda of Manūchihrī. We ought to include a much wider array of poet Roll Calls in both prose and verse, adding a list of mystic-poets from Nafaḥāt al-uns, for example, and the information from other prose works, like Dawlatshāh and ʿAwfī. Certainly many further verse Roll Calls could also be identified and added, and a rounder and fuller picture of the changing canon of Persian poetry might then emerge. Bibliography Afṣaḥzād, Aʿlā-Khān. Naqd va bar-rasī-yi āthār va sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Jāmī. Tehran: Daftar-i Nashr-i Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378sh./1999. Ahmad, Aziz. “Ḥasan Dihlawī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition. Edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Published online 2012. dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2765. Ahlī-yi Turshīzī. Dīvān-i-Mawlānā Kamāl al-Dīn Ahlī Turshīzī, al-ma‛rūf bi Ahlī Khurāsānī. Edited by Md. Shamoon Israeli. Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University, 1971. Algar, Hamid. Jami. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Arberry, Arthur J. Classical Persian Literature. London: Curzon, 1958; reprint, Oxon: Routledge/Curzon, 1994. ʿAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. Muṣībat-nāma. Edited by Muḥammad-Riḍā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī. Tehran: Sukhan, 1376sh./1997. ʿAwfī, Muḥammad. Lubāb al-albāb. Edited by E.G. Browne and Mirza Muḥammad Qazvīnī. 2 vols. London and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1906.

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chapter 16

“Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh” Jāmī’s Reception among the Safavids Paul Losensky Toward the end of his memoir of literary life in Herat in the final years of Timurid rule, Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Vāṣifī gives a first-hand account of events following Shāh Ismāʿīl’s conquest of the city in 916/1510. Vāṣifī reports that radical local Shi’ites (to whom he refers simply as Rāfiḍīyān) undertook a general slaughter of the Sunni partisans who had been left behind when Uzbek forces left the city. In the course of this riot, the crowd funneled down one of the city’s main avenues, which was lined with the heads of Uzbeks impaled on pikes, until it reached the tomb of Jāmī. There nearly “ten thousand had ­gathered,” and they threw all the doors, windows, chairs, or benches that were there in that district on top of Mawlavī [Jāmī]’s tomb until they reached the height of the arched gateway into the cemetery. Then they set them on fire. When the fire got going, one couldn’t get closer than a bow shot. It reminded one of Nimrod’s fire.1 Caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the Safavid rise to power, the Shi’ite rioters found in Jāmī a public symbol for the equally fanatical Sunnism of the Uzbek invaders. In a dramatic symbol of the ideological and social convulsions of the ascendency of the new dynasty, the tomb of the most renowned literary intellectual of the fifteenth century was put to the torch less than twenty years after his death in 1492. Vāṣifī’s report does not directly implicate the Safavid rulers in the attack on Jāmī’s tomb, but later anecdotes do. A story from Qāḍī Aḥmad Ghaffārī’s Tārīkh-i Nigāristān, composed in 959/1552, has Shāh Ismāʿīl defacing Jāmī’s literary legacy rather than his tomb: It is reported that when Shāh Ismāʿīl Safavī subjugated the city of Herat, he ordered that wherever the name of Sheikh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī was seen in a book, the dot below the letter jīm should be erased and placed 1  Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Vāṣifī, Badāyiʿ al-vaqāyiʿ, ed. A.N. Boldyrev, 2 vols. (Tehran: Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1972): 2:250. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_018

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above it, so it would read khāmī—the crude, the jejune. Jāmī’s nephew, the poet Hātifī, was upset by this and sent the verses below to Ismāʿīl: I find it a very strange case of the justice of the conquering king, before whose door heaven has served all its life, that for the sake of a group of uncultured boors, the dot on Jāmī has been erased and made into Khāmī.2 Hātifī’s verses drive home the contradiction inherent in this act of literary vandalism with an etymological pun between nātarāsh, “uncultured,” and tarāshīda, “erased,” setting loutish sectarianism in opposition to literary wit and grace. Though this anecdote may, in fact, be too witty to be historically plausible, it does indicate the ideological suspicions surrounding Jāmī, the literary icon of the previous dynasty. This latent hostility persisted even after Ismāʿīl’s death. In a letter dating from the early years of Ṭahmāsp’s reign, Jāmī’s poetry is quoted to support the Safavid cause, but the poet himself remains suspect. Relations between the Safavids and Uzbeks were tense even after the cessation of open warfare, and as a foray in this on-going war of words, the Uzbek ruler ʿUbayd Allāh Khān sent a letter to Shāh Ṭahmāsp calling into question key points of Safavid Shi’ite doctrine. In a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal to this letter (composed in 939/1532), a Safavid scribe compares ʿUbayd Allāh to the infamous and villainous opponent of the Prophet, Abū Lahab, and cites a couplet to this effect: The true Prophet, titled the King of Medina, is disgusted with you, Bū Lahab! Among neither the Persians nor the Arabs is there an unbeliever, an idolater, or a wretch like you. Although these verses are attributed to Jāmī, he is nonetheless slightingly characterized as a poet who is the “target of the arrow of public disrepute (hadaf-i tīr-i bad-nāmī).” Even a poet with questionable religious proclivities like Jāmī, the scribe suggests, can be mustered to disgrace blatant heretics like the Uzbek ruler and his followers.3 2  Qāḍī Aḥmad Ghaffārī, Tārīkh-i Nigāristān, ed. Murtaḍā Mudarris Gīlānī (Tehran: Ḥāfiẓ, 1404/1984), 362. 3  Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī: Majmūʿa-yi asnād va makātib-i tārīkhī hamrāh bā yāddāshthā-yi tafṣīlī, ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī (Tehran: Arghavān, 1368/1989), p. 40. For a detailed account of this

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This letter provides documentary evidence of both the currency of Jāmī’s poetry and his tainted reputation. The historian Faḍlī Iṣfahānī quotes it as a source in the second part of Afḍal al-Tavārīkh (composed ca. 1026/1617), but breaks away from the letter immediately after Jāmī’s verses to tell a related anecdote about Ṭahmāsp’s visit to Herat. During his tour of the city, the officials reported to Shāh Ṭahmāsp that Mawlānā Jāmī was a devout Sunnī and his poems harmed the public faith. His Highness ordained that anyone who was found reading the poems of the mystic of the age, Mawlānā Jāmī, should be punished. [Shāh Ṭahmāsp] also ordered the mausoleum of Mawlānā Jāmī, which was so tall that it reached the heavens, to be destroyed. The residents of Herat obediently and reluctantly destroyed Mawlānā’s mausoleum and carried away its material as sacred relics.4 Not satisfied with banning his works and destroying his tomb, Ṭahmāsp further orders that Jāmī’s body be disinterred and his bones burned. But on his way to desecrate the poet’s body, the Shah asks if anyone has a copy of Jāmī’s dīvān. His former grand vizier, Qāḍī Jahān Qazvīnī has one on hand, and the book is opened to a ghazal that ends with the following two verses: shāh-i ʿālamgīr-i takht-i khūbrūyī-rā bi-dām mīva-yi ʿaysh u farāghat āmad az har kishvarash sūkht Jāmī z’ātash-i ʿishq u dar āmad sālhā hamchunān bū-yi vafā mīyāyad az khākistarash From his every land, the fruits of pleasure and ease came into the net of the world-conquering king of the throne of beauty Jāmī burned up in the fire of love. Years have passed, but still the perfume of loyalty rises from his ashes.5 correspondence, see Colin P. Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 73‒79. 4  Simin Abrahams, “A Historiographical Study and Annotated Translation of Volume 2 of the Afżal al-Tavārīkh by Fażlī Khūzānī al-Iṣfāhānī” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1999), 218. 5  The final verse of this poem appears in: Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999), 1:496. The penultimate verse, however, appears only in Faḍlī’s text; its reference to the beloved as “the world-conquering king of beauty” is so apt to the context of the anecdote that one suspects it was composed

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This verse is taken as an augury of Jāmī’s devotion to the new dynasty even in his death. Qāḍī Jahān then quotes another verse by Jāmī in praise of the Imam ʿAlī. Ṭahmāsp repents of his rash decision, lifts the ban on Jāmī’s works, and orders the tomb rebuilt. Martin Dickson offers several compelling reasons for regarding this story as apocryphal,6 and if we accept Vāṣifī’s first-hand account of the burning of Jāmī’s tomb, it is unlikely that it could have been rebuilt in so grand a fashion in time for Tahmāsp to burn it down again. Solid historical evidence and the legends it inspired show a deep ambivalence toward Jāmī in the decades immediately after his death. These battles over Jāmī’s legacy are in some ways a continuation of the controversy that the poet had found himself embroiled in during his lifetime, most notably the inquisition over his attitude toward the Shi’ites and the Imams that he was forced to undergo in Baghdad during his pilgrimage to Mecca.7 While he expressed devotion to the family of the Prophet in his poetry, there can be little doubt that he was staunchly Sunni, and would have regarded the Shi’ism of the early Safavids as fanatically extreme. Politically and religiously, Jāmī became an easy target for all that the nascent Safavid dynasty opposed. But this purely sectarian reaction was apparently short-lived. As suggested by the quotation of his poetry in the polemical letter to ʿUbayd Allāh, the reception of Jāmī’s literary heritage was more complex. Collective biographies (tadhkiras), our principal source of literary criticism during the period, treated Jāmī with due respect, but qualified their praise in crucial ways. In the two hundred and fifty years after Jāmī’s death, two major poetic movements emerged in Persian lyric poetry. The maktab-i vuqūʿ or Realist School, which dominated the Persian lyric in the sixteenth century, in some ways defined itself in opposition to Jāmī’s poetics, as we will see in the response poems written by Muḥtasham Kāshānī (d. 995/1588). Poets of the succeeding shīva-yi tāza (Fresh Style), which was prevalent in both Safavid Iran and Mughal India in the seventeenth century, were apparently largely indifferent to Jāmī’s poetry; his generally conservative approach to language and imagery had little to offer poets who prided themselves precisely on innovative idiom and experiments in figures of thought. To construct a metaphor from the incident recorded by Vāṣifī, Jāmī’s tomb was

and inserted for just this purpose. See Faḍlī Khūzānī al-Iṣfāhānī, “Afḍal al-Tavārīkh,” MS Or. 4678 (British Library, London, microfilm), fol. 60b. Thanks to Austin O’Malley for providing me with a copy of the relevant folios of this manuscript. 6  Martin S. Dickson, “Sháh Tahmásb and the Uzbeks: The Duel for Khurásán with ‘Ubayd Khán, 930–946/1524–1540” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1958), 190‒93. See also Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, “The Tabarra’iyan and the Early Safavids,” Iranian Studies 37 (2004): 55. 7  See Hamid Algar, Jami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50‒54.

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not burned down by Persian poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was instead respectfully maintained, but seldom visited. 1

The Fleshy Phantom: Jāmī, Muḥtasham, and the Maktab-i vuqūʿ

In the conciliatory ending to Faḍlī’s anecdote, we see one sign of the recovery of Jāmī’s reputation among Safavid litterateurs. Further evidence comes from the biographical compendium, Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī (composed ca. 957/1550). A few years after the scribes of Shāh Ṭahmāsp’s chancellery cast passing dispersions on Jāmī’s character, Sām Mīrzā, Ṭahmāsp’s brother, offers a far different assessment: Due to the extreme loftiness of his character and the sheer intensity of his fame, there is no need to record his biography and illustrate his writings … There is no debate (sukhanī na) among his opponents and adherents concerning his laudable qualities and no bickering over the abundance of his natural genius.8 Behind this encomiastic celebration of Jāmī’s character and genius, however, the recent controversy over his religious beliefs seems to linger in the background. In his selections from Jāmī’s poetry, Sām Mīrzā quotes an entire section from Jāmī’s mathnavī Silsilat al-Dhahab in which the poet defends his praise of the family of the Prophet: If love of the family of the Prophet is heresy (rafḍ), then heresy is an obligation upon both the knowing and the ignorant.9 This apologetic citation contributes to Sām Mīrzā’s effort to downplay Jāmī’s sectarian affiliation as secondary to his poetic and scholarly achievements. Sām Mīrzā’s notice on Jāmī in the Tuḥfa is only one indication of the favor that Jāmi’s poetry enjoyed among members of the Safavid royal house. One of Ṭahmāsp’s nephews, Sultān Ibrāhīm Mīrzā, commissioned a lavishly illustrated manuscript of Jāmī’s collection of mathnavīs, Haft Awrang, which took over

8  Sām Mīrzā, Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī, ed. Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh (Tehran: Asāṭīr, 1384/2005), 143‒44. 9  This is the final verse of eleven. See Mathnavī-yi Haft Awrang, ed. Jābilqā Dād-ʿAlīshāh et al., 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999), 1:209‒10.

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ten years to complete.10 Even more significant for our purposes, Ṭahmāsp’s daughter, the powerful Parī Khān Khānum, was so fond of Jāmī’s poetry that she commissioned her poet laureate, Muḥtasham Kāshānī, to undertake a significant literary project in Jāmī’s honor, as reported by the historian Ashūfta‌ʾī Naṭanzī in his Naqāvat al-āthār (composed 1007/1598): Because of her well-balanced temperament, she had an avid liking for well-balanced words. Sometimes, she would set out verses as formal schemas (ashʿār ṭarḥ mīfarmūd) and would assign the poets of the time the task of responding (tatabbuʿ) to them. By this means, she would untie the knots of grief from the hearts of that group with ostentatious robes of honor and abundant largesse. As an example, having selected eighty ghazals from the dīvān of Mullā Jāmī, she sent them to the most fluent of the wordsmiths and the most eloquent of poets ancient and modern, the Ḥassān of Persia, Mawlānā Muḥtasham Kāshī, and he delivered to her presence responses to the aforementioned ghazals along with estimable and eloquently styled qaṣīdas. With a retinue as glittering as that of Belqis, Queen Parī Khān Khānum distinguished and elevated this cynosure of fluency among his peers with heart-winning honors and envybreeding dignities.11 These eighty alleged responses to Jāmī are no longer preserved as a separate group of poems in Muḥtasham’s Haft dīvān. But a careful comparison of the collected ghazals of the two poets certainly reveals enough ghazals written on a common schema of rhyme and meter (ṭarḥ) to substantiate Ashūfta‌ʾī’s story. As documented in Appendix A, I have identified over sixty poems with rhyme schemes so distinctive as to leave little doubt that Muḥtasham is responding directly to Jāmī’s ghazals. This textual evidence strongly indicates that Parī Khān Khānum’s literary commission to Muḥtasham is not a product of an historian’s hyperbole. As I have argued at length elsewhere, for poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writing a response poem is seldom a straightforward act of

10  See Marianna Shreve Simpson, Persian Poetry, Painting and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Manuscript (Washington, D.C. and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Chad Kia, “Jāmi iii. And Persian Art,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 14:479‒82. 11   Maḥmūd ibn Hidāyat-Allāh Ashūfta‌ ʾī Naṭanzī, Naqāvat al-āthār fī dhikr al-akhyār, ed. Iḥsān Ashrāfī (Tehran: Bungāh-i tarjuma va nashr-i kitāb, 1350/1971), 71. Ḥassān refers to the Arab poet Ḥassān Thābit, best known for his poems in praise of the Prophet Muhammad.

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deferential homage.12 Far more often, in fact, the use of the same meter and rhyme as an earlier poem allows the later poet to distinguish his own poetic voice from that of his predecessor. Attitudes toward the past work may range from emulative assimilation to transgressive parody with infinite gradations in between. While his responses were inspired by his patron’s evident fondness for Jāmī’s poetry, Muḥtasham frequently takes the opportunity to display the contrast between Jāmī’s poetics and his own very different literary ideals. Muḥtasham was an outspoken proponent of the maktab-i vuqūʿ or Realist School, which dominated lyric poetry in sixteenth-century Persia.13 In many ways, this school was a conscious reaction against the late classical poetics of the Timurid period, of which Jāmī was the foremost representative. A close comparison of two of Jāmī’s model poems with Muḥtasham’s responses provides a way of analyzing the differences between these two approaches to the ghazal. In the following ghazal, Jāmī presents an idealized portrait of a young male beloved. The first three verses focus on the soft down on his cheeks. In the homoerotic ideal of beauty typical of much Persian lyric poetry, the moment when soft whiskers first emerge on the beloved’s cheek marks the fulfillment of the beloved’s adolescent appeal, but also foreshadows the growth of a full beard, at which point the young boy will no longer be available as an object of desire. The poem then turns in quick succession to other features of his beauty—his lithe body, his well-coiffed locks, and his silent lips: sabza-yi naw ki zi gulzār-i rukhat sar zada ast raqam-i naskh-i gul az ghāliya-yi tar zada ast chun khaṭ-i sabz-i tu yak ḥarf nadīd-ast ṣabā ʿumrhā daftar-i gul garchi bi-ham bar zada ast khaṭṭ-i mushkīn-i tu dūdī-st k-az ātash bar khāst āh az īn dūd ki ātash bi-jahān dar zada ast dāsht maqṣūd-i havādārī-yi sarv-i tu ṣabā z-ān hama musht ki bar farq-i ṣanūbar zada ast 12  See Paul E. Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the SafavidMughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998), especially 106‒14 and chapter 5. 13  For an account of Muḥtasham’s life and works, see Paul Losensky, “Moḥtašam Kāšāni,” Encyclopaedia Iranica (online at: www.iranicaonline/articles/mohtasham-kashani). For the poet’s involvement with the maktab-i vuqūʿ, see Paul Losensky, “Poetics and Eros in Early Modern Persia: The Lovers’ Confection and The Glorious Epistle by Muhtasham Kāshānī,” Iranian Studies 42 (2009): 745‒64.

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dast-i mashshāṭa judā bih ki kunand az shāna ki chirā shāna dar ān jaʿd-i muʿanbar zada ast gar na nāyābī-yi kām-i dil-i mā khwāst labat qufl-i yāqūt chi bar ḥuqqa-yi gawhar zada ast Jāmī az laʿl-i tu hargiz nazada sāghar-i ʿaysh k-ash na sangīn dil-i tu sang bi-sāghar zada ast The fresh verdure that has sprung from the rose bed of your cheek has cancelled out the rose with a script of moist ambergris. The zephyr has seen no letter like the script of your verdant down, though it has flipped through the notebook of roses for many lifetimes. The musky script of your down is smoke that rose from the fire— alas for this smoke that has set fire to the world. All the blows the zephyr struck on the heads of the pines were motivated by its lusty passion for your cypress form. Why has the hair-dresser combed those perfumed tresses? It would be better to remove the comb from his hand. If your lips did not want to thwart my heart’s desires, why has it placed a ruby seal on the jewel box of pearls? Jāmi never sipped the cup of joy from your ruby lips without your hard heart smashing its stone on the cup.14 In portraying the beloved’s beauty, Jāmī carefully deploys several conventional images and metaphors. Comparing the dark curls of down to the cursive Persian script is a well-established topos, which Jāmī unfolds through a pun on the word naskh in verse one; it refers both to annulling or “cancelling” a segment of text and to a particular style of calligraphy. This topos is then woven together with two other traditional metaphors—the beloved’s cheek as a rose and the down as wisps of smoke—in the next two verses. The personified zephyr of verse two returns in verse four where it batters the top branches of the pine trees only to get at the cypress of the beloved’s body. These breezes 14  Jāmī, Divān, 2:143.

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seem to trigger the praise of the beloved’s disheveled tresses in verse five, while muʿanbar (perfumed with ambergris) provides a verbal and semantic echo of ghāliya-yi tar (moist ambergris) in verse one. To close the poem, Jāmī brings forward the idea of communication implicit in the handwriting and notebook of the opening verses, but any possible exchange of words between speaker and beloved is thwarted by the unspeaking lips of verses six and seven. The beloved’s gem-like self-enclosure contrasts with the smashing of the speaker’s cup of joy in verse seven. Only with this violent final image do we notice how forced movement and destruction dominate the poem’s imagery: texts are erased, fire rages, and winds blow. The careful disposition of related conventional images and the many links between verses create a sense of balance and almost repose concordant with the beloved’s final bejeweled silence. The formal scheme of the poem (the verbal radīf zada-ast and the relatively common rhyme syllable -ar) allows for significant thematic variation, enabling Muḥtasham to write a poem according to his own poetics despite the common rhymes and images that show the kinship between response and source. Although Muḥtasham sets aside the description of the beloved’s emergent facial hair that begins Jāmī’s poem, his response nevertheless belongs to the broad thematic genre of the portrait of the beloved. But his portrait has a new dynamism in a dramatic situation fraught with amorous tension and driven by an insistent rhetoric of confrontation: ḥarf-i ʿishqat magar imshab zi yakī sar zada ast ki ḥayā īn hama ātash bi-gulat dar zada ast zada jām-i ghaḍab ān ghamza magar ghamzada-ī ṭāq-i abrū-yi turā gufta u sāghar zada ast shuʿla-yi shamʿ-i jamālat shuda bar ham zada āh murgh-i rūḥ-i ki bi-pīrāmun-i ān par zada ast khūnat az ghayrat-i ashk-i ki bi-jūsh ast ki bāz gul-i tabkhāla zi shīrīn ruṭabat sar zada ast gashta āh-i ki turā silsila junbān-i ʿitāb k-ān siyah silsila bītāb u bi-ham bar zada ast mīgudhashtī u zi mīgh-i muzha khūn mībārīd ki bi-ḥayrān shuda-ī chashm-i tu khanjar zada ast

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jīb-i jānash zi man andar khaṭar ast ān ki chunīn dāman-i saʿī bi-rāh-i ṭalabat bar zada ast ḥājibat karda kamān zih magar az kam-ḥadharī dād-i jurʿat zada-ī qaṣr-i tu-rā dar zada ast khush ḥarīfī-st ki dar vādī-yi ʿishqat hama jā khayma bā Muḥtasham az lāf barābar zada ast Embarrassment has brought such fire to your rosy cheek. Has someone said something about loving you tonight? That glance has guzzled the cup of wrath. Has some grieving man raised a cup and toasted the arch of your eyebrow? Whose spirit-bird has fluttered around your beauty? It merged with its flame and let loose a sigh. From your date-sweet lips, a fever blister has bloomed again. Whose tears offended your honor, bringing your blood to a boil? Those dark locks of hair have grown restless and tangled. Whose sighs have rattled the chains of your anger? You were passing by, and blood rained from the eyelash mist. Your eyes have stuck a dagger into one staring amazed. Having tucked up his robes to go in search of you, he’s in danger that I’ll pick the pocket of his life. Your doorkeeper has strung his bow. Has a daring man’s cry knocked recklessly on the door of your mansion? It’s a fine rival who has boastfully pitched his tent across from Muḥtasham’s all over the valley of your love.15

15  Muḥtasham, Haft divān, 2:896. Although one would expect the word tīgh (blade) in verse six, all the editions that I have consulted read mīgh (mist).

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Although Muḥtasham describes some of the same physical features as Jāmī, he does so in a dramatically different fashion. Whereas Jāmī’s first five verses are held together in a tightly woven network of imagery and metaphor, Muḥtasham’s cohere because of an insistently repeated interrogative syntax, with either magar or ki as a question particle. As in Jāmī, we never hear the beloved’s voice, but his physical features—cheek, gaze, hair, and fever ­blister— speak so loudly of his angry discomfort that speech is unnecessary. But in keeping with the crisis of communication that is typical of the maktab-i vuqūʿ,16 it is never clear exactly what is being communicated, and the speaker’s questions probe different possibilities. Though none of them are answered, these insistent queries set up a strong sense of a face-to-face dramatic interaction, in sharp contrast to Jāmī’s carefully crafted, almost static images. The use of ki as a possessive interrogative (“whose”) in verses three through five impel the speaker to conjure up the image of rival, who is both stabbed by the beloved’s look and exposed to the criminal assault of the speaker. The implied setting of the poem is an urban world, a milieu of human conflict with physical violence always lurking; we are miles away from Jāmī’s breeze-tossed garden. This urban setting is exemplified by the architectural image of the mansion door in verse eight, a setting reminiscent of Muḥtasham’s two prosimetric works, Nuql-i ʿushshāq and Risāla-yi Jalāliya.17 The rival is an omnipresent figure in the ghazals of the Realist School and comes to the fore in the second half of the poem, culminating in the signature verse, where Muḥtasham begrudgingly acknowledges his rival’s presence at the same time that he disparages his boasting. This response highlights the differences between two radically different ways of portraying the beloved. In Jāmī’s stylized imagery, emotion is constrained by the crafted play of conventional topoi. Muḥtasham’s poem, by contrast, is charged with emotional force in the very syntactic structure of its lines and moves rapidly between different spheres of imagery. As he fulfills Parī Khān Khānum’s commission, Muḥtasham seems determined to demonstrate the differences between the realistic and dramatic poetics of the maktab-i vuqūʿ and the literary values of the earlier generation represented by Jāmī. “Description of the beloved” is a broad topical genre and can embrace wide variation. But even when the topic of the model is more restrictive, Muḥtasham’s approach is indicative of the new, more earthly and sensual 16  See Sheila S. Akbar, “Reading the Wound: Obsession, Ambivalence and Authenticity in the Ghazal of the Sixteenth-Century Maktab-e voquʿ ” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2014), 58. 17  See the narrative use of the urban setting in both the passages translated in Losensky, “Poetics and Eros.” See also Muḥtasham’s treatment of architectural images in his response to Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:450‒51 (Muḥtasham, Haft dīvān, 2:948‒49).

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poetics of the Realist School. In the following poem, Jāmī takes up the conventional topical genre of the nocturnal visitation of the beloved’s phantom18 that comes to the sleepless lover and offers the union and fulfillment that is impossible in the mundane world of waking reality: khiyālī būd yā rab dūsh yā dar khwāb mīdīdam ki rūyash dar naẓar bar kaf sharāb-i nāb mīdīdam bi-iksīr-i saʿādat yāftam ākhir bi-ḥamdullāh viṣālash-rā ki hamchun kīmiyā nāyāb mīdīdam chi ḥājat būd shamʿ afrūkhtan dar bazm-i ū yā rab chu az ʿaks-i rukhash ʿālam hama mahtāb mīdīdam bi-dāgh-i bīmurādī jān u dil mīsūkht dushman-rā chu khud-rā bar murād-i khāṭir-i aḥbāb mīdīdam basī bar khāk sūdam pīsh-i pā-yi sāqī az mastī sarī k-ash sajda-gah dar gūsha-yi miḥrāb mīdīdam bi-āb-i zindagī pay burd z-iqbāl-i viṣāl-i ū dilī k-az ātash-i mahjūrīyash dar tāb mīdīdam jahānī jān hamī dādand bahr-i jurʿa-ī ammā zi jāmash Jāmī-yi lab-tishna-rā sīrāb mīdīdam Was it a phantom last night, O Lord, or was I dreaming? I was looking full in his face, uncut wine in his hand. With the elixir of bliss, praise God, I was united with him at last, which I once considered as unattainable as alchemy. What need was there, o Lord, to light a candle at his feast when I was seeing the world all moonlight from the reflection of his face? 18  For a brief treatment of the precedents of this set theme in classical Arabic poetry, see John Seybold, “The Earliest Demon Lover: The Ṭayf al-Khayāl in al-Mufaḍḍalīyāt,” in Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed. Suzanne P. Stetkevych (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 180–89. For another ghazal by Jāmī on this theme and Muḥtasham’s reply, see Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:394‒5 and Muḥtasham, Haft dīvān, 2:960.

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The enemy’s heart and soul were burning with disappointment while I was seeing myself as the fulfillment of lovers’ minds. In the dust before the cupbearer’s feet, how often I drunkenly rubbed the head that I used to see bowing in the corner of the prayer niche. The heart I used to see writhing from the fire of his abandonment found its way to the water of life from the fortune of union with him. A whole world was giving its life for a single sip, but I was looking at thirsty Jāmī sated by his goblet.19 The first verse of Jāmī’s poem clearly announces the theme that it will follow through to the end, initiating a thematically coherent ghazal. This coherence is reinforced by the harmony of images between the first and final verses. Sharāb-i nāb (“uncut wine”) finds a sonic and semantic echo in the closing rhyme sīrāb (“sated”), and the images in both lines are drawn from the rich image domain of wine. Liquidity flows through the poem in the elixir (iksīr) of verse three and the water of life (āb-i zindagī) in verse six. These, in turn, become part of a larger pattern of elemental imagery with the addition of khāk (dust) in verse five and images associated with fire—the brand (dāgh) and the candle (shamʿ) of verses three and four and “the fire of his abandonment” (ātash-i mahjūrīyash) in verse six. Aside from a bit of gloating over his enemy’s suffering in the middle of the poem, the speaker maintains a consistently celebratory tone throughout. This joy persists regardless of the speaker’s awareness that what he was seeing was no more than a phantom, a mirage, or a dream image, and this lack of substance seems to be emphasized by the fact that the speaker describes the beloved’s appearance only in terms of the reflection of his face. The nature of the rhyming refrain, mīdīdam (“I was seeing, watching”), together with the somewhat restricted word stock of the rhyme syllable, –āb, perhaps limited Muḥtasham’s options for straying from Jāmī’s theme in his response.20 His opening rhyme, in any case, dar khwāb (“in a dream”), is identical to Jāmī’s and is even reiterated in the closing verse. This “ring structure” is 19  Jāmi, Divān, 1:609. 20  For a discussion of a sequence of ghazals with a strangely similar rhyme scheme, but a strikingly different theme, see Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī, 230‒49.

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similar to that of the model and serves to reaffirm the topic of the nocturnal vision of the beloved that runs throughout the poem: shabī k-ān sarv-i sīm-andām-rā dar khwāb mīdīdam tan-i khud-rā ʿayān az raʿsha chun sīmāb mīdīdam dar ān tārīkī-yi shab az furūgh-i māh-i rū-yi ū zi rawzan rafta bīrūn shuʿla-yi māhtāb mīdīdam namīdīdam tanash-rā az laṭāfat līk rū-yi khud dar ān āyīna chun barg-i khazān dar āb mīdīdam chi tābān kawkabī būd ān chirāgh-i chashm-i bīdārān ki shamʿ-i māh-rā dar janb-i ū bītāb mīdīdam hamānā āb-i ḥayvān būd jism-i nāzanīn-i ū ki bāgh-i rūḥ-rā az vay ṭarāvat-yāb mīdīdam tan-i sīmīn-i ū tā būd ghalṭān dar kinār-i man kinār-i khwīshtan-rā pur zi sīm-i nāb mīdīdam dar-i durj-i sukhan-rā Muḥtasham z-īn bīshtar magushā ki yārā nīst guftan ānchi man dar khwāb mīdīdam The night when I was dreaming of that silver-limbed cypress I watched my own body plainly quiver like quicksilver. In the darkness of that night, I was watching the moonlight flame streaming out through the window from the moon glow of her face. Out of delicacy, I was not looking at her body, but I was watching my own face in that mirror like an autumn leaf on the water. The light of the eyes of the wakeful—what a shining star she was beside which I saw the light of the moon to be without luster. Her precious body was indeed the water of life from which I saw the garden of the spirit receive its moisture

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As her silvery body was rolling in my embrace I was watching my own flanks fill up with pure silver. Don’t lift the lid on the jewel box of poetry, Muḥtasham, more than this. No one dares say what I saw in my dream.21 Although Muḥtasham casts his beloved’s nocturnal visitation explicitly in the dream realm, the experience is solidly corporeal. The first verse already makes two references to the lovers’ bodies. The beloved’s is “silvery-limbed” (sīm-andām), and its reflection bathes the speaker’s body (tan-i khud) in a soft light shimmering like mercury. Words for the body (tan, jism) appear again in verses three, five, and six. The phrase at the start of verse three, az laṭāfat (“out of delicacy”), is ambiguous. Either the beloved’s body is itself too diaphanous to view directly, or the speaker graciously refuses to stare directly at it. In either case, he catches sight of the reflection of his own face, which, in a striking visual simile, looks like a pale yellow autumn leaf floating on the water. The beloved and the speaker share in a half-lit, intimate physicality. This sensuality reaches its climax in the penultimate verse, where the body of the beloved and the speaker seem to snuggle or even wrestle in one another’s embrace. Even though the beloved’s body is apparently no more than a dream image, it has a tactile substance that goes beyond anything found in the model. The dramatic intimacy of the scene is further enhanced by Muḥtasham’s elimination of the elemental images in Jāmī’s poem; the moonlight that Jāmī mentions in verse three suffuses Muḥtasham’s entire poem, displacing the elements of fire and earth. Muḥtasham’s response adheres to the topical genre of Jāmī’s model, but refashions it with a tactile sensuality that is barely imaginable for Jāmī. These two pairs of poems are, of course, only a small sampling of the eighty responses that Muḥtasham wrote to Jāmī’s ghazals on Parī Khān Khānum’s commission. Not all of these responses differentiate themselves as distinctively from their models. In one exceptional case, Jāmī’s ghazal foreshadows the vuqūʿī manner by the speaker puzzling over his beloved’s enigmatic behavior and voicing his anxiety over his rivals and unsympathetic onlookers. 21  Muḥtasham, Haft divān, 2:1031‒32. The uncertainty of the beloved’s gender in the Persian ghazal seems especially acute here. There is no reason to question that Jāmī is referring to the default male beloved, but the situation with Muḥtasham is more complicated. Not only are his poems dedicated to a woman patron, but his own work (especially the Nuql-i ʿushshāq) indicates that he courted the amorous affections of women. I have therefore resorted to two different pronoun genders in rendering these poems into English. As suggested to me by Franklin Lewis, an implied change of gender may be part of the strategy of Muḥtasham’s response.

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Significantly, Muḥtasham wrote two separate responses to this one model.22 But the poems that we have examined here do exemplify the broader stylistic movement away from the literary values of the late Timurid period toward a poetics that prized the dramatic representation of encounters between flesh-and-blood lovers and the depiction of their psychological anxieties, suffering, and occasional joys. Even as he follows his patron’s request to pay homage to Jāmī, Muḥtasham manifests the new poetics of the Realist School. Muḥtasham’s response poems show due recognition of Jāmī’s literary stature among the early Safavids, but simultaneously enact the distance between Jāmī’s poetics and their own. To return to our opening image, Jāmī’s tomb survives, but it is remodeled almost beyond recognition. 2

“Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh”: Jāmī and the Fresh Style

In the decades immediately following Muḥtasham’s death in 1588, the Persian lyric tradition underwent another profound transformation. The relatively short-lived maktab-i vuqūʿ with its emphasis on dramatic sensuality would give way to the new conceptualist poetics of the shīva-yi tāza or Fresh Style. Perhaps the most attentive observer of the emergence of this new style was the poet, critic, and literary biographer Awḥadī Balyānī. His account of Jāmī in his biographical compendium ʿArafāt al-ʿāshiqīn va ʿaṣarāt al-ʿārifīn (completed ca. 1024/1615) signals a further change in Jāmī’s reception among Safavid poets: He was the most learned of the learned (afḍal al-fuḍalā) of the age, the most scholarly of the scholars of the time. Few among the most utterly accomplished achieved the comprehensiveness of his knowledge … Among the class of the learned, he was distinguished by the ornament of poetry, and among the ranks of poets, he had no need for the gem of learning. A taste of the honey of transcendental truth reached the palate of his soul, and he drank down the goblet of gnosis in the assembly where they drink bitter poison … There is little unevenness in his poetry, especially in his mathnavīs. He composes in an utterly flowing and easy style (bi-ghāyat ravān va salīs). Although he seldom strives for fresh figures of thought (maʿānī-yi tāza), that which he expresses, he expresses as it must and should be.23 22  See Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:397 and Muḥtasham, Haft dīvān, 2:487‒88 and 2:1188‒89. 23  Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad Awḥadī Balyānī, ʿArafāt al-ʿāshiqīn va ʿaṣarāt al-ʿārifīn, ed. Sayyid Muḥsin Nājī Naṣrābādī, 7 vols. (Tehran: Asāṭīr, 1388/2009), 2:939‒48.

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Awḥadī’s praise of Jāmī is lavish, but discriminating. Awḥadī foregrounds Jāmī’s learning and accomplishments as a scholar. He distinguishes clearly between the fields of scholarship and poetry, defending Jāmī’s literary stature in a somewhat backhanded way. He praises Jāmī for his flowing, plain style, but the qualification that follows, that Jāmī “seldom strives for fresh figures of thought,” articulates a fundamental divergence between Jāmī’s literary legacy and the poetics of the new age. Throughout his voluminous work, Awḥadī consistently propounds the literary value of the Fresh (tāza), and in closing his opening evaluation of Jāmī on this note, Awḥadī implies that Jāmī is an eminently competent and safe poet, but one with little to offer current modernist poets. Even Awḥadī’s selection of verses seems somewhat ambivalent. After singling out Jāmī’s mathnavīs for particular notice in his opening evaluation, he cites verses only from Jāmī’s ghazals, the genre in which the shīva-yi tāza found its fullest expression, and the notice ends with the comment that Jāmī’s mathnavīs are so famous that there is no need to write them down. Despite his praises, when Awḥadī comes to write the history of the poetry of his own era, Jāmī is marginalized and implicitly cast in a negative role. For Awḥadī, the source of the current poetic style is Jāmī’s contemporary from western Iran, Bābā Fighānī of Shiraz (d. 925/1519): Without doubt, [Fighānī] is the master of the firm, fresh style [ṣāḥib-i ravish-i tāza-yi matīn] in poetry, sure, perfect, and genuine. Most of the modern poets have followed his manner of composing verses and style and have often imitated his divan.24 In his biography of Fighānī, Awḥadī includes an anecdote (probably apocryphal) about the young poet’s visit to Herat and the ridicule he suffered from the literary establishment there. Although Jāmī is not mentioned by name, he was the unquestioned master of the leading poetic circle of the time, and the anecdote implicitly sets Jāmī’s conservatism in opposition to the progressive poetic represented by Fighānī and the Safavid poets that followed him. How accurately does Awḥadī’s assessment of Jāmī’s reception reflect the attitudes and practices of his literary contemporaries? This question raises an interesting evidentiary problem for the literary historian. When writers explicitly acknowledge the influence of a particular predecessor, we can take them at their word, though it may be difficult to ascertain in precisely which ways later writers interpreted and responded to that influence. There are also cases when the influence of a particular writer is so pervasive that it goes unspoken. 24  Awḥadī, ʿArafāt, 5:2883. See also Losensky, Welcoming, 34‒40.

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But how exactly can we demonstrate a lack of influence? Arguing from silence should make the responsible historian wary. To attempt an answer, we can turn to the acknowledged master of the Fresh Style, Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (d. 1087/1676). In his voluminous works, Ṣāʾib makes frequent reference to his literary predecessors and in this way should help us to judge the position of Jāmī in the literary canon as the poets of the seventeenth century understood it. A logical starting point is Ṣāʾib’s comprehensive anthology of Persian poetry, known variously as the Safīna or Bayāḍ-i Ṣāʾib.25 This massive anthology contains about 17,000 verses from the works of some 750 poets. Over half of these poets (420 in the Hyderabad manuscript of the work) are represented by fewer than five verses. For the remaining 330, Ṣāʾib includes anywhere from five to over one thousand verses. Three poets are singled out for particularly in-depth treatment; Ṣāʾib selects over a thousand verses each from the works of Sanāʾī, Amīr Khusraw, and Rūmī, constituting fully a fifth of the anthology. By privileging these three poets, Ṣāʾib in effect creates his own predecessors, clearly marking three of his most prominent influences.26 The mathematics of influence, so to speak, must be calculated differently in the case of another poet whom we know that Ṣāʾib read closely and whose presence is felt frequently in Ṣāʾib’s work. Not a single verse by Ḥāfiẓ is included in the anthology, and here Ṣāʾib seems to be following the logic that we saw at the end of Awḥadī’s account of Jāmī: Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals are so famous that there is no need to write them down. What is Jāmī’s position in Ṣāʾib’s Bayāḍ? He is situated among other poets from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and is represented by twenty-eight verses. We can compare this number to the selections immediately preceding and following Jāmī: Bābūr (d. 937/1530), the founder of the Mughal dynasty and sometime poet, is represented by eight verses, and Jaʿfar Āṣaf Khān Qazvīnī (or Tabrīzī, d. 1021/1612–3), an administrator at the court of Tahmāsp and later Akbar and Jahāngīr who wrote poetry in the style of the maktab-i vuqūʿ, follows Jāmī with thirty-three verses. These numbers alone suggest that Ṣāʾib regarded Jāmī as a poet of middling significance, important enough to represent in the anthology, but not enough to give special treatment. Ṣāʾib’s selections, 25  I have access to two manuscripts of Ṣāʾib’s anthology. I rely primarily on the unpublished manuscript housed in Hyderabad: “Muntakhab-i ashʿār-i mutaqaddamīn [Bayāḍ-i Ṣāʾib],” MS 344, Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, Hyderabad, India. The selections from Jāmī are on fol. 104b. I have compared this to a manuscript kept at the University of Isfahan Library and published in facsimile reproduction as Safīna-yi Ṣāʾib, ed. Sayyid Ṣādiq Ḥusaynī-Ishkavarī (Isfahan: University of Isfahan Press, 2006). The selections from Jāmī are identical to the Hyderabad manuscript and are found on p. 292. 26  I have discussed this anthology in two recent meetings of the International Society of Iranian Studies in papers that are currently being prepared for publication.

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moreover, cover only a small portion of Jāmī’s poetic corpus. Twenty-five of the twenty-eight verses are chosen from Jāmī’s ghazals; the remaining three come from Jāmī’s famous homiletic qaṣīda written in imitation of Amīr Khusraw.27 As in Awḥadī, no verses are quoted from Jāmī’s extensive collection of narrative mathnavīs. In part, this exclusion can be attributed to the fact that the ghazal was the foremost genre of the Fresh Style, and Ṣāʾib himself wrote almost exclusively in this genre. On the other hand, Ṣāʾib does quote extensively from the mathnavīs of other poets such as Rūmī and Sanāʾī. Ṣāʾib’s complete neglect of Jāmī’s mathnavīs seems to be less a matter of genre selectivity than a reflection to his indifference toward Jāmī’s work generally. Though we cannot be certain of the criteria that guided Ṣāʾib in making his selections, the small number of verses suggests that his goal was not to provide a representative sampling of Jāmī’s vast poetic output for its own sake, but rather to bring forward those verses that were most concordant with his own poetics. For one of his selections, Ṣāʾib chooses the fourth verse from one of Jāmī’s ghazals: gar bi-khūn ghalṭam chi bāk ū-rā ki ṭifl-i khurd sāl raqṣ dānad iḍṭirāb-i murgh-i bismil karda-rā If I wallow in blood, what does she care? A young child thinks the flurry of a headless chicken is a dance.28 Though the murgh-i bismil is a conventional image for the suffering of the tormented and unfulfilled lover, it takes on a particularly grotesque vividness here. The cliché of the sacrificed fowl is brought back to life through the eyes of the child who perceives its death spasms as a joyous dance. It is precisely the shocking graphicness of the verse that makes it unusual for Jāmī, and attractive to Ṣāʾib, with his aesthetics of the new and startling. We can compare this verse to the one that immediately precedes this one in Jāmī’s poem: jān bi-lab āvardīyam lab bar labam nih yak nafas tā bi-tu bispāram īn jān-i bi-lab āvarda-rā You’ve brought my soul to my lips. Place your lip on mine one moment, so I can entrust you with this soul brought to the lips. 27  These twenty-five verses come from a total of twenty-one ghazals; Ṣāʾib quotes multiple verses from three ghazals. See Appendix B. 28  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:214; Ṣāʾib, “Muntakhab,” fol. 106a.

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“The soul at the lips” is a common idiom for the expiring breath of a dying person. Jāmī balances this phrase at either end of the line and links it to the meeting of lips in a kiss to express his undying devotion to his beloved. In both verses, the speaker is about to die of his love yearning, but one verse is all elegance and grace, and the other, morbidly vivid. It is the latter that Ṣāʾib singles out. But the appeal of the verse for Ṣāʾib goes beyond its shock value. Ṣāʾib had a fascination with the world of children unusual among Persian poets.29 Moreover, the child’s misapprehension of the bird’s death agony subtly raises the issue of how we perceive the world and draw meaning from it. While this aspect of the meaning of the verse is incidental to Jāmī, questions of perception and misperception are a recurrent theme in Ṣāʾib’s poetry. In his fullest quotation from any of Jāmī’s poems, Ṣāʾib quotes the opening three verses from a seven-verse ghazal: dar īn muqarnas-i zangārgūn-i mīnā-rang bar ābgīna-yi arbāb-i dānish āyad sang nahād-i charkh-i muqavvas kaj-ast hamchu kamān az ān nishasta bi-khāk-and rāstān chu khadang kasī ki gām dar īn baḥr mīnihad pay-i kām bi-kām mīrasad ākhar valī bi-kām-i nahang Under the rusted turquoise muqarnas of this archway, stones land on the mirrors of the wise. Like a bow, the vaulted heaven is crooked by nature, so the righteous lie in the dust like arrows. Anyone who steps (gām) in this sea seeking fulfillment (kām) will get fulfillment in the end by filling a crocodile’s maw (kām).30 These didactic verses on contempt for this world again say more about Ṣāʾib’s aesthetic sensibilities than Jāmī’s. Though Jāmī wrote extensively on themes like these, he did so mostly in his narrative poetry in rhymed couplets, not in his lyric ghazals, which are almost exclusively devoted to the theme of love 29  See Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī, “Yādī az Ṣāʾib 2,” Sukhan 24 (2535/1976):1163‒64; Hātam Zindī, Ḥikmat-i ʿāmmīyāna dar shiʿr-i Ṣāʾib (Tehran: Fartāb, 1386/2007), 43‒52. 30  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:542; Ṣāʾib, “Muntakhab,” fol. 106a.

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whether mundane or mystical. Many of Ṣāʾib’s most famous ghazals, on the other hand, use the genre for philosophical and ethical reflections. The imagery, too, belongs more to the world of Ṣāʾib than Jāmī. The implied setting for most of Jāmī’s ghazals is the garden and meadow, while Ṣāʾib’s poems often use images drawn from the built environment of the city.31 The muqarnas refers to the stalactite-shaped brackets that often fill the transition zones between the supporting walls and a curved archway or dome; the mixed color scheme of turquoise and rust describes pieces of blue tile set into a mud brick substrate. This sort of precise observation of the everyday world is again typical of Ṣāʾib’s poetry, and much less so of Jāmī’s.32 In general, the selections from Jāmī in Ṣāʾib’s anthology suggest that Jāmī was a poet of minor interest, whose work was worth quoting only to the extent that it reflected the later aesthetics of the Fresh Style. Another common way that Ṣāʾib openly acknowledges and implicitly assesses the work of his poetic predecessors is to mention them by name at the end of a response to one of their ghazals. He mentions dozens of poets in the course of his dīvān, many of them repeatedly. Out of Ṣāʾib’s 7,000 ghazals, Jāmī is mentioned just once. In this regard, there is again nothing to distinguish Jāmī from dozens of other poets whose names are today no more than footnotes in Persian literary history. As is common in Ṣāʾib’s work, this mention of Jāmī’s name comes at the end of a response poem in the takhalluṣ or signature verse. The ghazal that provides the meter and rhyme for Ṣāʾib’s poem is, as its opening words indicate, a poem of yearning and devotion: zi ārzū-yi tu sargashta dar biyābānīm bi-justjū-yi tu dar kūh u dar shitābānīm bimānd rāḥila-yi saʿī-yi mā khush ān sāʿat ki dar ḥarīm-i viṣālat shutur bikhwābānīm

31  See, for example, the use of architectural imagery in Ṣāʾib’s long ghazal with the radīf makhusb discussed in Paul Losensky, “To Revere, Revise, and Renew: Ṣā’ib of Tabriz Reads the Ghazals of Rūmī,” Mawlana Rumi Review 4 (2013): 43, or his treatment of the landscape of Isfahan in Paul Losensky, “ ‘The Equal of Heaven’s Vault’: The Design, Ceremony, and Poetry of the Ḥasanābād Bridge,” in Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times, eds. Beatrice Grundler and Louise Marlow (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004), 205‒7 and 210‒13. 32  More characteristic of Jāmī is the multiple pun on the word kām in the third verse, which means both “fulfillment” and “the mouth of a beast.” The pun even extends to the word gām, “footstep,” which was often spelled identically to kām in manuscript.

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chu dharra garchi ḥaqīrīm rukh matāb az mā ki bar sipihr-i vafā āftāb-i tābānīm ḥavāla-yi digarān sāz raṭlhā-yi girān ki mā zi sāghar-i laʿlat tunuk-sharābānīm bi-burj-i mā chu mah-i chārdah shudī ṭāliʿ zi qadr u manzilat imshab falak-junābānīm sharāb u nuql bi-arbāb-i bazm u ʿishrat dih ki mā bi-ātash-i ḥirmān jigar-kabābānīm ḥadīth-i rawḍa makun Jāmī īn na bas mārā ki dar savād-i Harī sākin-i khiyābānīm Yearning for you, we are lost in the desert. Searching for you, we are in the mountains and in a hurry. The beast of our burden will rest happy the moment when we bed down our camel in the sanctum of your union. Though we are as puny as dust motes, don’t turn away from us, for in the heaven of fidelity, we are the shining sun. Entrust the heavy flagons to others, for we get drunk on just a sip from the cup of your ruby lips. You rose up in our constellation like the midmonth moon. Through your power and position, we make the heavens move tonight. Give wine and treats to the lords of pleasure and the feast, for we roast our livers on the fire of privation. Don’t tell stories of paradise, Jāmī. Isn’t it enough for us to live on the streets in the suburbs of Herat?33 The apparent paradox in verse three captures the dominant theme and mood of the poem. Even as the speaker humbles himself as “puny as a dust mote” 33  Jāmī, Dīvān, 1:594‒95.

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before the beloved, he boasts of his shining fidelity and his single-minded devotion. Typical of the care and balance of Jāmī’s poetry, this ghazal develops three image complexes. The first two verses imagine the speaker’s longing in terms of the desert quest, a topos that goes back to the earliest form of Islamicate poetry, the Arabic qaṣīda. In verses three and five, celestial imagery serves to symbolize the power that the speaker receives from his worshipful dedication to his beloved. This empowerment is earned by the speaker’s rejection of social pleasure, as he turns his back on the banquet and the cup in verses four and six. These image complexes are melded together in the final signature verse. The fertile soils of savād-i Harī (“the suburbs of Herat”) replace not only the desert of the speaker’s quest, but also heavenly paradise as the poet lives on the streets ostracized from social contact. As Awḥadī would point out, none of these images are particularly fresh, but they are elegantly deployed and utterly fluent. Ṣāʾib’s response explores the same apparent paradox found in Jāmī’s poem; indeed, the tension between self-abasement and spiritual dominion shapes the very structure of the following ghazal as the verses oscillate between these two poles in a dialogical fashion: ʿinān-gusasta-tar az sayl dar biyānbānīm bi-har ṭaraf ki qaḍā mīkashad shitābānīm namīshavad ki dar āghūsh-i mā nayāyī tang tu shabnam-i gul u mā āftāb-i tābānīm naẓar bi-ʿālam-i bālā-st mā ḍaʿīfān-rā nahāl-i bādiya u sabza-yi biyābānīm bi-kū-yi ʿishq zi naqsh-i qadam fitāda-tarīm u garna dar gudhar-i khud falak-khiyābānīm zi bargrīz-i khazān pā-yi mā namīlaghzad ki dar thibāt-i qadam sarv-i īn biyābānīm az ān zi mā hama ʿālam ḥisāb mīgīrand ki dar qalamruv-i inṣāf khud-ḥisābānīm tu dar ḥarīm-i suvaydā u mā siyah-kārān chu girdbād sarāsar-ruv-i biyābānīm

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bi-har maqām ki jamʿiyyat-ast raḥmat nīst az ān chu sayl bi-baḥr-i ʿadam shitābānīm javāb-i ān ghazal-i Jāmī ast īn Ṣāʾib ki mā zi sāghar-i ghaflat tunuk-sharābānīm In the desert, our reins are slacker than a flash flood. We hurry in any direction fate pulls us. It’s impossible you won’t come close into our embrace. You are the dew on the rose, and we are the shining sun. We weaklings look to the world on high. We are seedlings in the wilderness and grass in the desert. We are sunk lower than footprints in the byway of love, or else in our passage, we are celestial boulevards. We do not slip on the falling leaves of autumn. With firmly planted steps, we are the cypresses along this avenue. The whole world takes reckoning by us, for we reckon with ourselves in the realm of justice. You are in the sanctum of the heart, while with our dark deeds we wander the desert end to end like a whirlwind. Like a flash flood, we rush to the sea of oblivion, for wherever composure is, there is no compassion. This is a response, Ṣāʾib, to that ghazal by Jāmī: “for we get drunk on just a sip from the cup of carelessness.”34 Ṣāʾib closely adheres to his model’s inventory of rhyme words; it opens with the same two rhymes, introduces only one new rhyme (khud-ḥisāb), and uses

34  Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī, Dīvān, ed. Muḥammad Qahramān, 6 vols. (Tehran: ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 1364– 70/1985–91), 5: 2796‒97.

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three of the rhymes more than once.35 Despite the thematic and formal similarities between model and response, however, we can start to measure the distance between them by looking at the final verse of the Ṣāʾib’s ghazal. As he often does in the signature verses of his response poems, Ṣāʾib identifies his model by naming its author and quoting one of its verses. But there’s an obvious problem in this case: Ṣāʾib cites the fourth verse of Jāmī’s poem, but replaces sāghar-i laʿlat (“the cup of your ruby lips”) with sāghar-i ghaflat (“the cup of carelessness”). There do not appear to be manuscript variants of either poem to rectify this discrepancy. Is the difference intentional on Ṣāʾib’s part or a slip in recalling Jāmī’s verse? It is impossible to say for certain, but whatever the source of the discrepancy, it marks a significant shift in poetic standards. Jāmī’s phrase is a highly conventional visual simile, likening red lips to a glass of red wine. Ṣāʾib, however, links concrete and abstract nouns on a metaphorical rather than visual basis: the cup is the source of negligence in a relationship of cause and effect. This quotation with a difference is a minor example of the emphasis on dianoia, poetic thought or thinking through images, that characterizes not only Ṣāʾib’s poetry, but the aesthetics of the Fresh Style generally.36 Ghaflat, “carelessness or negligence,” also indicates the direction of Ṣāʾib’s thematic reconceptualization of Jāmī’s poem. In Jāmī’s devotional appeal, the metamorphosis of self-abasement into empowerment is represented as a natural, celestial process (verses three and five). Ṣāʾib’s response problematizes this process. This ironic rewriting is most apparent in Ṣāʾib’s treatment of the images of the desert quest. In Jāmī, this image disappears after the first two verses and is resolved in the closing reference to the civilized realm of Herat. In Ṣāʾib, on the other hand, the desert journey weaves through the poem in verses one, three, seven, and eight, and the speaker never arrives at any destination. While Jāmī’s journey is guided by the yearning for the beloved, the speaker in Ṣāʾib’s poem is instead pulled by fate (verse one) and runs headlong like a whirlwind or flash flood (verses seven and eight). This wayfarer is fully aware of the existential and ethical dangers of life in this world, represented most distinctly in the siyah-kār, “dark deeds” of verse seven, and his uncertain progress toward devotion and spiritual development is constantly threatened by ghaflat. The apparent confidence of the speaker is constantly undercut. Ṣāʾib’s second verse 35  Considered a flaw in earlier stages of the Persian tradition, the repetition of rhymes was common practice in the seventeenth century. 36  The term dianoia comes from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 52. Frye identifies the fusion of concrete and abstract words as particularly characteristic of the lyric mode and associates it especially with the conceit of European baroque poetry, a contemporary movement to which Ṣāʾib’s Fresh Style is often compared.

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is a clear rewriting of Jāmī’s third; in both lines, the speaker calls himself “the shining sun” (āftāb-i tābān). Jāmī deferentially qualifies this image by placing the sun in “the heaven of fidelity” (sipihr-i vafā). Ṣāʾib offers no such qualification; he is the sun and the beloved is the dew, a striking reversal of the usual power hierarchy between lover and beloved in the ghazal tradition. Union between the two is boldly presented as the inevitable result of a process as natural as evaporation. But in the very next verse, another natural process serves to upset this sense of security. The speaker now casts himself as a “seedling in the wilderness and grass in the desert.” Rather than shining like the sun, the speaker struggles against the natural forces of aridity and, ironically, too much sun. Similarly, the three central verses of Ṣāʾib’s poem (four to six) project an impression of the lover’s power and confidence beyond anything in the model. Building on the repetition of the rhyme khiyābān (avenue, boulevard), Ṣāʾib strides down the streets of the empyrean and becomes the standard by which the created world judges itself. But in verse seven, the speaker seems to pull up short with the recognition that he is among the siyah-kārān, guilty of dark and evil deeds, and the close of the poem returns to the directionless, impetuous movement of the whirlwind and flash flood. These radical reversals of theme and tone create a poem strikingly different from its model. Ṣāʾib’s poem itself rushes like a churning flash flood from verse to verse, as the body of the poem begins and ends with the rhyme shitābānīm. There is a dialectical dynamism in the organization of the response that stands in sharp contrast to the carefully ordered sequence of imagery in the model. Moreover, Ṣāʾib’s response lacks the secure and steady confidence in the value of devotion to the beloved found in Jāmī. We seem to be in another age, where the sureties of the past are thrown into question and even disarray. As in the case of Muḥtasham, Ṣāʾib’s act of homage to Jāmī serves not to mark the debt that he owes to his predecessor, but rather his distance from him. 3 Conclusion Muḥtasham’s responses to Jāmī’s ghazals emerged from a period when the contention over Jāmī’s ideological and literary reputation was still fresh, and the sheer scale of this project suggests that the stakes in these negotiations were high. By the time that Ṣāʾib was writing a century later, these debates were largely settled. The sectarian dust had settled, and Jāmī’s reputation was paid its due respect. But, as Awḥadī’s account of Jāmī suggests, and Ṣāʾib’s treatment of Jāmī confirms, Jāmī’s reputation was secured at the cost of irrelevance. To return to the metaphor with which this paper opened, his tomb was fully

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restored, but seldom visited. In his systematic summary and deployment of the classical tradition, Jāmī had little to offer the poets of the Fresh Style with their aesthetics of the new and a worldview marked by a spirit of inquiry and doubt. The modern Afghan critic and literary historian Najīb Māyil-Haravī states the case with blunt finality: However, the indisputable poets of the Indian Style in the Safavid period, such as Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī, Kalīm Hamadānī, Fayyāḍ Lāhījī, Vāʿiẓ Qazvīnī, etc., in no way placed any value on Jāmī’s poetry. Why? Did their disregard for Jāmī’s poetry have a sectarian cause? Certainly not. In the opinion of this writer, the outstanding poets of the Indian Style in Persian were the most critically acute and, so to speak, the most poetically knowledgeable litterateurs of the later periods in the Persophone world. Their dīvāns indicate that they paid attention to those poets in the history of Persian poetry who had combined authenticity of thought with a measured, new, and well-honed style of language and had attained the essentially poetic in poetry. Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, Mawlavī, Ḥāfiẓ, and their like were reckoned to be the leading and revered poets by the Indian-style writers [hindīsukhanān]. This clearly indicates that the versifications [shiʿrvāra-hā] of Jāmī could not be regarded as a foundation for their “Fresh Style.”37 Māyil-Haravī’s use of the term shiʿrvāra, “versification or pseudo-poetry,” to describe Jāmī’s literary output is dismissive and probably represents a more extreme negative judgment than that of seventeenth-century poets and critics. Nevertheless, Jāmī’s literary achievement consisted of his ability to consolidate and codify many of the literary achievements of the classical period, and, as Ṣāʾib’s anthology shows, Safavid poets had direct access to the works of that classical past. Why read the work of a neo-classicist when one can read the classics themselves? Despite the respect paid to him for his prolific accomplishments, Jāmī seems to have little immediate influence (except negatively) on the lyric poetry of the Safavids. But a fairer assessment should recognize that without the consolidation of the literary tradition that Jāmī also represents, the experiments of the maktab-i vuqūʿ and the shīva-yi tāza would not have been possible. If we can no longer accept Jāmī as the khātam al-shuʿarā (seal of the poets), we must still work to

37  Najīb Māyil-Haravī, Jāmī (Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i naw, 1377/1998), 292‒93. The other poets mentioned in the first sentence are Ṣāʾib’s contemporaries.

Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh

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set his work in its proper place in the history of Persian poetry.38 It was the efforts of Timurid litterateurs, Jāmī foremost among them, which gave later poets direct access to the master poets of the distant past. Jāmī’s mapping of the literary tradition enabled later Persian poets to see the way forward and allowed that tradition to be extended beyond its conventional confines. Perhaps more importantly, Jāmī’s poetry was only a small part of his literary legacy. In focusing on Jāmī’s ghazals, Safavid critics and poets tended to neglect Jāmī’s narrative poetry (as in Awḥadī’s lip service), and it is this part of his oeuvre that had the greatest effect beyond the Persian tradition and in the emerging vernacular languages. Finally, as the papers in this volume amply document, poetry was only a small part of Jāmī’s intellectual, cultural, and pedagogical activities, and perhaps one that he himself did not hold in particularly high esteem. Bibliography Abrahams, Simin. “A Historiographical Study and Annotated Translation of Volume 2 of the Afḍal al-Tavārīkh by Faḍlī Khūzānī al-Iṣfāhānī.” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1999. Akbar, Sheila S. “Reading the Wound: Obsession, Ambivalence and Authenticity in the Ghazal of the Sixteenth-Century Maktab-e voquʿ.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2014. Algar, Hamid. Jami. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dickson, Martin S. “Sháh Tahmásb and the Uzbeks: The Duel for Khurásán with ‘Ubayd Khán, 930–946/1524–1540.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 1958. Faḍlī Khūzānī al-Iṣfāhānī. “Afḍal al-Tavārīkh.” MS Or. 4678. British Library, London, microfilm. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Dīvān-i Jāmī. 2 vols. Edited by Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999. Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Mathnavī-yi Haft Awrang. 2 vols. Edited by Jābilqā Dād-ʿAlīshāh, et al. Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999. Khānlarī, Parvīz Nātil. “Yādī az Ṣāʾib 2.” Sukhan 24 (2535/1976): 1163‒64. Kia, Chad. “Jāmi iii. And Persian Art.” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 14: 479‒82.

38  For a general assessment of Jāmī’s literary reception and the moniker khātam al-shuʿarā bestowed on him by nineteenth-century literary historians, see Paul Losensky, “Jāmi i. Life and Works,” Encyclopeadia Iranica, 14:473‒74.

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Losensky, Paul E. Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the SafavidMughal Ghazal. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998. Losensky, Paul E. “Moḥtašam Kāšāni.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. Online at: www. iranicaonline/articles/mohtasham-kashani. Losensky, Paul E. “Jāmi i. Life and Works.” Encyclopeadia Iranica, 14: 473‒74. Losensky, Paul E. “ ‘The Equal of Heaven’s Vault’: The Design, Ceremony, and Poetry of the Ḥasanābād Bridge.” In Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times, edited by Beatrice Grundler and Louise Marlow, 195‒216. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004. Losensky, Paul E. “Poetics and Eros in Early Modern Persia: The Lovers’ Confection and The Glorious Epistle by Muhtasham Kāshānī.” Iranian Studies 42 (2009): 745‒64. Losensky, Paul E. “To Revere, Revise, and Renew: Ṣā’ib of Tabriz Reads the Ghazals of Rūmī.” Mawlana Rumi Review 4 (2013): 10‒49. Maḥmūd ibn Hidāyat-Allāh Ashūfta‌ʾī Naṭanzī. Naqāvat al-āthār fī dhikr al-akhyār. Edited by Iḥsān Ashrāfī. Tehran: Bungāh-i tarjuma va nashr-i kitāb, 1350/1971. Mitchell, Colin P. The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Najīb Māyil-Haravī. Jāmī. Tehran: Ṭarḥ-i naw, 1377/1998. Qāḍī Aḥmad Ghaffārī. Tārīkh-i Nigāristān. Edited by Murtaḍā Mudarris Gīlānī. Tehran: Ḥāfiẓ, 1404/1984. Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī. “Muntakhab-i ashʿār-i mutaqaddamīn [Bayāḍ-i Ṣāʾib].” MS 344. Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, Hyderabad. Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī. Dīvān. Edited by Muḥammad Qahramān. 6 vols. Tehran: ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 1364–70/1985–91. Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī. Safīna-yi Ṣāʾib. Edited by Sayyid Ṣādiq Ḥusaynī-Ishkavarī. Isfahan: University of Isfahan Press, 2006. Sām Mīrzā. Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī. Edited by Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūn Farrukh. Tehran: Asāṭīr, 1384/2005. Seybold, John. “The Earliest Demon Lover: The Ṭayf al-Khayāl in al-Mufaḍḍalīyāt.” In Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry, edited by Suzanne P. Stetkevych, 180–89. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī: Majmūʿa-yi asnād va makātib-i tārīkhī hamrāh bā yāddāshthā-yi tafṣīlī. Edited by ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī. Tehran: Arghavān, 1368/1989. Simpson, Marianna Shreve. Persian Poetry, Painting and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Manuscript. Washington, D.C. and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Stanfield-Johnson, Rosemary. “The Tabarra’iyan and the Early Safavids.” Iranian Studies 37 (2004): 41–71. Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad Awḥadī Balyānī. ʿArafāt al-ʿāshiqīn va ʿaṣarāt al-ʿārifīn. 7 vols. Edited by Sayyid Muḥsin Nājī Naṣrābādī. Tehran: Asāṭīr, 1388/2009.

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Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Vāṣifī. Badāyiʿ al-vaqāyiʿ. 2 vols. Edited by A.N. Boldyrev. Tehran: Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1972. Zindī, Hātam. Ḥikmat-i ʿāmmīyāna dar shiʿr-i Ṣāʾib. Tehran: Fartāb, 1386/2007.



Appendix A: Muḥtasham’s Replies to Jāmī

The following table lists the responses to Jāmī’s ghazals by Muḥtasham. The left-hand column gives the location of Jāmī’s ghazal in Afṣaḥzād’s edition of the dīvān. The middle column identifies Muḥtasham’s response according to the pagination of the Navāyī-Ṣadrī edition of Muḥtasham’s Haft Dīvān. In the final column, I have given the rhyme syllable and radīf of the common ṭarḥ of the pair of poems; in each case, the meter of the two poems is identical. Where I have some doubts whether Muḥtasham’s poem is a direct response to Jāmī or not, I have marked the number of Muḥtasham’s poem with an asterisk.

Jāmī

Muḥtasham

Rhyme scheme

2:143 1:271–2 1:326–7 1:315 1:298 1:321 1:326–7 1:348–9 1:429 1:459 2:570–1 2:182–3 1:450–1 1:453–4 ditto 1:397 ditto 1:414 1:375 1:445 1:394–5

2:896 2:889–90 2:1152 2:910 1:727–8 2:885 2:919 2:1159 pp. 68–9a 2:942–3 2:1194–5 ditto 2:948–9 2:929 2:1164–5* 2:1187–8 2:1188–9 2:1199–1200 2:1181–2 2:1161 2:960

-ar zada-ast -īz ast -ūsh girift -akī nīst -āna chīst -āb andākht -āhī rāst gāhī kaj -īḥ -ūy namānad -ān furū rīzad -āla mīravadb ditto -ūn basta-and -ā dārad ditto -īdan chi būd ditto -āb kashīd -ān kunad -am mabād -ār būd

598

Losensky

(cont.) Jāmī

Muḥtasham

Rhyme scheme

1:389–90 1:391–2 ditto 1:446–7 1:460–1 1:387–8 ditto 1:449 2:530 1:454–5 1:417 1:406 1:373–4 1:486–7 2:585–6 2:243 1:511 1:530–1 1:532 2:260 1:609 1:570–1 ditto 1:615 1:635–6 ditto 1:596–7 1:626–7 1:593 1:617–8 1:682–3 1:681–2 1:678 1:678–9 1:693–4 1:676–7

2:970–1 2:975–6 2:976 2:1166–7 2:939–40 2:971 2:972 2:943–4 2:925–6 2:957–8 2:978–9 2:1173 2:937–8 2:1208 2:1212–3 2:1002–3* 2:1219 2:1018–9 2:1017 2:1018 2:1031–2 2:1036* 2:1035–6* 2:1037 2:1041 2:1042 1:769 2:1040–1 2:1047–8 2:1245–6 2:1066–7 2:1065–6 2:1059 2:1059–60 2:1052 2:1056

-ān burūn āyad -ān dīr mīyāyad ditto -am gudharad -an mīparvarad -īn āyad ditto -arī rasad -ār dād -anat bīnad -ād nagushāyad -ān khwāhad shud -āhī ham nakard -ar hanūz -ān ki mapursc -ahashd -ā-yi khwīsh -ān-i ʿishq -ān mushtāq -ān-i ʿāshiq -āb mīdīdam -āram -āram -an mīram -ā mīravam -ā mīravam -āhī nishasta-am -āk mībīnam -ākhtīm -ān-i khwud kasham -ārān bīsh az īn -ā-rā bīsh az īn -ū makun -ūʾī makun -āl angīkhtan -and kun

599

Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh (cont.) Jāmī

Muḥtasham

Rhyme scheme

1:685–6 1:690–1 1:695 1:697–8 1:670–1 1:723 1:767 2:363–4

2:1067 2:1064–5 2:1057–8 2:1050–1 2:1275 2:1289 2:1297* 2:1095

-ā-yi khwīsh bīn -ār āmad burūn -ah bishkan -am hamchunān -il-i man -īn furū -āda‌ʾī -ūdagī

a  This poem is found in Muḥtasham Kāshānī, Dīvān, ed. Akbar Bihdārvand (Tehran: Nigāh, 1379/2000). b  The poems using this rhyme all follow the formal schema (ṭarḥ) of a ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ: Ḥāfiz, Dīvān, ed. Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī, 2 vols. (Tehran: Khwārazmī, 1359/1980), 1:452. c  Both poems follow the ṭarḥ of Ḥāfiẓ, Dīvān, 1:548. d  Both poems follow the ṭarḥ of Ḥāfiẓ, Dīvān, 1:584.



Appendix B: Jāmī in Ṣāʾib’s Bayāḍ

Transliterated below are the twenty-eight verses by Jāmī excerpted and included in Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī, “Muntakhab-i ashʿār-i mutaqaddamīn [Bayāḍ-i Ṣāʾib],” MS 344, Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, Hyderabad, India, fol. 115b–116a. Following each verse is a reference to its location in: Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān Afṣaḥzād, 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrāth-i maktūb, 1378/1999). The reference to the volume and page number in this edition is followed by the number of the ghazal (gh.) or qaṣīda (q.) and the position of the verse in the poem. Where the text in the Dīvān differs significantly from the text in the Bayāḍ, I have given the variant in brackets. 1 ānki az ḥalqa-yi dar [zar] gūsh-i girān ast ū-rā chi gham az nāla-yi khūnīn-jigarān ast ū-rā (1:277/gh. 61, v. 1) 2 bar mah ān rūz turunj-i dhaqanash mīcharbīd  [az bih ān rūz bicharbīd turunj-i dhaqanash] ki bi-bāzīcha zi nāranj tarāzū mīsākht  [ki bi-bāzīcha zi nāranj tarāzū mīkard] (2:209/gh. 214, v. 2)

600

Losensky

3 gar bi-khūn ghalṭam chi bāk ū-rā ki ṭifl-i khurd sāl raqṣ dānad iḍṭirāb-i murgh-i bismil karda-rā (1:214/gh. 4, v. 4) 4 tu ḥūr-i jinnatī ammā zi chashm-i fattānat zi baski khāst balā ʿudhr khwāst Riḍvānat (1:258/gh. 113, v. 1) 5 shamshād-rā zi zulf-i tu kūtāh būd dast dastash burīda bād k-az īn chub shāna sākht (1:320/gh. 206, v. 2) 6 āhū-yi chashm-i tu dil-i shīrān-i dīn burd āhū ki dīd k-ū dil-i shīr īnchunīn [shīrān chunīn] burd 7 Jāmī khiyāl-i khāl-i tu ākhar [bā khud] bi-khāk burd chun mūr dāna yāft bi-zīr-i zamīn burd (1:434/gh. 382, v. 1 and 7) 8 bar man az jawr-i tu [khū-yi tu] har chand ki bīdād ravad chun rukh-i khūb-i tu bīnam hama az yād ravad (1:418/gh. 358, v. 1) 9 nāzanīn ṭabʿ-i tu-rā az gila chun ranjānam ānchi [harchi] kardī bigudhasht ānchi kunī ham gudharad (1:446/gh. 400, v. 2) 10 ay ki mīpursī zi rāh-i kaʿba-yi ʿishqash [ʿishqam] nishān z-ustukhwān-i kushtagān rāhī-st sar tā sar safīd (2:195/gh. 191, v. 6) 11 shawq-i tu shud [shud shawq-i tu] fuzūn zi tamāshā-yi sarv u gul bālā girift az īn khas u khāshāk ātasham (1:575/gh. 596, v. 2) 12 bas ki dard-i sar zi faryād u faghān-i khud kasham az dihan [dihān] chun nāla mīkhwāham zabān-i khud kasham (1:617/gh. 664, v. 1) 13 vaʿda-yi āmadan madih ghussa-yi hijr bas marā bar sar-i ān fuzūn makun miḥnat-i inṭiẓār ham (1:600/gh. 637, v. 2) 14 dar mawsim-i gul tawba zi may dīr napāyad yād ast marā īn sukhan az tajruba-kārān 15 az subḥa-shumārān maṭalab gawhar-i maqṣūd k-āmad ṣadaf-i ān kaf-i angūr-fishārān (1:653/gh. 717, v. 3 and 4) 16 ghayratam bar tu chunān ast ki gar dast dihad nagudhāram ki dar āyī bi-khiyāl-i digarān (1:688/gh. 769, v. 2)

Utterly Fluent, but Seldom Fresh

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17 āsūdagī bi-khwāb nadīd ānki tikya-gāh az gird-i bālish-i falak-i tīz-gard kard (1:367/gh. 281, v. 2) 18 dānī chirā nishāṭ jahān khanda āvarad yaʿni ki jā-yi khanda buvad dar jahān nishāṭ (1:519/gh. 510, v. 6) 19 shikār-pīsha du turk-and khufta chashmānat nihāda bar sar-i bālīn-i khud kamān har du (1:722/gh. 822, v. 5) 20 gū bimīr az dard-i tanhāyī raqīb pīsh-i tanhā-māndagān tanhā dar āy (1:816/gh. 976, v. 4) 21 dar īn muqarnas-i zangārgūn-i mīnā-rang bar ābgīna-yi arbāb-i dānish [himmat] āyad sang 22 nahād-i charkh-i muqavvas kaj-ast hamchu kamān az ān nishasta bi-khāk-and rāstān chu khadang 23 kasī ki gām dar īn baḥr mīnihad pay-i kām bi-kām mīrasad ākhir valī bi-kām-i nahang (1:542/gh. 546, vv. 1, 2, and 3) 24 nafʿ-i ʿāmma ʿāmma-rā awlá-st ārī dumm-i khar khush magasrānī-st ammā [līkan] kūn-i khar dar khwar ast (1:70, q. 7, v. 21) 25 bā ḥasūdān luṭf khush bāshad valī na-tvān bi-āb kushtan ān ātash ki andar sang u āhan [sang-i ātash] muḍmar ast (1:71, q. 7, v. 36) 26 zar bidih v-az fuḥsh-i awlād-uz-zanā-rā lab biband qufl-i zar na-shnīda-ī k-az bahr-i farj-i astar ast (1:69, q. 7, v. 15) 27 sar bar nadāram az khaṭ-i ḥukm-i tu chun qalam gar band-band-i man kunī az yakdigar judā (2:98/gh. 91, v. 2) 28 shahīd-i ʿishq-rā juz man kasī mātam namīdārad ki khwāhad mātam-i mā dāshtan rūzī ki mīmīram [man mīram] (1:615/gh. 660, v. 3)

chapter 17

Evaluating Jāmī’s Influence on Navā‌ʾī

The Case Studies of the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī and the Sadd-i iskandarī Marc Toutant The history of the evolution of intellectual life in medieval Central Asia is closely linked with the problem of the literary imitation process.1 Monuments of Chaghatay poetry emerged with imitations of Persian classical works.2 The most well-known writer, ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (844/1441–906/1501), is considered to be the greatest representative of Chaghatay Turkish literature which, thanks to him, reached its apogee in the second half of the fifteenth century at the court of the Timurid Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (r. 873/1469–911/1506) in Herat. Navāʾī became famous with his rewritings of Persian poetry.3 The success of his Chaghatay version of Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s Khamsa4 is certainly a good example of this process.5 Written roughly at the same time as Jāmī completed the last pieces of his Haft awrang (during the first part of the 1480s) and according to 1  Although this assumption is usually taken at face value, we still have an extremely vague picture of this imitation process. See in particular Ferenc Csirkés, “Aspects of Poetic Imitation in 15th–17th-Century Turkish Romances. The Case of the Gul u Navruz,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientarum Hung. 60/2 (2007): 195‒221. 2  See Vladimir Vassilich Bartol’d, “Čagatajskaja literature,” in Sočinenija, V (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostočnoj literatury, 1963–1977), 608; Fuat Köprülü, “Cağatay Edebiyatı,” Islam Ansiklopedisi (Ankara: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1944), 3:275‒323; Natham M. Mallaev, O‘zbek Adabiyoti Tarixi (Tashkent: O’zSSR, 1962), 141; János Eckmann, “Die tschaghataische Literatur,” in Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, II, eds. Jean Deny, Kaare Gronbech, Helmuth Scheel, Zeki Velidi Togan (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1964), 304‒402. 3  For a synthetic presentation of the poet and bibliographical indications about him, see Maria E. Subtelny, “Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 7:90‒93. For further inquiries see bibliographical works such as Aleksandr Semenov, Materialy k bibliograficheskomu ukazately pechatniikh proizvedeniy Alishera Navoi i literatury o nem (Tashkent: Gosizdat YzSSR, 1940); Agâh Sirri Levend, Ali Şir Nevaî, I cilt, Hayatı, sanatı ve kişiliği (Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu Basım Evi, 1965); for more recent overview see Marc Toutant, Un empire de mots. Pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī (Leuven: Peeters, 2016). 4  From 569/1173 until 599/1203, Niẓāmī wrote a cycle of five epic poems in the mathnavī form (extended verse narrative): Makhzan al-asrār (Treasury of Mysteries), Khusraw u Shīrīn (Khusraw and Shīrīn), Laylī u Majnūn (Laylī and Majnūn), Haft paykar (The Seven Portraits) and Iskandarnāma (The Alexander-book). 5  Navāʾī’s Khamsa is composed of Ḥayrat al-abrār (Confusion of the Righteous, 888/1483), Farhād u Shīrīn (Farhād and Shīrīn, 888/1483), Laylī u Majnūn (Laylī and Majnūn, 889/1484),

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_019

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the model provided by Niẓāmī,6 Navāʾī’s Khamsa is all the more interesting in that it shows signs of a direct influence from the work of his famous Persian contemporary. Sometimes the reader is even led to believe that Navāʾī had used Jāmī’s rewriting as his own model to imitate the Pentalogy of Niẓāmī. This fact is all the less surprising when looking at the two poets’ close relationship.7 The Chaghatay poet was initiated into the Naqshbandī order by Jāmī, probably in 881/1476 when they both met in Herat. From then on not only Navāʾī became Jāmī’s murīd (spiritual disciple), but they soon became close friends whose literary interests coincided. Throughout his life, Navāʾī remained loyal to his master, and strengthened their ties by a close intellectual collaboration. This closeness is clearly reflected in the Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn, a work written after Jāmī’s death and dedicated to his memory, in which Navāʾī stresses the importance of his master in his literary career. He writes, for instance, that Jāmī was the person who taught him how to read a number of Sufi writings.8 Sabʿa-yi sayyār (The Seven Travellers, 889/1484), and Sadd-i iskandarī (The Alexandrine Wall, 890/1485). 6  Jāmī’s Haft awrang (The Seven Thrones or The Constellation of the Great Bear) consists of seven mathnavī: Silsilat al-dhahab (The Chain of Gold, between 872/1468 and 877/1472), Tuḥfat al-aḥrār (Gift of the Free, 886/1481), Subḥat al-abrār (Rosary of the Pious, 887/1482), Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, 888/1483), Laylī u Majnūn (Laylī and Majnūn, 889/1484), Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī (The Alexandrine Book of Wisdom, 890/1485), and Salāmān va Absal (Salomon and Absal, 893/1488). In a section of the prologue of the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī, Jāmī explained that he wrote Tuḥfat al-aḥrār, Subḥat al-abrār, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā, Laylī va Majnūn, and Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī within the framework of the Kamsanavīsī (the tradition of writing Khamsa). These five pieces thus compose “Jāmī’s Quintet.” See ʿAbd alRaḥmān ibn Aḥmad Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, ed. Murtaḍa Mudarris-i Gīlānī (Tehran: Ahurā-Mahtāb, 1385/2006), 927‒28. For a discussion on that specific topic, see Evgeni Bertel’s, Roman ob Alexandre i ego glavnye versii na vostoke (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1948), 100‒2; Johann Cristof Bürgel, “Ğāmī’s Epic Poem on Alexander the Great: An Introduction,” in La Civiltà timuride come fenomeno internazionale, II, ed. Michele Bernardini (Roma: Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino, 1996), 417‒19. 7  For a selection of texts that show the importance of Jāmī’s figure in Navāʾī’s work, see Porso Shamsiev and Suyima G‘anieva, eds., Abdurahmon Jomiy va Alisher Navoiy (Tashkent: FAN, 1966); Mahmud Hasaniy, Jomiy va Navoiy (Tashkent: G’afur G’ulom nomidagi Adabiyot va San’at nashriyoti, 1989). As for studies, see Bertel’s chapter: “Abdurraxman Dzhami i ego druzhba c Navoi,” in Evgeni Bertel’s, Navoi. Opyt tvorčeskoi biografii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1948), 140‒58; Aftandil Erkinov, “La querelle sur l’ancien et le nouveau dans les formes littéraires traditionnelles: Remarques sur les positions de Jâmi et de Navâ`i,” Annali del`Istituto Universitario Orientale 59 (1999): 18–37; Ertuğrul Ökten, “Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat” (PhD diss., Chicago University, 2007), 199‒214; Hamid Algar, Jami (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 40‒61; and Alexandre Papas’s contribution in this volume. 8  See the most recent Uzbek edition in Cyrillic script: Xamsat al-mutahayyirin, in Alisher Navoiy. Mukammal Asarlar To‘plami, vol. 15, ed. Porso Shamsiev (Tashkent: FAN, 1999), 56.

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In many respects, this work undoubtedly shows the intellectual proximity between the two poets, but the importance of Jāmī is obvious in other writings of Navāʾī, especially his Khamsa. Right from the prologue of each mathnavī Navāʾī acknowledges the major role Jāmī played in his rewriting of the famous Quintet. Although the Chaghatay poet acknowledges his debt to all of his Persian predecessors in the introductions to his poems, he distinguishes his contemporary by devoting an entire eulogistic section to him, whereas panegyrics of Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (651−725/1253−1325) are to be found in the same unique section.9 This imbalance in favour of the Chaghatay poet’s master is already an indication of the prominence of Jāmī in the composition of this work, but there are many other signs that can also be found in the five Chaghatay mathnavīs. For instance, in Ḥayrat al-abrār, Navāʾī explains to his reader that it was the reading of Jāmī’s Tuḥfat al-aḥrār that prompted him to rewrite Niẓāmī’s Makhzan al-asrār.10 Likewise, other telling examples can be read in the Sadd-i iskandarī, where Navāʾī depicts himself in the company of Jāmī in several passages: either before the composition of this piece, when he needs the support of his master to accomplish this last endeavour, or just after its completion, when he brings his Khamsa to Jāmī to hear his opinion.11 A reading of Navāʾī’s five mathnavīs in the light of Jāmī’s works produces numerous reasons to think that a comparison between the two Pentalogies would be very fruitful.12 But despite concrete evidence of coherence between the two Khamsas, the study of their mutual relationships has to date encountered various problems, among which ideological biases are prevalent. Navāʾī was mostly studied in the Soviet empire, whose cultural policy tried to establish the Chaghatay poet as the emblematic writer of the new-born Republic 9  For Navāʾī’s Khamsa I use a manuscript copied in Herat in 1485. This copy comes from the University of Michigan (Special Collections Library, Isl., Ms. 450, 325 leaves of paper). In the MS 450 Michigan manuscript, the Sadd-i iskandarī begins on page 348 and ends at page 530. From now on I will refer to this copy as MS Michigan 450. For the eulogies of Jāmī, see MS Michigan 450, 18, 115, 266, 361, 542. Praises of Navāʾī are also found in Jāmī’s works: see for instance, Haft awrang, 1012‒13 (as regards Jāmī’s Khiradnāma, I use the text in M. Gilānī’s edition of Haft awrang, 912‒1013, to which I will refer by using Haft awrang). For the eulogies of Niẓāmī and Dihlavī, see MS Michigan 450, 17, 114, 264, 358, 540. 10  See MS Michigan 450, 19. In this excerpt, Navāʾī’s claim to Jāmī’s superiority over Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw is obvious: bashtïn ayaq guhar-i shahvār edi/qaysï guhar tuḥfat alaḥrār edi. nafʿ tapïp kim ki bolup mustafīd/mukhtaṣar ol ikkidin ammā mufīd. “It was a perfect royal pearl,/this pearl, which was The Gift of the Free [Tuḥfat al-aḥrār]. He benefits from it who takes interest in it,/it is shorter than the two others (Niẓāmī’s and Khusraw’s works) but of greater benefit.” 11  MS Michigan 450, 522‒23. 12  See Marc Toutant, Un empire de mots.

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of Uzbekistan; Soviet scholars therefore tended to isolate the so-called “old Uzbek poet” from any Persian influence.13 And even if the famous orientalist Evgeni Bertel opened the way for analyzing Jāmī and Navāʾī as a literary and cultural couple, he finally argued that it was Jāmī’s mathnavī which should be understood with reference to Navāʾī’s Pentalogy, and not the other way around.14 This attitude remains a basic trend in today’s Uzbekistan, whereas outside the Soviet World the question was approached even less, since Turcologists tended to focus on the Turkish elements of Navāʾī’s poetry, and Iranists appeared to be rarely concerned with Turkish emulators of Classical Persian poetry.15 In order to bring concrete elements of a response to the question of whether and to what extent Navāʾī’s Pentalogy is indebted to Jāmī’s work, I will investigate not only the case of the Sadd-i iskandarī (that is to say, Navāʾī’s rewriting of Niẓāmī’s famous Iskandarnāma and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī’s Ā ʾina-yi iskandarī), but also of Jāmī’s own version of the Alexander novel, the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī. In more than one respect, the comparison between the Sadd-i iskandarī and the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī is a highly interesting case of the reception of Jāmī’s work being indebted to both the temporal and cultural proximities of the two poets involved. 1

Grounds for a Meaningful Comparison between Navāʾī and Jāmī’s Mathnavi ̄s

Several elements support the view that a comparison between the Khiradnāma and the Sadd-i iskandarī are meaningful regarding the purpose of the present study. First, Nava‌ʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī is among the three mathnavīs for which we have a clear equivalence between Navāʾī’s and Jāmī’s texts. Whereas Navāʾī’s five mathnavīs are all modelled around Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī’s works,16 only three books of Jāmī’s Quintet can be clearly identified as being rewritings of Niẓāmī’s works: Tuḥfat al-aḥrār (886/1481) which is an imitation 13  See Marc Toutant, “Materialist Ideology Facing a Great Sufi Poet: The Case of ‘Alî Shîr Nawâ’î in Soviet Uzbekistan: From concealment to ‘Patrimonalisation’,” Orient, Reports of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 46 (2011): 29‒50. 14  See Bertel’s, Navoi. Opyt tvorčeskoi biografii, 159–219. 15  This fact has been recently recognised by various scholars who stated that, whereas poetic imitation was a universal phenomenon of Persico-Turkish literature, it remained still not entirely understood. See Riccardo Zipoli, The Technique of the Ǧawāb. Replies by Nawā’ī to Ḥāfiẓ and Ǧāmī (Venice: Cafoscarina, 1995), 5‒16. 16  Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī’s Khamsa is composed of Maṭlaʿ al-anvār (Rising of Lights), Shīrīn u Khusraw (Shīrīn and Khusraw), Laylī u Majnūn (Laylī and Majnūn), Hasht Bihisht (Eight Paradises), and Ā ʾina-yi iskandarī (The Alexandrine Mirror).

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of Niẓāmī’s Makhzan al-asrār and Dihlavī’s Maṭlaʿ al-anvār; Laylī va Majnūn which bears the name of its models (889/1484); and Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī (ca. 889/1484–890/1485) which is Jāmī’s own version of the Alexander Cycle.17 Since Jāmī’s Laylī va Majnūn seemed to have been written after Navāʾī’s own imitation of this famous romance,18 Jāmī’s direct influence on Navāʾī’s mathnavī poetry can only be appreciated through the comparative study of the Tuḥfat al-aḥrār and Ḥayrat al-abrār, and that of the Khiradnāma and the Sadd-i iskandarī.19 Moreover, we have textual evidence from Navāʾī himself, who claimed Jāmī’s Khiradnāma as the main influence for his imitation of the Alexander Romance, as quoted in this brief passage of the Muḥākamat al-lughatayn (completed around 905/1499):20 yānā chūn sadd-i sikandarī āsāsïn khāṭïrïm muhandisi salïb dur ḥaḍrat-i makhdūm khiradmandnāmasidin kūs-i iṣlāḥ u imdād chālïb dur Again when the engineer of my heart was building the foundations of The Alexandrine Wall, his majesty the lord [i.e. Jāmī] beat the drums of the amendment and the help coming from The Book of Wisdom. This is consistent with the fact that Jāmī’s presence is felt more strongly throughout the whole book than that of any other of Navāʾī’s predecessors.21 Finally, the date on which Jāmī and Navāʾī composed their work is roughly the same (around 890/1485). In an introductory section devoted to a praise of Jāmī, Navāʾī tells the reader that: bu damkim qïlïp khāmasïn durfishān sikandar ḥadīthin aytur nishān

17  The reasons why Jāmī refused to rewrite the two other books, Khusraw u Shīrīn and Haft paykar, are exposed in the Khiradnāma and Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (see Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, 590, 927‒28). 18  Erkinov, “La querelle sur l’ancien et le nouveau,” 28‒31. 19  A comparative study between the Khiradnāma and the Sadd-i iskandarī is roughly sketched in Yunus Azimov, “Abdurahmon Jomiy “Xiradnomai Iskandariy” Qiyosiy— Tipologik tahlili” (PhD diss., Samarqand Davlat Universiteti, 1996). 20  Navāʾī, Muḥakāmat al-lughatayn, ed. M. Yaʿqūb Vaḥidī (Kabul: Akādemī -yi ʿulūm, 1323/1905), 44. 21  See MS Michigan 450, 361‒62, 373, 522‒30.

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Now by running the pearls of his reed he [Jāmī] traces the movement of Alexander22 This means that Jāmī may have completed his work shortly before Navāʾī, who may have composed his version with Jāmī’s text in mind, since it is known from a passage of the Sadd-i iskandarī that they used to read their texts to each other when either of the two poets had completed it.23 The two imitations were composed in the same meter (mutaqārib) which Niẓāmī used to write his famous Iskandarnāma. Jāmī’s text is titled Khiradnāma (“The Book of Wisdom”) since the poet decided to imitate only the second book of Niẓāmī’s text which is sometimes called the Khiradnāma.24 If the first book of Niẓāmī’s text, the Sharafnāma, describes Alexander’s conquest of the world, the Iqbālnāma or Khiradnāma portrays Alexander as a great sage and prophet, who devoted his time to a spiritual conquest, surrounded by the greatest minds in the ancient world.25 When he was composing his work, Jāmī probably had eyes on both Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma and Amīr Khusraw’s Ā ʾina-yi iskandarī, even though he does not claim the latter’s work as a seminal influence.26 Jāmī’s text is structured according to a binary pattern: each part of Alexander’s narrative is followed by an inserted story or ḥikāyat. Whereas “Nizāmī’s narrative is straightforward, only occasionally does he allow himself to digress by inserting little stories that do not belong to Alexander’s biography (…) Ğāmī’s procedure is totally different. He superimposes, as it were, the structure of the 22  MS Michigan 450, 362. 23  Dates of composition of the Khiradnāma and the Sadd-i iskandarī are very close: towards the end of 1484 and the beginning of 1485; Afsakhzod states that Jāmī’s Khiradnāma was completed by December 1484; see A’loxon Afsaxzod, Lirika Ab dar-Rakhmana Dzhami, Problemy teksta i poetiki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, glavnaja redakcija vostočnoj literatury, 1988), 65; see also Erkinov, “La querelle sur l’ancien et le nouveau,” 28. 24  See François de Blois, Persian Literature. A Bio-bibliographical Survey, Begun by the Late C. A. Storey, (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1997), 3:585‒91. 25  However, as Peter T. Chelkowski pointed out, Alexander’s conquest in the Sharafnāma was already shaped by the idea of his future prophetic mission. “It was therefore, not for an empire that Alexander set out to conquer, but for the purpose of liberating oppressed people: assisting the Egyptians in their struggle against the Zangis; rescuing Queen Nūshabeh from the hands of the Russians; freeing the Persians people from the enslavement of Darius and the Zoroastrian priests; securing safe passages through bandit territories; guiding travellers on land and see; and assisting in constructing urban centers.” See Peter J. Chelkowski, Mirror of the invisible world: tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), 23. 26  For the study of Jāmī’s Khiradnāma, see Bertel’s, Roman ob Alexandre, 100‒15; Bürgel, “Ğāmī’s epic poem on Alexander the Great,” 415‒38; Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, “Jâmi, conseiller des Princes ou le Le Livre de la Sagesse Alexandrine,” Kâr-Nâmeh 5 (1999), 11‒31.

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didactic epic with its constant narrative illustrations (ḥikāyat) upon the life story (dāstān) of Alexander, which he reduces to a minimum.”27 Thus, the interest clearly shifts from the biography of the hero to the predominant Sufi themes, which are illustrated both by Alexander’s narrative and by the accompanying stories. This departure from the earlier versions of Alexander’s biography is justified in a section devoted to the Praise of the word, in which the subject of Alexander is explicitly justified by its link with sapiential concerns: bi-yak silk khwāham chū guhar kashīd khiradnāmahā k’az sikandar rasīd khiradnāma z’ān ikhtiyār-i man ast ki afsāna khwānī na kār-i man ast z’asrār-i ḥikmat sukhan rāndan-ast bih az qiṣṣahā-yi kuhan khwāndan-ast On a single necklace I will string like pearls the books of wisdom transmitted by Alexander. I want to write the Book of Wisdom, for to tell fairy-tales is not my job. To speak about the secrets of wisdom is better than to chant old tales.28 The mystical poet refused to rewrite the pagan stories such as those of Khusraw Parvīz and Bahrām Gūr, which he regarded as “fairy-tales.” With these words, Jāmī shows that he saw his rewriting of Alexander’s biography first and foremost as a means to highlight his ethical concerns and his Sufi conceptions. Navāʾī’s version, entitled The Alexandrine Wall, is a reminder of the Quranic episode relating the eschatological task entrusted to Dhū al-Qarnayn (a name referring to Alexander the Great in the Muslim tradition) to build the Wall against Gog and Magog.29 Navāʾī followed two of the major innovations 27  Bürgel, “Ğāmī’s epic poem on Alexander the Great,” 416. 28   Haft awrang, 928. 29  Quran 18:83–98. For the study of the Sadd-i iskandarī, see Bertel’s, Navoi. Opyt tvorčeskoi biografii, 211‒18; Bertel’s, Roman ob Alexandre, 121‒87; Aziz Qayumov, “Saddi iskandarida Iskandar xarakterining evolyutsyasi,” O‘zbek Tili va Adabiyoti 3 (1968): 52‒56; Aziz Qayumov, Saddi Iskandariy (Tashkent: G‘afur G‘ulom nomidagi badiiy adabiyot nashriyoti, 1975); Najmiddin Komilov, Xizr chashmasi (Tashkent: Ma’naviyat, 2005), 124‒92; Ermanno

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found in the Ā ʾina-yi iskandarī. First, as most poets would subsequently do after Dihlavī’s version, Navāʾī gathered Niẓāmī’s two books in one. Secondly, the whole dāstān is ruled by a series of thematic chapters, each devoted to an ethical theme and divided into four sections and not three (as was the case in Dihlavī’s work), thereby adhering to a more regular pattern than that of his Indian predecessor.30 This four-section pattern runs as follows: the first section of each thematic chapter is a discussion of the main theme of the chapter (andarz section). This theme is then illustrated by way of a short apologue (ḥikāyat section). A third section depicts a discussion between Alexander and Aristotle, his wise adviser, aiming at a better and a deeper understanding of the theme (ḥikmat section).31 Finally, the last section narrates an episode of Alexander’s life, which serves as a kind of empirical confirmation, so to speak, of the concept approached in the first section (dāstān section). Thus, the 72 bābs (sections) of the dāstān (from bāb XVI to bāb LXXXVIII) are divided into 18 thematic chapters, each of which is sub-divided into four sections. For an example, see the first four-section pattern presented in Table 17.1. Eighteen themes are then subsequently addressed, illustrated, explained in depth, and finally embodied by Alexander’s biography.32 In this way, more than 70 sections comprise the boxes of this vast table, which reveals how the poet’s approach tended towards systematization.33 Visintainer, L’Alessandro ‘turco’: alcune riflessioni in marginale al Sedd-i Iskenderî (La muraglia di Alessandro) di Alī Šīr Navā’ī,” Quaderni di studi indo-mediterranei 1 (2008): 209‒52. 30  For Amīr Khusraw’s mathnavī, see Bertel’s, Roman ob Alexandre, 77‒100. The structure of the Ā ʾina-yi iskandarī already showed that the conqueror’s biographies became more and more sapiential, and less and less epic, in so far as the narrative part tended to decrease its emphasis on the benefit of moral and ethical considerations. On this point see Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, “Les figures d’Alexandre dans la littérature persane: entre assimilation, moralisation et ironie,” in Épopées du monde. Pour un panorama (presque) général, ed. E. Feuillebois (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), 181‒202. 31  Reappearing regularly throughout the book, the figure of Aristotle gains even more significance in the Sadd-i iskandarī. Note that Alexander’s veneration for his teacher was already well expressed in Jāmī’s mathnavī; see for instance Alexander’s letter of wisdom (Haft awrang, 967). 32  Here is a list of the 18 thematic chapters: 1) aspiration/ideal (himmat); 2) justice (ʿadālat); 3) rivalry (mukhālafat); 4) respect owed to the ranks of people; 5) the virtues of winter; 6) eulogy of the journey; 7) the proper use of youth; 8) leniency (avf); 9) rectitude (tüzlük); 10) hospitality (mīhmānlïq); 11) eulogy of spring; 12) the beauty of the world; 13) separation (hajr) and union (viṣāl); 14) “travelling in the homeland” (safar dar vaṭan); 15) the “true” himmat; 16) the treachery (vafāsïzlïq) of the world; 17) acquiescence (riḍā) and compassion (hamdardlïq); 18) the importance of having a good adviser. 33  This division into four sections, which gives an important part to the theoretical presentation, does not impinge on the narration of the conqueror’s expeditions. The number of bayts of each episode of Alexander’s biography (dāstān) is always significantly higher

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Table 17.1 The four sections (bābs) of Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī

Ḥikmat section

Dāstān section

Illustrative Theoretical presentation with apologue moral exhortations

Question to Aristotle

Alexander’s biography

XVII XVIa General discussion Story of the about himmat (aim, beggar-kingc aspiration, ideal)b

XVIII Alexander asks Aristotle: “What is the best way to achieve one’s aim?”d

XIX Alexander succeeds his father to the thronee

Andarz section

Ḥikāyat section

a  I have numbered all the sections of the text in the same way it has been done in the Turkish and Uzbek critical editions of the Sadd-i iskandarī. b  M S Michigan 450, 376‒77. The heading (sarlawḥa) of the bāb begins like this: himmat humāʾïnïng baland parvāzlïghï taʿrīfida kim (…) (“about the depiction of the sublime flight of the Phœnix-like himmat […]”). c  M S Michigan 450, 377‒78. Note that this is the only hiḳāyat of the mathnavī in which Alexander appears. d  M S Michigan 450, 378‒79. e  M S Michigan 450, 379‒82.

As to the way in which Jāmī and Navāʾī partitioned Alexander’s life, it is worth noting that one of Jāmī’s version’s particularities is to devote only one third of his poem to the journey of the Macedonian conqueror. Thus, if we exclude the introductory section, more than two-thirds of the Khiradnāma are devoted to the formative years and death of Alexander.34 We will begin by focusing on these stages of Alexander’s life in order to examine how Jāmī’s version could have influenced Navāʾī’s rewriting. Only then can we turn our attention to the conquest.35

than the sum of the verses of the three sections that precede it. It seems that Navāʾī wanted to maintain a balance between the didactic sections and the narrative parts. In this regard, it is a significant departure from Jāmī’s approach. For Navāʾī’s comments on this departure, see MS Michigan 450, 365. 34  In this “formation period,” I include the content of the letters of wisdom, since these letters were written before Alexander set out to conquer the world. 35  For the structures of the two mathnavīs, see the two tables in the Appendices.

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Lessons to be Drawn from Alexander’s Formative Years and Death: a Reorganization of Jāmī’s Material

If we take a look at the sections devoted to Alexander’s education and accession to the throne, the first sign of a direct influence of Jāmī’s text in Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī is the repetition of an episode of Alexander’s life that Jāmī recounted very differently from Niẓāmī and Amīr Khusraw. While in the other mathnavīs, Alexander’s succession to kingship happened de facto after Philip’s death, Alexander’s crowning in the Khiradnāma is the result of a kind of plebiscite. In Jāmī’s version, after his father’s death Alexander refused to become the new king, considering himself equal to his people. Although he advised them to look for a better “shepherd,” people showed their discontent and induced him to sit on the throne.36 Navāʾī repeats this episode, keeping exactly the same structure, and expands it, as shown by the number of bayts (from 37 in Jāmī’s text to 135 in Navāʾī’s narration).37 In fact, the Chaghatay poet does more than just repeat some of Jāmī’s meaningful excerpts. The aforementioned episode, showing Alexander’s reluctance to the crown, is preceded in the Sadd-i iskandarī by an illustrative anecdote (ḥikāyat) which seems also to be taken directly from Jāmī’s text. Towards the end of the Khiradnāma, we read that Alexander heard of a prince living as a recluse. When he invited him to the court, the man appeared before the conqueror with a few bones in his hands, explaining that in this state, there was no difference between beggars and kings. Amazed by this lesson of all men’s equality after death, Alexander offered to make the beggar a king. The latter refused the offer with the argument that his rank was even higher than that. Yet he would accept on the condition that Alexander procure him an eternal life, an eternal youth, a joy that cannot be shaken by grief, and a fortune that cannot be marred by poverty; whereupon Alexander admitted that nobody could bestow these gifts except God.38 This is exactly the same story as that told in the Sadd-i iskandarī, with the same sequence of events and roughly the same number of bayts. The 36   Haft awrang, 938. 37  The expansion is also “qualitative” since the Chaghatay poet seems to go further than Jāmī while describing Alexander’s reluctance and people’s ensuing bewilderment: the heir’s refusal is even compared with “doomsday’s chaos” (qiyāmat); see MS Michigan 450, 380. 38   Haft awrang, 988‒89. This story of an old man who has busied himself for many years turning over the bones of the dead in order to discover whether a difference exits between the bones of noble and simple men is extensive in the Arabic tradition. See Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus. A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: from Pseudo-Callisthenes to Ṣūrī (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 42, 47, 87.

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main difference is that this story is a part of Alexander’s life narrative in the Khiradnāma, which concludes a narrative sequence composed of several chapters, all underpinned by the idea of renouncement and detachment from the vainglory of the world. In Jāmī’s mathnavī, Alexander’s various meetings with people such as the Brahmans,39 the pious inhabitants of the ideal town,40 the tailor who “had severed his heart with the scissors of abstinence,”41 are here to prepare the conqueror for his encounter with the beggar-king, which corresponds to a sort of spiritual climax. But the beggar-king’s final lesson to Alexander—that hierarchy between men only relies on their spiritual ideal (himmat is the word used in the text)—Navāʾī chose to place at the very beginning of his narrative (see Table 17.2 and Table 17.3). The reason for this textual transposition seems to lie in Navāʾī’s desire to give this episode a specific function. In the Sadd-i iskandarī, the beggar-king’s anecdote takes place in the second section of the first thematic chapter, whereas Alexander’s plebiscite is placed in the fourth section of this same chapter. According to the four-section pattern of the book, the encounter with the beggar is not so much an explanation of Alexander’s wise reluctance to accept the throne, but an illustration of the theme, which is approached in the first section of the chapter: the concept of himmat (aim, aspiration, ideal, referring here more to some kind of spiritual ideal).42 Himmat is a traditional notion of the Persian “Mirrors for Princes.” It is regarded as a virtue, which consists in “aiming from the highest point.”43 This explains the variety of translations from the Arabic term, which literally means “intention,” “aim,” or “plan.” Although this virtue was often deprived of a precise content, authors of Mirror for Princes made it a “cardinal virtue of the king in the sense that himmat gives a signification to all his acts.”44 Since Alexander the Great was regarded as the archetype of the hero who wanted to go beyond the limits that are imposed on men, a notion like himmat was rapidly associated with the figure of the conqueror.45 It is therefore appropriate that Navāʾī 39   Haft awrang, 980‒82. 40   Haft awrang, 984‒86. 41   Haft awrang, 985. 42  On himmat and the paradox of the king like a dervish, see Alexandre Papas, “Islamic Brotherhoods in Sixteenth Century Central Asia: the Dervish, the Sultan, and the Sufi Mirror for Princes,” in Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, eds. Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi and Stefania Pastoria (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 209‒31. 43  See Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, Moralia: les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1986), 406‒8. 44  Papas, “Islamic Brotherhoods,” 224. 45  See Anna Livia Beelaert, “Alexandre dans le discours sur les âges de la vie dans l’Iskandar-nāmā de Nizāmī,” in Alexandre le Grand dans les littératures occidentales

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Evaluating Jāmī ’ s Influence on Navā ʾ ī Table 17.2 Jāmī’s Khiradnāma (bāb XVII-La)

Dāstān

XVII Alexander succeeds his father to the throne

XLVI Alexander meets the XIX-XLV Brahmans

Ḥikāyat XVIII

XLVII

XLVIII Alexander meets the pious men of the ideal town

L Alexander meets the beggar-king

XLIX

a As I have done for Navāʾī’s text, I have numbered the various sections of Jāmī’s Khiradnāma on the basis of Gīlānī’s edition. Table 17.3 Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī (bāb XVI–XIX)

Andarz

Ḥikāyat

Ḥikmat

Dāstān

XVI himmat

XVII Story of the beggar-king

XVIII Alexander asks Aristotle: “What is the best way to achieve one’s aim?”

XIX Alexander succeeds his father to the throne

touches upon this virtue in the first thematic chapter, at the beginning of his book, in contrast to the way in which this notion was outlined in his Persian predecessors’ mathnavīs but not in such a clear and standardized manner. In the Sadd-i iskandarī, Alexander’s reluctance to accept the crown then becomes an illustration of the way a king who possesses a great himmat should react. Closely following Jāmī’s conception, and displaying it in a much clearer manner, Navāʾī aims to illustrate the importance of himmat for a king from a spiritual perspective, and as if he intended to make Jāmī’s telling even more explicit, the Chaghatay poet adds a few verses at the end of the apologue. In the Khiradnāma, when he admitted that nobody could bestow the beggar’s supplication except God, Jāmī wrote that the Macedonian king, amazed by the hermit’s speech, was unable to utter a single word:

et proche-orientales, Actes du colloque de Paris, 27–29 novembre 1997, Nanterre, eds. Laurence Harf-Lancner and Claire Kappler (Paris: Centre des Sciences et de la Littérature, Université Paris X-Nanterre, 1999), 250.

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sikandar chū ān nukta-rā gūsh kard zi chīzī ki mīguft khāmūsh kard Once Alexander had listened to this speech, he remained silent because of what he [the beggar] had said46 However, in Navāʾī’s text, Alexander (while also struck by the beggar’s speech) is not prevented from speaking. On the contrary, his astonishment soon gives way to an eloquence full of wisdom: ki bu dayr ara tapsang āgāhlïq sanga faqr berdi manga shāhlïq agarchi meni äylädi arjumand sanga berdi himmatni mendin baland Since you became aware in this tavern47 [God] gave you poverty and He gave me kingship; Even if He gave me a high rank, He gave you a higher [spiritual] ideal than me. And, even more explicitly, Navāʾī emphatically concludes: gadāʾī ki bolghay biyik himmati anga past erür shāhlïgh rifʿati For the beggar whose [spiritual] ideal is high, the height of kingship looks low.48 This apologue illustrates how a beggar could represent a model for a prince, looked at from the viewpoint of himmat (according to its spiritual meaning). In the subsequent section, Alexander asks Aristotle about the proper use of such a himmat.49 The philosopher answers that the prince has to neglect his own personal interests.50 Next comes the narration of the first episode of 46   Haft awrang, 989. 47  I.e. “the world.” 48  MS Michigan 450, 378. 49  MS Michigan 450, 378. 50  MS Michigan 450, 262.

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Alexander when he refuses to become the new king (see supra). As soon as he begins to rule, Alexander’s behaviour exemplifies the idea of an action inspired by a great himmat. Neglecting his own interests, just as Aristotle advised him to do, the new king devotes himself entirely to the well-being of his people, in particular by reducing taxes and cancelling tyrannical laws.51 Not only is Alexander a very pious monarch,52 but he is also the fairest king the world had ever known: ketür sāqīyā toldurup jām-i ʿadl ki körgüzdi iskandar ayyām-i ʿadl O cupbearer, fill and bring the goblet of justice! For Alexander has revealed the time of justice.53 Alexander’s unique sense of justice is the outcome of his spiritual ideal (himmat) and the way he put it into practice. The beggar-king’s lesson and Aristotle’s explanations clearly show this to the reader. Thus, at the beginning of his reign, Alexander is portrayed by Navāʾī as a king who is less interested by worldly power than by spiritual value. That is a king whose model is a dervish,54 but who cannot escape his destiny as a conqueror; a king who will aspire to power only in a non-power-seeking manner, in submission to God, which subsequently means in his position that he has an absolute devotion to justice. There is no doubt that, reorganized this way, Jāmī’s narrative and sapiential materials are expressed in a clearer and in a more didactic manner. Now, if we compare the chapter of the Khiradnāma devoted to Alexander’s death with those composed by Niẓāmī in his Iqbālnāma on the same subject, two things are evident in Jāmī’s work: firstly, the special emphasis put on the theme of the treachery of the world (bīvafāʾī-yi dunyā), and secondly, the importance attached to the solace given to Alexander’s mother as a way for the poet to introduce the concept of riḍā, the Sufi notion that indicates an elevated level of ability to discern the good in whatever condition God has seen fit to 51  See MS Michigan 450, 381. 52  Navāʾī tells the reader that on the first night of his enthronement, Alexander did not forget to wake in the middle of the night to perform his prayers. Thereafter he spent the rest of his time till the dawn imploring God’s mercy for his sins. See MS Michigan 450, 381. 53  MS Michigan, 450, 382. 54  In this regard, Alexander’s attitude is consistent with the very first bayt of the mathnavī. Portraying the real position of kings in front of God, Navāʾī opens the Sadd-i iskandarī with this couplet: khudāyā musallam khudālïq sanga/birav shah ki da’bi gadālïq sanga. “O God, to be God is your own prerogative./Each king is used to serve you like a beggar.” See MS Michigan 450, 348. For the motif of the king and the beggar couple in the Khiradnāma, see Plato’s letter (Haft awrang, 943).

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bestow upon the individual.55 These two notions also seem to be issues of particular concern for the author of the Sadd-i iskandarī, since they each become the themes that underpin the four sections of the last two chapters of the book. In Niẓāmī’s Iqbālnāma, when the great conqueror began to understand that he would die soon, he summoned enough strength to write a letter to his mother in which he begged her not to lament his passing. As winter set in, Alexander’s army carried his body to Alexandria for burial. He was placed in a coffin, and as he requested, one of his hands was extended from the closed coffin and filled with earth, as a symbol that this is all a man shall take from the world when he leaves it. Jāmī repeats this sequence of events but adds several sections in order to underpin the lessons he wants to impart to his reader. In the Khiradnāma, ten wise men standing around the bier comment upon Alexander’s death, highlighting the fragility and transience of power and fortune, and of life in general.56 “In this world, there is no hope,” writes Jāmī,57 whereas he makes the third sage say: “The world did not have a king like him [Alexander]/but he [Alexander] did not enjoy an eternal felicity.”58 In addition, at the end of the book, a section is specifically devoted to the motif of the treachery of the world (bīvafāʾī-yi dunyā).59 In this section, Jāmī enumerates the most famous prophets from Ādam to Muḥammad, as well as the kings, and alludes to the death of each one of them. As for Alexander’s mother’s consolation, Jāmī adds a couple of sections, which do not exist in Niẓāmī’s work, in order to expand the theme of riḍā. When Alexander’s coffin is transferred to Alexandria, five sages console his mother and she praises their wisdom and thanks them.60 Besides these five speeches, the following chapter introduces a letter written by Aristotle, in which the philosopher addresses condolences to Alexander’s mother.61 The next chapter is her response.62 This exchange shows that despite a terrible pain, his mother respects his wishes and agrees to God’s will (riḍā). As regards the treachery of the world, it is the same kind of reorganization we have just observed at work in the Sadd-i iskandarī, for it also seems to be 55  In the Maḥbūb al-qulūb (written around 906/1500), Navāʾī defines the concept of riḍā as the submission to God’s will no matter what; see Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlari, vol. 14, ed. Suyima G‘anieva (Tashkent: Fan, 1998), 63‒65. 56   Haft awrang, 998‒1002. 57   Haft awrang, 999. 58   Haft awrang, 1000. 59   Haft awrang, 1009‒11. 60   Haft awrang, 1002‒6. 61   Haft awrang, 1006‒8. 62   Haft awrang, 1008‒9.

617

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based on Navāʾī’s desire to propose a clearer link between Alexander’s story and the various concepts approached by Jāmī in his mathnavī. In this case, the idea stressed is that no one, not even the greatest king on earth, is protected from the world’s treachery. Thus, instead of spreading this idea throughout the last few chapters of his book as Jāmī did, Navāʾī gathered all of Jāmī’s material devoted to this theme in the four-section chapter dedicated to the explanation of this conception. Table 17.4 Khiradnāma (XLIII–LX)

XLIII Letter of Aristotle

XLIV The tyrant

LXV– LII

LVII LIV LVI LIIIa Five sages Alexander’s Testament Death of Alexander console farewell Alexander’s letter to his mother mother LV

LVIII– LX

LXI About the treachery of the world

a  Some boxes of the second row do not contain a section number, which simply means that there is not ḥikāyat to illustrate the corresponding narrative chapter. Table 17.5 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXXVII–LXXX)

Andarz LXXVII About the treachery of the worlda

Ḥikāyat LXXVIII Story about the wise Luqmān who had renounced the worldb

a  M S Michigan 450, 507‒8. b  M S Michigan 450, 508‒9. c  M S Michigan 450, 509. d  M S Michigan 450, 509‒13.

Ḥikmat LXXIX Luqmān’s wisdomc

Dāstān LXXX – Testament of Alexander – Farewell letter to his mother – Death of Alexanderd

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In the first section of this thematic chapter, Navāʾī begins his presentation of the treachery of the world as follows: jahāngha chū yoqtur baqā ey köngül ṭamaʿ qïlma andïn vafā ey köngül Since nothing lasts forever in this world, O my heart, do not covet fidelity from him, O my heart!63 Here the poet does not refrain from taking Alexander’s tragic faith as an example, although he does not make any mention of the conqueror in the andarz sections: qayu shāh nechūkkim sikandar edi ḥakim u valī u payambar edi […] anga qïlmadï davr-i gardān vafā jafā birlä qïlmadï iktifā Which king was like Alexander? He was a sage, a saint, a prophet; […] to him the sky did not keep his promise, it perfidiously deceived his expectations.64 Once again, in Navāʾī’s text, the link between the general Sufi concept and Alexander’s destiny could not be more explicit. From that very first section, Navāʾī took advantage of the evocation of the destiny of some great Iranian kings to remind his reader of the destiny of the Macedonian conqueror. The last bayt of this section is significantly expressed in the form of an “admonition” to his reader: anga kim jahān kāmin äylär havas bu afsāna tanbīhī olghuncha bas For the one who feels desire for the world, this story will be a sufficient admonition.65 63  MS Michigan 450, 507. 64  MS Michigan 450, 507‒8. 65  MS Michigan 450, 508.

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In the next section, the poet tells an apologue about the wise figure of Luqmān, who lived in the ruins in order to keep himself isolated from the world and its treachery.66 Thereafter, the reader learns how Luqmān became so wise. His wisdom came from his desire to renounce the world (jahān tarki): jahān tarkidür shādlïgh bāʿithi kharābïdur ābādlïgh baʿithi The renunciation of the world is the cause of joy, its ruins are the cause of prosperity.67 The corresponding stage of Alexander’s life is the episode of his death, which was designed to give an empirical illustration of the three previous sections (andarz-ḥikāyat-ḥikmat). In fact, Navāʾī gathered several sections of the Khiradnāma in a single one: an initial section in which Jāmī tells how, during his homeward march, Alexander decides to write a farewell letter to this mother upon realising that he was going to die;68 a subsequent section presenting Alexander’s last will (the transfer of his corpse to Alexandria and his wish that his hand be left hanging out of his coffin);69 the telling of Alexander’s death, and a final section in which, once the body had been transferred to Alexandria, his mother respected her son’s wishes. Indeed, the basis for this gathering in the Sadd-i iskandarī rests on the desire to reorganize Alexander’s narrative so that it could perfectly illustrate the idea that no one can escape the treachery of the world (vafāsïzlïq). If the reader understands this lesson, he should act accordingly: anga kim madadkār bolghay bilik jahān shughlïdïn bari chekgäy ilik The one who will be helped by knowledge will keep his hand off worldly affairs.70

66  MS Michigan 450, 508. This ḥikāyat is to be linked to the advice given by Socrates in his letter of wisdom in Jāmī’s Khiradnāma: makash bahr-i maʿmūra-yi khāna ranj/bi-vīrāna khud-rā nihān kun chū ganj. “Don’t worry about the building of a house,/hide yourself in a ruin like a treasure.” See Haft awrang, 949. 67  MS Michigan 450, 509. 68   Haft awrang, 993‒97. 69   Haft awrang, 997‒98. 70  MS Michigan 450, 511.

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Toutant

As to the solace given to Alexander’s mother when she is in pain, the Chaghatay poet goes beyond a mere reshaping of Jāmī’s material. In fact, the first section (LXXXI) of this thematic chapter seems to be devoted to the presentation of riḍā, repeating Jāmī’s idea of giving voice to various sages comforting the unfortunate mother. In the Sadd-i iskandarī, the five sages of the Khiradnāma are replaced by the seven Greek philosophers. Aristotle admits that he is unable to give advice, but argues that to refuse the order of destiny is to be ungrateful to God’s mercy.71 Plato’s speech is used by the Chaghatay poet to recall the definition of riḍā: va lek ol kishi kim khiradmanddur nekim tengridin kelsä khursanddur But wise is the person who is happy, Whatever comes from Tengri (God).72 And Plato specifically extols Alexander’s mother for her riḍā: ki andaq oghul andïn oldï qaḍā qaḍāgha ʿiyān etmädi juz riḍā The heavenly decree took such a son from her, (yet) she did not say anything to the heavenly decree but her acceptance.73 But, when Navāʾī reports Alexander’s mother’s words at the end of the excerpt, her speech goes further than the simple thanks addressed to the wise men in the Khiradnāma,74 since they introduce a concept which proved to be very important to Navāʾī, but which is not likely to be found, at least in this manner, in Jāmī’s mathnavī. At the very end of the chapter, Alexander’s mother confesses that, since the seven philosophers who were so dear to their late king opened their hearts to her, she felt that she was able to share her pain with them and open her heart, thereby introducing the notion of hamdardlïq (compassion):

71  MS Michigan 450, 515. See also Jāmī’s text, Haft awrang, 999‒1006. 72  MS Michigan 450, 514. 73  MS Michigan 450, 513. 74   Haft awrang, 1006.

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chū sizdin ʿayyān boldï hamdardlïq emäs yakhshï hamdarddin fardlïq meni saldïngïz sözgä bī ikhtiyār ki hamdard olup sözgä ne ikhtiyār Since you showed me compassion, it is not good to be deprived of compassion. You made me talk whereas I did not want to; when we are companions of pain no will is needed to talk.75 So important is that notion that the priority shifts from riḍā to hamdardlïq in the thematic chapter, since it is the hamdardlïq that will be illustrated by an apologue in the next section, and not the concept of riḍā (see Table 17.6). This departure from Jāmī’s text is all the more significant as this notion reappears in the rewriting of another passage of the Khiradnāma, which is itself a rewriting of a passage of Niẓāmī’s Iqbālnāma. In this text, Niẓāmī depicts Alexander, just before his death, trying to comfort his mother in a farewell letter by means of an allegory: the king advised his mother to organize a great Table 17.6 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXXXI–LXXXIV)

Andarz section Ḥikāyat section LXXXI About riḍā and hamdardlïqa

LXXXII Illustrative anecdote about hamdardlïq: the man whose arm was brokenb

a  M S Michigan 450, 513‒15. b  M S Michigan 450, 515‒16. c  M S Michigan 450, 516. d  “Iskandar-i thānī” (MS Michigan 450, 516). e  M S Michigan 450, 516‒17.

75  MS Michigan 450, 513‒15.

Ḥikmat section

Dāstān section

LXXXIII What wise people say about hamdardlïqc

LXXXIV Eulogy of Ḥusayn Bāyqarā who is a “second Iskandar”d and of his son Muẓaffar Ḥusayne

622

Toutant

banquet with the instruction that she warn the people that only those who do not have anybody buried in earth would be allowed to eat: v’agar kas nayārad naẓar sū-yi khward tū nīz anduh-i ghāʾibān dar-navard And if nobody looks at the food, you too hide your moaning for the absent.76 Jāmī took up the same allegory and its conclusion, but included the figure of the Sufi sage who should not react as the others do: va gar nī nashāyad zi sāḥib khirad ki dar majlis-i jamʿ tanhā khwurad chirā gham khwurad zīrak-i hūshiyār chū z’āghāz mīdānad anjām-i kār And if it is not appropriate for the sage to be the only one to eat in the banquet, why should the sagacious wise be sad, since, from the beginning, he knows the end?77 Navāʾī’s rewriting also provides a slightly different lesson from that of his predecessors:

76  Niẓāmī, Kulliyāt-i Niẓāmī Ganjavī, ed. V. Dastgirdī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi millī-yi Irān, 1384/2005), 1439. This motif was already present in the Greek version of the Alexander Romance (3rd century CE). In the λ recension of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ version, we read that in the farewell letter addressed to his mother, Alexander bids her to prepare a splendid meal as a thanksgiving to the gods for having presented her with such a son. He goes on by saying that if she wishes to honor her late son, she has to invite everyone to a banquet and tell them that none should come if he has suffered affliction either now or in former times, since she would have prepared a meal not of sorrow but of joy. Olympias does as she is bid. In the end, no one comes to her meal. There was no one, rich or poor, who had not known sorrow. See Helmut van Thiel (ed. and trans.), Leben und Taten Alexanders von Makedonien: der griechische Alexanderroman nach der Handschrift L (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 165. 77   Haft awrang, 996.

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bu maʿlūm olurkim yoq ermish birav ki tufrāq ara yoq kishisi garav bilingachki bu navʿ emish rūzgār ol ishdin özzünggä bol āmūzgār ghamïmgha alam huznidin fard bol bari ʿālam ahlïgha hamdard bol It is certain that there will be nobody who does not have somebody pledged in the dirt. Once we know that this sort of thing is a fact of life, from this matter draw lessons for yourself. Stay away from the sorrow and the pain caused by the grief of my loss. Be the companion of pain for all the people of the world.78 The focus on the parts of the Sadd-i iskandarī devoted to the making and the death of Alexander the Great provides a concrete insight of the ways in which Navāʾī used Jāmī’s text. As far as we are able to observe, three features can be outlined. Firstly, from a narrative point of view, the Chaghatay poet does not hesitate to repeat Jāmī’s textual material, when episodes of Alexander’s life as rewritten by Jāmī are of significance to him. Furthermore, he does not mention some episodes found in Niẓāmī and Khusraw’s versions that Jāmī did not keep in his mathnavī. Secondly, as regards the presentation of Jāmī’s thoughts, Navāʾī reorganizes the way the Sufi poet’s conceptions appear throughout the text in order to establish a clearer link between Alexander’s life and the lessons to be learned from his story. Here lies the main interest of this particular structure, consisting of a series of four-section chapters, which allows the poet to display Jāmī’s conceptions in a more didactic manner.79 Finally, the emphasis placed on the notion of hamdardlïq shows that Navāʾī can highlight some of his specific concerns while using a textual framework directly borrowed from Jāmī. 78  MS Michigan 450, 510. Here I have replaced ghamïm by ghamïmgha according to the text given by the manuscript kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (MS BNF Turc 316, fol. 416v). 79  This is reminiscent of the Timurid effort to standardize the Persian literary canon as described by Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī. Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 134‒54.

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Lessons to be Drawn from Alexander’s Conquest: Towards a Mystical Explanation

Undoubtedly, Jāmī did not want to waste time depicting battles and other narratives and turned all his attention to more sapiential matters. In his mathnavī, the progress of Alexander’s life is only designed to propound advice, making Alexander the wisest king after whom none would reach such wisdom.80 The link between the king’s expeditions and his search for knowledge is steadily stressed throughout the dāstān, as shown by this distich narrating his coming into the land of pious people: sikandar chū mīgasht gird-i jahān khabarpurs-i har āshkār u nihān … As Alexander travelled all around the world inquiring about everything that was obvious and hidden …81 After equipping himself with the wisdom letters written by the Greek philosophers, according to a pattern taken from Niẓāmī but considerably expanded, Alexander set out to conquer the world, receiving lessons from various people throughout his expedition.82 These lessons are all the more interesting in that 80  In Jāmī’s mathnavī, the conquest is related only in a form of a brief summary (see Haft awrang, 964). 81   Haft awrang, 984. This quest for wisdom is also central in Niẓāmī’s Iqbālnāma: after acquiring earthly wisdom, Alexander turned to God, and his analysis of the nature of the Almighty had led him on a search for philosophical values; he turned then all his energy inward this important quest. In Jāmī’s narrative, wisdom (khirad) is presented as the science of all sciences and the way to justice, yet its culmination is man’s knowledge of God. 82  In Niẓāmī’s Iqbālnāma, before he set out on his challenging new mission, Alexander asked Aristotle, Socrates and Plato to counsel him well with their wisdom. Each of these three philosophers then presented Alexander with a book summarizing their most salient ideas. In the Khiradnāma, on his deathbed, Philip asked Aristotle to write a letter of wisdom (khiradnāma) as guidance for Alexander’s rule. It contained “all necessary instructions for divine rule and royal justice” (Haft awrang, 934). We learn thereafter that it was Alexander who asked the philosophers to write letters of wisdom, in which he would read at any given moment, so that his actions would be well-guided. Thus in the Khiradnāma, we can read the wisdom letters of Aristotle (Haft awrang, 939‒41), Plato (Haft awrang, 943‒45), Socrates (Haft awrang, 947‒50), Hippocrates (Haft awrang, 952‒56), Pythagoras (Haft awrang, 957‒59), Asclepius (Haft awrang, 959‒60), and Hermes (Haft awrang, 961‒63). The motif of the wisdom letters is expanded substantially in Jāmī’s imitation. While in Navāʾī’s mathnavī there is only one section, which is devoted to all the letters of wisdom (MS Michigan 450, 517‒20), this section is long enough to encompass the seven letters. It is interesting to note that the philosophers are the same as those whom we

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they provide an opportunity for the poet to explain the real meaning of this conquest. The dialogue between Alexander and the khāqān (emperor) of China is a good example. The khāqān asks the conqueror the following question: chirā har zamān ranj-i digar kishad bi har kishvar az dūr lashkar kishad nihad rū bi har mulk tārāj-rā rubāyad zi farq shahān tāj-rā giriftam ki gītī bigīrad tamām bi dastash dihad mulk u millat zimām bi kūshish bar-āyad bi charkh-i baland nakhāhad shudan bīsh az īn bahramand hamān bih ki kūs-i qanāʿat zanad dar-i rastagārī u ṭāʿat zanad Why suffering another pain all the time, leading an army far away in every country, looting every kingdom, seizing the crowns from kings? Suppose one has conquered the entire world and submitted kingdoms and people with his arm, he would gain nothing more than what heavens sent to him. One should beat the drum of contentment and knock at the door of salvation and obedience [to God].83 find in the Khiradnāma and that the order in which the letters are presented is modelled around Jāmī’s mathnavī. In both Jāmī and Navāʾī’s mathnavī, the letters having been written for him, Alexander set out to conquer the world. This is different from the sequel of events in Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma, where Alexander equips himself with the various wisdom letters only after his conquest of the world, by which time he has already become a philosopher. 83   Haft awrang, 983.

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In his answer, Alexander links his conquest to his desire to expand justice all over the world. Actually, according to Jāmī, Alexander’s conquest is designed to free all human beings from the darkness of tyranny and ignorance, and to help their soul find the way of salvation by establishing the sultanate of the wisest man in the entire world. But Alexander was unquestionably the first who benefited from this expedition. The conqueror gradually acquires the spiritual knowledge (maʿrifa) that makes him closer to God than any other human being. At the end of his quest, Alexander became the shahanshāh-i iqlīm-i rāz, “the great king of the climate of mystery.”84 He reached the top of the Qāf Mountain, a feat which shows that Alexander has reached the highest level of spirituality a mortal can attain, since “this mountain is regarded as the station at the end of the created world, the place where man can find true proximity, qurb, on his way towards God.”85 The question is therefore: should the reader consider Alexander’s conquest as a way to reach such a spiritual level? In Jāmī’s mathnavī, there is no doubt that Alexander has become a “perfect man” in a mystical sense, and that his wisdom is a model for every king. Alexander’s behaviour is unambiguously an ideal of kingship, a mirror for every prince, but we see through Niẓāmī and Dihlavī’s mathnavī that his expedition should not really be taken as an example. The fact that Iskandarius, his son, refused to succeed him, is in this respect significant, especially considering the famous anecdote (noted above) that before dying Alexander commanded that his hand be left hanging out of his coffin, as a visible hint that he had died with empty hands. This could be considered as a way to express the meaninglessness of conquering lands and treasures.86 In either the western or eastern traditions, Alexander’s death is an emblem of the vainglory of conquest. No wonder, then, if in the Khiradnāma, before dying, Alexander looks bitterly upon his achievements. Never are Alexander’s regrets towards his conquest more clearly expressed in Jāmī’s mathnavī than in his farewell letter addressed to his beloved mother: darighā ki raftam bi tārāj-i dahr zi didār-i ū hich nagirifta bahr

84   Haft awrang, 989. 85  Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 421. 86   Haft awrang, 997‒98.

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Alas, I went to plunder the world, I did not take any profit from its vision.87 We find the same kind of regrets in ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī, in the same excerpt. The reproaches the conqueror addresses to himself in this same farewell letter are here expressed in a more concrete manner: bashïmgha tüshüp harza andīsha‌ʾī dedim ʿālam achmaq erür pīsha‌ʾī ne qïlghan khayālim barï khām emish havas jāmï könglümgä āshām emish Senseless thoughts came into my mind: I said to myself ‘conquering the world is your work’; Everything I had in my mind seemed to be immature the cup of desire seemed to become a drink for my heart.88 Compared to Jāmī’s text, it is interesting to note that, in the Sadd-i iskandarī, Navāʾī himself explicitly warns his own character a few sections before these regrets. The most explicit criticisms Navāʾī formulates against Alexander’s expedition are situated in the chapters relating to Alexander’s first return to Greece. While the conqueror has come back to his homeland, he has no desire but to prepare his new maritime expedition, which will allow him to complete his exploration of the earth by reaching the abyss of the oceans. Navāʾī’s comments on this decision are written in the following terms: chū könglidä yer tuttï mundaq havas tapa almadï dafʿïgha dastras havas tund-bādï chū bī-dād itär khirad khān u mānïnï barbād itär bu andīsha chūn könglin etti zabūn dimaghïgha yüzländi bīm-i junūn 87   Haft awrang, 990. 88  MS Michigan 450, 510.

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When such a desire took place in his heart, he did not have the possibility to destroy it. As the storm of desire tormented his soul, it destroyed the house of wisdom. As this thought made his heart weak, in his mind appeared the danger of madness.89 According to the Chaghatay poet, Alexander is then affected by bīm-i junūn, “the danger of madness,” which destroyed his wisdom. He should have stayed with his relatives and friends to enjoy their company and some fruitful rest in his homeland.90 It seems that, this time, Alexander went too far, as if he had forgotten the real meaning of himmat. This is what Navāʾī tries to explain to his reader when he comments upon Alexander’s last resolution to explore the abyss: burun yetti daryāgha ʿazm etti jazm bulardïn song etmäk muḥīt ichrä ʿazm bolur ādamīning biyik miḥnati erür himmatidin fuzūn ghaflati First he resolved to go in the seven seas, and then he decided to go into the interior of the ocean. The human being goes to great lengths, [but] his negligence is even bigger than his aspiration.91

89  MS Michigan 450, 496. 90  This idea is also found in Amīr Khusraw’s mathnavī. The Persian poet made the same kind of criticisms towards the seafaring expedition, but not in such an explicit way (see Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, Ā ’ina-yi iskandarī, ed. Djamala Mirsaidova [Moscow: Akademija Nauk SSSR Institut Vostokovedenija, 1977], 268‒69). When Amīr Khusraw announces that Iskandar has finished his exploration of the abyss and he is ready to go home, he reminds his reader of the importance of staying in his homeland with his friends: bi-zindān darūn marg bā dūstān/bih az ʿumr-i ṣad sāl dar būstān. “Dying in prison with friends/is better than living one hundred years in an orchard.” Ā ʾīna-yi iskandarī, ed. Mirsaidova, 274. 91  MS Michigan 450, 499.

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Some bayts further, the Chaghatay poet returns to this specific issue raised by the maritime expedition, and questions the real purpose of kingship in the light of this last episode of Alexander’s conquest: emäs shahlïq almaq yürüp baḥr u bar erür tapmaq andïn ki ḥaqq berdi bar birav kim bu maʿnīgha yābandadur khiradmand u farkhundapay bandadur The purpose of kingship is not to conquer seas and lands, it is about discovering that God gave everything. The one who understands this idea is the slave of wisdom and prosperity.92 The specific structure of Navāʾī’s mathnavī allows the reader to have a precise idea of the poet’s attitude towards this episode of the quest. In the andarz section of this four-section cycle, Navāʾī deals with the importance of staying in one’s homeland (see Table 17.7). Table 17.7 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXIX–LXXII)

Andarz section

Ḥikāyat section

Ḥikmat section

Dāstān section

LXIX Importance of staying in one’s homeland (safar dar vaṭan)a

LXX Story of the pigeon which preferred to stay in its ruined house rather than in the royal castleb

LXXI Things we are accustomed to turning into a second naturec

LXXII Back in Greece, Alexander wants to leave his homeland to explore the oceans against the will of his peopled

a  M S Michigan 450, 492‒94. b  M S Michigan 450, 494. c  M S Michigan 450, 494‒95. d  M S Michigan 450, 495‒98.

92  MS Michigan 450, 499.

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The link between the poet’s opinion, expressed in the andarz section, and the traditional telling of the expedition is very clear. The reader may infer that the poet exhorts every monarch to put an end to his desire for conquest and to take advantage of the quietness of his homeland, in contrast with Alexander’s resolution. But, as was the case in Jāmī’s narrative with the episode of Qāf Mountain, this last expedition brings the highest level of spirituality to the conqueror, for Alexander becomes a saint (valī) and a prophet (payambar) after his exploration of the bottom of the sea: bilip khalq shāh-i muẓaffar anï ḥakīm u valī u payambar anï People knew that this invincible king was a wise man, a saint, and a prophet.93 How then can we understand this kind of paradox? The perilous oceanic expedition, so condemned by the poet as it caused Alexander to neglect his homeland, is precisely what makes him able to reach the highest level of spirituality. What we label a paradox is actually a misleading reading that obscures the notion that is so central in Navāʾī’s mathnavī: the problem of destiny. Throughout the Sadd-i iskandarī, Navāʾī stresses the idea that world conquest is beyond Alexander’s control and only depends on God’s will. As the Macedonian king explained to his people when he was about to leave for his maritime expedition, it was destiny which caused him to undertake such a journey. He had to execute an order that no human being could escape. Alexander is like a tragic character confronting the question of fatality; his desire for conquest is part of his nature and destiny, as Alexander confessed to the emperor of China several chapters before: aning ḥukmidin āshkār u nihān mangä boldï rūzī sarāsar jahān chū ol qïldï bu kāmgha bakhtiyār mangä daghï bu ishtä yoq ikhtiyār By His will whether manifest or secret my lot was the entire world. 93  MS Michigan 450, 506.

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Since He favoured me for this goal, in this task I also do not have the choice.94 It is the same explanation the conqueror gave to his own people in order to justify his last expedition: qaḍādïn manga tüshti mundaq safar qadar ḥukmidin elgä ayna‌ʾl-mafar The heavenly decree caused me to undertake such a journey; how can man escape such an order?95 And further on, during a general assembly, the Macedonian king returns to this issue: barï tengri taqdīridür bī gumān kishi qïlmaghï yakhshïdur gar yamān gar ol gar bu har qaysï taqdīr ilä qïla almadïm chāra tadbīr ilä Without doubt everything is due to the destiny willed by God, either we do good or bad things. Whatever I have done, all was due to destiny; I could decide nothing on my own.96 These words sound like an echo of those pronounced in the Khiradnāma. Facing the Brahman’s disapproval, Jāmī’s character explains that: man ān mavj-i jumbish nihādam zi-bād ki yak-dam zi jumbish nayāram sitād zi-bād-i idhn ārām agar dīdamī sar-i mūʾī az jā najunbīdamī

94  MS Michigan 450, 412. 95  MS Michigan 450, 497. 96  MS Michigan 450, 502.

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valī chūn na pīsh-i man-ast ikhtiyār nayāram giriftan bi-yak jā qarār asīram dar īn jumbish nav-bi-nav ravam tā mā-rā guyad izad bi-rav I am this wave moved by the Wind, and I cannot stop one moment. If I saw a peaceful piece of hair because of the Wind of Announcement, I would stop moving. But for I have no choice, I cannot stay in one place. In this incessant movement I am a prisoner, I am going as long as God tells me to go.97 According to Jāmī’s words, Alexander is a wave moved by the wind of God. He had no choice in doing what he had done. It is the same situation as in the Sadd-i iskandarī. Thus, Navāʾī’s mathnavī helps the reader understand the role and function of destiny in both poems: the acknowledgement of destiny enables the poets, in the logic of the Mirror for Princes, to distinguish the model of a kingship based on justice and wisdom that Alexander’s royal behaviour provides, and his war expedition, which is only specific to his own destiny. If Alexander is the model of a perfect king, his conquest should be considered, first of all, as the accomplishment of the will of God Himself and should not be understood as an example to follow. In other words, kings who are moved by another destiny would do better to model their behaviour on Alexander’s kingship, but also hear Alexander’s regrets and consider the importance of staying in their homeland. Navāʾī summarises this idea quite simply: jahān mulkin etsäng safar khusk u tar sikandardek alsang yürüp baḥr u bar 97   Haft awrang, 982. The images of the waves and the wind were already found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes version of the Greek Alexander Romance, and this motif was also particularly extensive in the Arabic tradition. In this regard, Jāmī’s text is very close to ʿUmāra’s Qiṣṣat al-Iskandar, in which we can read: “My God has sent me to profess His religion. Don’t you know that the waves of the sea do not move unless they are moved by the wind?” On these aspects, see Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 39, 84.

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qoyup barïn ākhir chū ketgüngdürür degin kim olup ani netgüngdürür hamul khush ki tark-i ʿazimat tutup farāghat maqāmïn ghanimat tutup If you travel all over the world on dry and wet, if like Alexander you seize lands and seas, in the end you will leave everything when you go saying “why did I take all this?” You’d better leave this resolution and take the benefit of the stage of quietness.98 But Navāʾī’s clarification of Jāmī’s conceptions seems to go further. While depicting the contrast between the suffering caused by Alexander’s journey and the quietness he could have enjoyed in his homeland, the Chaghatay poet reminds any reader who would be tempted to undertake a war expedition like that of Alexander that life is already a journey in itself. Since this existential travel is very hard, one should learn to take a fruitful rest. If the desire to travel is still strong, it is better to adopt these verses, expressed in the form of two maxims: musāfir bol ammā vaṭan ichrä bol tilä khalvat u anjuman ichrä bol Be a traveler but stay in the homeland; Look for solitude and be within society.99 Readers may easily recognize the Turkic adaptations of the famous Naqshbandī mottos or “sacred words” (kalimāt-i qudsiyya): safar dar vaṭan (travel in the homeland) and khalvat dar anjuman (solitude within society), characteristic of the order to which Navāʾī and Jāmī belonged. According to this conception, the “travel in the homeland” is an inward journey in which the individual 98  Or “if you go around the world night and day,”; here Navāʾī plays on the different meanings of the expression khusk u tar which means “dry and moist,” “day and night,” and “bad and good.” MS Michigan 450, 494. 99  MS Michigan 450, 493.

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progresses in his own internal world. The idea of an inward journeying as opposed to an outward one distinguishes the Naqshbandiyya from other Sufi brotherhoods, which had always encouraged the disciple to physically travel. Although Naqshbandī Sufis did not explicitly condemn the outward journey, they advised a renunciation of this practice as soon as a master is found. As Hamid Algar explains: “The outward journey through the world, it is true, may serve as a mirror and support for inward wayfaring, but it too is liable to defeat its own purpose, and become an end in itself. Hence the Naqshbandī have emphasized the inward journey, the journey in the homeland that is man’s own inner world and the receptacle of God’s grace.”100 The opposition between the internal and external journey is once more illustrated in a concrete manner a few sections before by a thematic chapter in Navāʾī’s mathnavī (see Table 17.8). In his search for wisdom, Alexander sets out to conquer the world in order to see the wonders of creation. In section LXI, Navāʾī reminds us that the people who are looking for such wonderful things should first look at the wonders within themselves and the secret treasure their hearts contain. To this end, their hearts need to be vigilant to be able to recognize and to feel God’s strength and wisdom in everything that belongs to this world, in accordance with the waḥdat al-wujūd theosophy. Table 17.8 Sadd-i iskandarī (LXI–LXIV)

Andarz section

Ḥikāyat section

Ḥikmat section

Dāstān section

LXI The beauty of the world in which the most astonishing thing is man himselfa

LXII Story of fish which are looking for the water in which they swimb

LXIII What distinguishes man from animals: man can understand the whole scheme of thingsc

LXIV Alexander fights against the tribe of the giant ants.d

a  M S Michigan 450, 478‒80. b  M S Michigan 450, 480. c  M S Michigan 450, 480‒81. d  M S Michigan 450, 481‒85.

100   Hamid Algar, “The Naqshbandi Order: A Preliminary Survey of its History and Significance,” Studia Islamica 44 (1976): 134.

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Every “new” Alexander who forgets to seek God’s wisdom—not in the conquest of the world, but within himself—will look like those fish that spend their lives seeking the water in which they swim (section LXII): alar barcha sudïn chū äyrildilär burun suda irkenlerin bildilär When they were all outside water they realised that they had been in water before.101 At the end of this section the poet addresses his reader: netärsen tiläp har ʿajāʾibqa yol ʿajāʾib erür sendä āgāh bol Why do you look for a path [to see] every wonderful thing? Wonderful things are in you, be aware of that!102 This is the true quest, which guarantees the most enviable position. This idea was highlighted in the previous section (LXI), in which Navāʾī “reminded” his reader that the world is nothing but a vast theophany. The world is full of treasures, the existence of which is only attributable to God; however, there is only one quest that is worth the cost, leading to the Creator of all these treasures, that is in fact the real treasure. This treasure must be found in the heart of the seeker, not in the conquest of the world: kishi kim bu ganjīnagha taptï yol jahān ahlïnïng shahī ol boldï ol The one who found the path to this treasure, became the king of the world103 Rather than a conquest of the world, the poet calls for a conquest of the self. This is how the Chaghatay poet understands the meaning of the safar dar vaṭan. Navāʾī links this motto with the exhortation of “seclusion while remaining in society” (khalvat dar anjuman), and the opposition between internal 101  MS Michigan 450, 480. 102  MS Michigan 450, 480. 103  MS Michigan 450, 480.

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and external journey reiterates the opposition between external and internal seclusion. The heart of the seeker must be present with the Lord and be absent from the creatures, even while he remains physically present among them. So, even if Alexander gains knowledge of God through his expedition, it will be best to acquire this maʿrifat without engaging in a conquest. The inward quest, by which a man sets out to discover himself, is the true conquest that will guarantee the status of king of the world. Would Jāmī, who initiated Navāʾī to the Naqshbandiyya in 881/1476, disagree with this kind of conclusion? If we turn back to the Khiradnāma, there were a number of reproaches addressed to the conqueror for having engaged in such an expedition. This is particularly clear in the letters of wisdom (khiradnāma), which convey an essential part of Jāmī’s imitation project. None of the seven letters call for physical travel. On the contrary, in his letter, Plato urges Alexander to examine his own self and to realize the transience and deception of worldly affairs. He admonishes the conqueror not to “wander in the ruins in search for a treasure,” but first of all to gain knowledge of himself.104 Alexander’s own mother warns him about the vainglory of his enterprise in a letter. She asks him why he is conquering kingdoms and possessions that would rapidly perish, and reminds him that travel could be a danger in itself, since it may divert from the purification of the self.105 This is highly reminiscent of Naqshbandī warnings about external journeys that can distract attention from the internal quest. Throughout his book, Jāmī undoubtedly emphasizes inward travel at the expense of the outward journey. Most of the words of wisdom expressed in his poem address the man rather than the conqueror. They are not linked with any military, economic or other monarchical aspects.106 In this context, Jāmī only stresses the importance of justice. Otherwise, the poet focuses on the need to care about one’s own death. He encourages the reader to practice an austere mode of living, and to become detached from this world. These are just a few aspects corresponding to the fundamentals of a Sufi life in conformity with Naqshbandī principles rather than princely behavior. When Alexander meets the angel on the top of Qāf Mountain, they talk until Alexander prays for the angel to give him a maxim that would be useful for both his worldly and religious affairs. The angel tells him to:

104   Haft awrang, 943‒45. 105   Haft awrang, 975. 106  As Bürgel wrote, “the letters hardly contain more than moralizing sermons of a mystical tinge”: Bürgel, “Ğāmī’s epic poem on Alexander the Great,” 437.

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bi chashm-i khirad nāẓir-i vaqt bāsh bi ḥusn-i ʿamal ḥāẓir-i vaqt bāsh Watch your time with the eye of wisdom, prepare your moment with good actions.107 It is significant that this advice is not intended as much for a king as for an ascetic who is travelling within his self. Additionally, a formulation like nāẓir-i vaqt sounds close to the Naqshbandī principle of vuqūf-i zamānī, a motto that advises the Naqshbandī disciple to be aware of the way he spends his time, and recommends that he account for and analyze his actions and intentions every day and every night.108 4 Conclusion The comparative study of Jāmī’s Khiradnāma and Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandarī is rewarding in many ways. On the one hand, Navāʾī seized the opportunity offered by this rewriting to reorganize some of the more meaningful passages of the Khiradnāma in order to establish a clearer link between Alexander’s life and the lessons to be learned from his story. In this sense, the Chaghatay text is helpful for understanding Jāmī’s mathnavī. On the other hand, Navāʾī’s text highlights certain aspects that are less obvious in Jāmī’s mathnavī. In fact, the reading of the Sadd-iskandarī I have offered shows that this retelling of Alexander’s conquest could serve as a pretext for illustrating some of the most important Naqshbandī principles, such as safar dar vaṭan. Similarly, it seems that Jāmī took advantage of his rewriting to contrast the physical journey with the internal journey in a way that exemplifies the famous motto of the Sufi brotherhood. While reading the Khiradnāma, one feels that Alexander is closer to an internal traveller than a conqueror, a mystic who undertakes a journey into his own human nature so as to achieve the transition from human qualities to angelic qualities, a conception that is close to the definition of safar dar 107   Haft awrang, 990. 108  This motto is also linked to the practice of dhikr. In Aḥmad Kāsānī’s Risāla-yi dhikr (Treatise on Recitation), vuqūf-i zamanī is precisely the pause, which corresponds to the second movement of the dhikr of the beginner. This temporal pause “consists in holding the breath then releasing it; between two breaths, the Sufi must be attentive, that is to say, his heart must be empty of any thought.” See Alexandre Papas, “Creating a Sufi Soundscape: Recitation (dhikr) and Audition (samā‘) according to Aḥmad Kāsānī Dahbīdī (d. 1542),” Performing Islam 3/2-1 (2014): 25‒43.

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vaṭan.109 This travel in the self, which Jāmī encourages his reader to undertake, probably corresponds to the Naqshbandī conception. We have seen that Navāʾī, who was careful in his mathnavī to clarify and make explicit some of the most important ideas that were expressed in Jāmī’s poem, did not refrain from quoting the Naqshbandī motto. But the fact remains that, contrary to Navāʾī, Jāmī never specifically mentions it in his poem. To what extent should we link this question to the issue of reception? Since they were written in different languages, Jāmī’s and Navāʾī’s versions of the Alexander Romance were not addressed to the same population. Given that Navāʾī chose to use the Chaghatay language—while he could have written his Khamsa in Persian, having mastered its rhetoric in addition to that of his own language—we can assume that one of his specific concerns was to popularize his master and friend’s conceptions throughout the Turkish-speaking members of Timurid society. The royal court of Herat was bilingual. In this respect, both the Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī and the Sadd-i iskandarī were dedicated to Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, and we may suppose that these two mathnavīs were partially designed to model for the sovereign and his court a pattern of behavior.110 Nonetheless, Navāʾī’s version of Alexander’s Romance was certainly more likely to have had a real influence on the sovereign: Chaghatay Turkish was the mother tongue of the last great Timurid ruler, who was proud to use it as a literary language, since he wrote poetry in Turkī under the pen name Ḥusaynī. It was Navāʾī who had encouraged him to do so, although Persian remained the primary language of poetry in the Timurid era, despite the fact that the use of Chaghatay in literature at this time was more sporadic than in the early period. Navāʾī’s work and personality played a major role in the resurgence of Turkic culture at Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā’s court and the latter praised the poet for this.111 Naturally, it is difficult to assert the real nature of Navāʾī’s influence on the sovereign, owing to the lack of historical evidence. There is at least one anecdote preserved in the Badāʾiʿ al-vaqāʾiʿ (written between 915/1510 109  See Thierry Zarcone, “Le ‘voyage dans la patrie’ (safar dar watan) chez les soufis de l’ordre naqshbandî,” in Le Voyage initiatique en terre d’islam. Ascensions célestes et itinéraires spirituels, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi (Leuven-Paris: Peeters, 1996), 308. 110  It was with this last great Timurid ruler that Jāmī had the longest and closest involvement (see Algar, Jami, 41‒43); as for Navāʾī, his close relationships with Sulṭān Ḥusayn are also well documented (see Khwāndamīr, Ḥabīb al-siyar, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humā’ī [Tehran: Khayyām, 1339/1954], 4:137). 111  In his Apologia, presumably written sometimes between 892/1486 and 998/1492, the Timurid ruler wrote that Navāʾī had “infused life into the dead body of the Turkish language with his messianic breath.” See “Sultan-Husayn Mirza ‘Apologia’,” in A Century of Princes. Sources on Timurid History and Art, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Cambridge: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989), 376.

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and 938/1532) which could shed light on this matter, if indeed we can rely on Vāṣifī’s memoirs. According to Vāṣifī, when ʿAlī Shīr had completed his Khamsa and had dedicated it to Bāyqarā, the latter expressed his desire to become his murīd (disciple) and called Navāʾī his pīr (master).112 Thus, Navāʾī’s efforts to be as didactic as possible in the composition of his work could be explained by his desire to turn his mathnavī into a “Sufi Mirror for Princes” for the Timurid ruler who he described as a “second Iskandar” (Iskandar-i thānī).113 Based on the ideas developed by Jāmī in his own version of the Alexander Romance, Navāʾī could have aimed to deliver a Naqshbandī teaching which advised the ruler to accomplish an internal quest instead of embarking on dangerous warlike expeditions. In order to do so, Navāʾī produced a more accessible text than his Persian contemporary, a kind of pedagogical book written in plain language for Turkish-speaking readers who were perhaps less accustomed than Persophone peoples to Naqshbandī mystical conceptions. In any event, Navāʾī’s rewriting of Alexander’s quest definitely questions Jāmī’s reluctance to formulate explicitly Naqshbandī matters. We know that, despite being a prominent Naqshbandī authority in Herat, Jāmī had always been reluctant to express the brotherhood’s principles in such an explicit manner as Navāʾī did.114 Were these Naqshbandī principles so obvious in Jāmī’s text so that they did not need to be clearly mentioned for Persian speakers? The preliminary aim of this paper was to show the nature of Jāmī’s influence on Navāʾī’s poetry. This investigation has finally led to another question, which is: to what extent can Navāʾī’s work be regarded as a valuable source for a better understanding of the “Jāmī phenomenon”? And, in this particular case, to what extent can Navāʾī’s poem be seen as a commentary on Jāmī’s teachings, or at least a clarification of his ideas? Further studies of this “partnership,” to use Hamid Algar’s words,115 are needed in order to fully understand the real nature of the link that existed between the works of the Persian and the Chaghatay polymaths. Whatever difficulties this ambitious task may involve, there is no doubt that this is a key issue for a thorough knowledge of both authors.

112  See Maria Eva Subtelny, “The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid Sultan Ḥusain Baiqara and its Political Significance” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1979), 106. 113  MS Michigan 450, 516. See Table 17.6 above (section LXXXIV). 114  Algar, Jami, 90. 115  Algar, Jami, 128.

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Figure 17.1 University of Michigan—Special Collections Library, Isl., Ms. 450, p. 365

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Erkinov, Aftandil. “La querelle sur l’ancien et le nouveau dans les formes littéraires traditionnelles : Remarques sur les positions de Jâmi et de Navâ’i.” Annali del`Istituto Universitario Orientale 59 (1999): 18–37. Feuillebois-Pierunek, Eve. “Les figures d’Alexandre dans la littérature persane : entre assimilation, moralisation et ironie.” In Épopées du monde. Pour un panorama (presque) général, edited by Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, 181‒202. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011. Fouchécour, Charles-Henri de. Moralia: les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1986. Fouchécour, Charles-Henri de. “Jâmi, conseiller des Princes ou le Le Livre de la Sagesse Alexandrine.” Kâr-Nâmeh 5 (1999): 11‒31. Hasaniy, Mahmud. Jomiy va Navoiy. Tashkent: G’afur G’ulom nomidagi Adabiyot va San’at nashriyoti, 1989. Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang. Edited by Murtaḍa Mudarris-i Gīlānī. Tehran: Ahurā-Mahtāb, 1385/2006. Khwāndamīr, Ghiyāth al-Dīn ibn Humām al-Dīn Muḥammad. Ḥabīb al-siyar. Edited by Jalāl al-Dīn Humāi.̄ 4 vols. Tehran: Khayyām, 1339/1954. Komilov, Najmiddin. Xizr chashmasi. Tashkent: Ma’naviyat, 2005. Köprülü, Fuat. “Cağatay Edebiyatı.” In Islam Ansiklopedisi, 3:275‒323. Ankara: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1944. Levend, Agâh Sirri. Ali Şir Nevaî, I. Hayatı, sanatı ve kişiliği. Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu Basım Evi, 1965. Losensky, Paul. Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Indivuduality in the SafavidMughal Ghazal. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1998. Mallaev, Nathan. O‘zbek Adabiyoti Tarixi. Tashkent: O’zSSR, 1962. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Khamsa. MS University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Special Collections Library, Isl. Ms. 450, 325 p. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Kulliyāt-i Navāʾī. MS Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Supplément turc no. 316, 469 f. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Muḥakāmat al-lughatayn. Edited by Ya‘qub Vaḥidī. Kabul: Akādemī -yi ʿulūm, 1323/1905. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Mahbub ul-qulub. In Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlari, vol. 14, edited by Suyima G‘anieva, 7‒130. Tashkent: Fan, 1998. Navāʾī, ʿAlī Shīr. Xamsat al-mutahayyirin. In Alisher Navoiy. Mukammal Asarlar To‘plami, vol. 15, edited by Porso Shamsiev, 7‒85. Tashkent: FAN, 1999. Niẓāmī Ganjavī, Abū Muḥammad Ilyās ibn Yūsuf. Kulliyāt-i Niẓāmī Ganjavī. Edited by Vaḥid Dastgirdī. Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi millī-yi Irān, 1384/2005. Ökten, Ertuğrul. “Jāmī (817–898/1414–1492): His Biography and Intellectual Influence in Herat.” PhD diss., Chicago University, 2007.

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Papas, Alexandre. “Islamic Brotherhoods in Sixteenth Century Central Asia: the Dervish, the Sultan, and the Sufi Mirror for Princes.” In Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities, edited by Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastoria, 209‒31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Papas, Alexandre. “Creating a Sufi Soundscape: Recitation (dhikr) and Audition (samā‘) According to Ahmad Kāsānī Dahbīdī (d. 1542).” Performing Islam 3/1–2 (2014): 25‒43. Qayumov, Aziz. “Saddi iskandarida Iskandar xarakterining evolyutsyasi,” O‘zbek Tili va Adabiyoti 3 (1968): 52‒56. Qayumov, Aziz. Saddi Iskandariy. Tashkent: G‘afur G‘ulom nomidagi badiiy adabiyot nashriyoti, 1975. Semenov, Aleksandr. Materialy k bibliograficheskomu ukazately pechatniikh proizvedeniy Alishera Navoi i literatury o nem. Tashkent: Gosizdat YzSSR, 1940. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Shamsiev, Porso, G‘anieva, Suyima. Abdurahmon Jomiy va Alisher Navoiy. Tashkent: FAN, 1966. Subtelny, Maria Eva. “The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid Sultan Ḥusain Baiqara and its Political Significance.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1979. Subtelny, Maria Eva. “Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, 7:90‒93. Leiden: Brill, 1986. Thackston, Wheeler. A Century of Princes, Sources on Timurid History and Art. Cambridge: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989. Thiel, Helmut van. Leben und Taten Alexanders von Makedonien: der griechische Alexanderroman nach der Handschrift L. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974. Toutant, Marc. “Materialist Ideology Facing a Great Sufi Poet: The Case of ‘Alî Shîr Nawâ’î in Soviet Uzbekistan: From Concealment to ‘Patrimonalisation.” Orient, Reports of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 46 (2011): 29‒50. Toutant, Marc. Un empire de mots : Pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī. Leuven: Peeters, 2016. Visintainer, Ermanno. “L’Alessandro ‘turco’: alcune riflessioni in marginale al Sedd-i Iskenderî (La muraglia di Alessandro) di Alī Šīr Navā’ī.” Quaderni di studi indo-mediterranei 1 (2008): 209‒52. Zarcone, Thierry. “Le «voyage dans la patrie» (safar dar watan) chez les soufis de l’ordre naqshbandî.” In Le Voyage initiatique en terre d’islam. Ascensions célestes et itinéraires spirituels, edited by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, 301‒15. Leuven-Paris: Peeters, 1996. Zipoli, Riccardo. The Technique of the Ǧawāb: Replies by Nawā’ī to Ḥāfiẓ and Ǧāmī. Venice: Cafoscarina, 1995.

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Appendix A: Structure of Jāmī’s Khiradnāma-yi iskandari ̄ (from section XIII to section LXII) Dāstān

Alexander’s formation

Alexander’s expeditions

XIII: Alexander’s early life

Ḥikāyat

XIV: Dispute between the sage and the evilly-disposed man XV: Philip’s death XVI: The mourner in despair in front of the tomb of his neighbour XVII: Alexander succeeds his XVIII: The lord of a village and his father to the throne little son watching the pomp of a royal pageant XIX Aristotle’s wisdom letter XX: The camel which was discontent with carrying salt XXI: Plato’s wisdom letter XXII: The traveller and the Indian king XXIII: Socrates’ wisdom letter XXIV: The old heron and the fish XXV: Hippocrates’ wisdom letter XXVI: The Greek sage whose son had gone astray XXVII: Pythagoras’s wisdom letter XXVIII: The little child and his piece of bread XXIX: Asclepius’ wisdom letter XXX: The smartly dressed man whose words did not match his clothing XXXI: Hermes’ wisdom letter XXXII: The ugly man who invited a sage in his beautiful house XXXIII: Alexander’s conquest of XXXIV: The friend of the king who the world (brief summary) had lost everything by accident XXXV: Alexander’s wisdom letter XXXVI: The caliph and the beautiful girl in his harem XXXVII: Jāmī’s warning about XXXVIII: Khusraw Parvīz, his wife women Shīrīn and the fisherman XXXIX: The gifts of the Chinese XL: Story of the time of Anūshīrvān khāqān XLI: Letter of the mother of XLII: The young man who rode to Alexander a feast XLIII: Aristotle’s letter in XLIV: The tyrant who liked response to Alexander’s letter tormenting good people

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Evaluating Jāmī ’ s Influence on Navā ʾ ī (cont.) Dāstān

Alexander’s death

XLV: Alexander hears an anecdote about Aristotle’s disciples XLVI: Alexander meets the Brahmans in India LXVIII: Alexander meets the pious men in the ideal city L: Alexander meets the beggar-king LI: Alexander reaches the Qāf Mountain LIII: Signs of Alexander’s death and his farewell letter to his mother LIV: Alexander’s testament

Ḥikāyat

XLVII: The shipwrecked philosopher XLIX: The king’s visit to the eremite

LII: The black page and the wife of the governor

LV: The sage who had given his wife a bag full of silver coins

LVI: Ten sages standing around Alexander’s bier stress the transience of the world LVII: Alexander’s coffin is transferred to Alexandria. Five sages console his mother LVIII: Alexander’s mother thanks the sages LIX: Aristotle’s letter of condolence to Alexander’s mother LX: Alexander’s mother’s response to Aristotle’s letter LXI: About the Treachery of the LXII: The sage in Balkh who always World remembered his own death

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Andarz

Toutant

Appendix B: Structure of Navāʾī’s Sadd-i iskandari ̄ (from section XVI to section LXXXVIII) Ḥikāyat

XVII: Alexander and XVI: Aim, aspiration, ideal the beggar-king (himmat) XX: Justice XXI: Maʿsūd’s dream (ʿadālat)

Ḥikmat

Dāstān

XVIII: The best way XIX: Alexander’s to achieve one’s aim accession to the throne. XXIII: Brief summary XXII: What is achieved thanks to of Alexander’s conquest. Alexander justice refuses to pay tribute to Darius. XXVII: Battle against XXIV: Rivalry XXV: Demonstration XXVI: Advantages (mukhālafat) of friendship during and disadvantages of Darius. the conflict the war between Genghis Khan and the king of Khwarazm XXXI: Darius’ empire XXX: The XXVIII: Respect XXIX: Sulṭān Abū under Alexander’s Saʿīd betrayed by his importance of owed to the control. soldiers because of considering the ranks interests of others his miserliness XXXII: The XXXIII: Majnūn in XXXIV: Advantages XXXV: Alexander’s winter season Laylī’s house of the winter season army in the Khurasan, and its march towards India. Battle against the king of Kashmir. XXXVIII: Advantages XXXIX: Alexander XXXVI: The XXXVII: The two liberates Kashmir Journey friends who escaped of the journey from its king’s spell their miserable and puts the son conditions thanks to of the king on the their journeys throne. XL: The Youth XLI: The young man XLII: Young peoples XLIII: Alexander who did not want to and the problem of spends the winter in India. their egos (nafs) hear the advice of the old man

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Evaluating Jāmī ’ s Influence on Navā ʾ ī (cont.) Andarz

Ḥikāyat

XLIV: Leniency (avf )

XLV: The merchant and his lost son

XLIX: Rectitude (tüzlük)

LIII: Hospitality (mīhmānlïq) LVII: The spring season LXI: The Beauty of the World

LXV: Separation (hajr) and Union (viṣāl)

Ḥikmat

Dāstān

XLVI: Advantages of XLVII-XLVIII: leniency Alexander’s army in China. L: King Ardashīr and LI: Two sorts of men LII: Agreement and the traitor friendship between Alexander and the Chinese Khāqān. LIV: Bahram Gūr LV: The king must LVI: The gifts of the and his three hosts not waste his money. Chinese Khāqān. LIX: Why men like LX: Alexander spends LVIII: The the spring in China. nightingale and the spring and nature. Conquest of Maghreb. crow LXIV: Battle against LXII: The fish which LXIII: What the tribe of the giant distinguishes men were looking for ants. water in which they and animals swam LXVI: Majnūn and LXVII: About lovers LXVIII: Battle against Laylī’s letter Gog and Magog. Building of the Alexandrine Wall. LXXII: Back in Greece, LXXI: Things we LXX: The pigeon Alexander wants to are accustomed which preferred to leave his homeland to to turning into a stay in its ruined explore the oceans. second nature house

LXIX: Travelling in the Homeland (safar dar vaṭan) LXXIII: The true LXXIV: The man himmat who looked for another treasure LXXVIII: Luqmān’s LXXVII: The detachment from Treachery of the world the World

LXXV: Water and earth

LXXVI: The Maritime Expedition.

LXXIX: Why Luqmān LXXX: Alexander’s is so wise. farewell letter to his mother and his testament. Death of Alexander.

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(cont.) Andarz

Ḥikāyat

Ḥikmat

Dāstān

LXXXI: Acquiescence (riḍā) and compassion (hamdardlïq) LXXXV: The seven wisdom letters

LXXXII: The man whose arm was broken

LXXXIII: What wise people say about compassion

LXXXIV: Eulogy of Ḥusayn Bāyqarā and his son Muẓaffar Ḥusayn.

LXXXVI: The beggar whose words were like pearls for kings

LXXXVII: The importance of having a good adviser

LXXXXVIII: Advice to Darwīsh-ʿAlī, the poet’s brother.

chapter 18

Foundational Maḥabbat-nāmas: Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Bengal (ca. 16th–19th AD) Thibaut d’Hubert shudī mashhūr-i shahr ān-sān ki hamchūn sūra-yi yūsuf hamī khwānand ṭiflān qiṣṣa-yi ḥusn-at ba maktab-hā1 You became so famous in town that, like the Surat Yūsuf, children in schools read the story of your beauty.

⸪ 1

Yūsuf u Zulaykhā and the Project of Popularizing Akbarian Doctrine

When Jāmī wrote Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (YZ) he was approximately seventy years old.2 This was the second mathnavī of what would eventually become his Seven Thrones (Haft awrang). In Jāmī’s life, this period is characterized by an overwhelming urge to write on a central notion of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystic thought: love.3 In his ghazals one often encounters love owing to the rules of the genre; but Jāmī also devoted several chapters of his works to speculative and narrative elaborations on the subject of love.4 Earlier in his life, Jāmī started 1  Jāmī, Dīvān-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1999), 192, ghazal no. 14, line 1872. 2  Hamid Algar, Jami, Makers of Islamic Civilization (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 79–81. 3  Ibn al-ʻArabī, Traité de l’amour, trans. Maurice Gloton, reprint, Spiritualités vivantes 60 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986); L’interprète des désirs ; Turjumân al-Ashwâq, trans. Maurice Gloton, Spiritualités vivantes 264 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2012). See also William C. Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For further references on love, Ibn ʿArabī and Jāmī, see Chad Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 138–41. 4  The threefold structure of Jāmī’s Dīvān would allow a diachronic analysis of Jāmī’s treatment of love in his lyric poetry as well, but I have not done it for the present article.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_020

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commenting on Ibn ʿArabī’s works and produced a vade mecum for his readers to familiarize themselves with key concepts and the general schema of the Akbarian doctrine of emanations (tajallī). The composition of the Lavāʾiḥ (“Flashes,” ca. 870/1465) provided his readers with a brief and clear introduction to the Akbarian doctrine which met with phenomenal success throughout the Muslim world. Drawing from Ibn ʿArabī’s own style of relying on poetry to convey his teachings, in his Lavāʾiḥ Jāmī concludes each section with verses of his composition that give the reader yet another way to approach the content of his speculative discourse. In a way similar to Ibn ʿArabī’s Tarjumān alashwāq (The Interpreter of Desires), Jāmī commented upon his own poetry to explain the Shaykh’s doctrine to his Persian readership.5 Jāmī’s relation to the works of Ibn ʿArabī (560/1165–638/1240) can be divided into several phases, starting from his study of the Akbarian corpus (which was followed by scholarly commentaries on his works) and ending with a series of texts combining poetry and prose didacticism that aimed at conveying the core of the Shaykh’s theology in an accessible and pleasing form.6 In this last phase, one can distinguish between the treatises either based on or derived from short Persian couplets, rubāʿīyāt, and long narrative poems, mathnavīs. Both kinds of text participate in a larger didactic endeavor. In one case, he has recourse to explicit didacticism and emphasizes key concepts through the suggestive discourse of poetry. In the other case, explicit didacticism was secondary, and he used suggestive poetical means to bring the reader to an experiential level of understanding. The two kinds of texts thus serve a common purpose. At the textual level, in his mathnavīs Jāmī was very meticulous in his use of Akbarian terminology; this remained consistent with his former use of it in his didactic works (I am here especially referring to the Lavāʾiḥ). In the 1480s, one observes a dense literary activity focusing on the theme of love and its various manifestations. We can see the production of a large part of his collection of mathnavīs as the result of this need to explore further narrative matters related to love. On the speculative and theoretical side of things, the Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt (“Rays from the flashes”) composed in 886/1481 5  The combination of prose and poetry in Jāmī’s works is often related to commentarial practices. Whether commenting on his own verses, as in his Sharḥ-i rubāʿīyāt, or on other’s Arabic or Persian verses, poetry is alternatively used as the source or the illustration of a speculative discourse on taṣawwuf (e.g. Sharḥ-i qaṣīda-yi tāʾīya and Lawāmiʿ fī sharḥ-i qaṣīda-yi mīmiyyayi khamriyya on Ibn Fāriḍ’s Arabic poetry, or Risāla-yi nāʾiya/Nay-nāma on the opening verse of Rūmī’s Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī or the Sharḥ-i bayt-i Amīr Khusraw). For a detailed study of his Sharḥ-i rubāʿīyāt, see Eve Feuillebois’s contribution in the present volume. 6  Hamid Algar, “Jāmī and Ibn ‘Arabī: Khātam al-shu‘arā and Khātam al-awliyā,’” Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 3 (2012): 138–58.

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inaugurated this period. A doctrinal as well as narrative treatment of love is also found in the second daftar of the Silsilat al-dhahab, composed sometime during the first half of the 1480s.7 This mathnavī that may be seen as a sort of poetical memoire in which Jāmī recorded events of his own life, anecdotes gathered during his travels on his way to Mecca (from Rabīʿ al-awwal 877/21 August 1472 to Shaʿbān 878/7 January 1474),8 and versified notes on what constituted the subjects of his reflections at the time. The second daftar of this mathnavī thus contains fragments of discourses echoing his earlier speculative works on Ibn ʿArabī as well as elements of the mathnavīs that he was composing at the time. The second daftar opens with a few sections introducing the concept of love and its central role in the doctrine of emanations; this parallels the comments found in the prologues of some of his mathnavīs.9 After this theoretical opening, the poet shifts to a narrative mode and relates a series of short anecdotes on prophets and saints who either experienced the various forms that love can take or witnessed them in others. Jāmī also narrates stories of a more generic nature that contain traits found in his full-fledged romance mathnavīs. For instance, he tells the story of a princess and a Ḥabashī slave, in which the latter is brought to the palace during his sleep. After a night spent with the princess, the Ḥabashī slave is brought back home and laments that he ignores who his beloved (maʿshūq) is or where she resides. Eventually, he turns away from the fascination for his beloved and contemplates love (ʿishq) for its own sake. The ignorance of the identity of the beloved is a central narrative and didactic device in the episodes of YZ where Zulaykhā’s sees Yūsuf in three dreams.10 Even more explicit are references to the story of Laylī and Majnūn, the archetypal narrative of love in the Perso-Arabic tradition.11 Jāmī even related a short anecdote on how Ibn ʿArabī himself fell in love on his way to Damascus:

7  See Paul Losensky, “Jāmi I. Life and Works” (Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, September 26, 2012). 8  See Sajjad Rizvi’s contribution in the present volume. 9  See for instance Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” in Mathnavī-i Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād, (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1997), 2:34–36; “Laylī u Majnūn,” in Mathnavī-i Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād, (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1997), 2:233–35. 10  Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 48–62. 11  Asʻad E. Khairallah, Love, Madness, and Poetry: An Interpretation of the Maǧnūn Legend, Beiruter Texte und Studien 25 (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 1980). See also A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, Laylī and Majnūn: Love, Madness, and Mystic Longing in Niẓāmī’s Epic Romance, Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures 27 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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The master of unicity, Shaykh Muḥyī al-Dīn, the sun of the sphere of unveiling and certainty, when explaining the notion of “taste” related in the Fuṭūḥāt-i makkī: “As I was coming from the Maghreb to Damascus, the passion of love grabbed the collar of my soul. In my heart, love kindled such a fire that smoke came out of my being. But in no way and from nowhere did a place of worship show itself.” Love raised its banner above the Shepherd’s star, but there was no sign of the beloved.12 Here, the anecdote again illustrates the case of someone falling in love for the sake of love itself, without going through the intermediary of the physical form (ṣūrat).13 In the rest of the daftar, Jāmī relates other anecdotes of various lengths, including two longer ones that are themselves little mathnavīs within Silsilat al-dhahab. The structure of the second daftar of Silsilat al-dhahab is rather loose, and it ends abruptly with Jāmī apologizing for not completing this section: I wished that this section be not shorter than half of the first,

12   pīr-i tawḥīd shaykh-i muḥyī al-dīn/āftāb-i sipihr-i kashf u yaqīn. z’ānchi az dhawq bayān karda’st/dar futūḥāt-i makkī āvarda’st. ki zi maghrib chū āmadam ba damishq/jayb-i jānam girift jadhba-yi ʿishq. ʿishq-am andar dil ātish-ī afzūd/ki bar-āmad zi hastī-i man dūd. lákin ān rā ba hīch rūy u rah-ī/mutaʿayyin nabūd qibla-gah-ī. ʿalam afrākht ʿishq bar ʿayyūq/ lek nām u nishān na az maʿshūq. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, “Silsilat al-dhahab,” in Mathnavī-i Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād, Jābilqā Dād ʿAlīshāh, and Aṣghar Jānfidā (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1997), 1:288, lines 4485–90. Compare with Ibn alʻArabī, Traité de l’amour, 51–53. 13  We may also note the symbolic motion eastward—from Maghreb to Damascus—shared with YZ—from Maghreb to Misr—that matches the actual travel of Ibn ʿArabī’s travels.

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but the pen, from its constant motion, when it reached this point, broke. If ever fate puts an end to its strife, and whets the knife of my resolve, may I sharpen the tip of my reed and bring this book to an end.14 This comment reflects the fact that Jāmī was not following any specific plan and wrote on the spur of the moment. He was very much conscious of the erratic structure of Silsilat al-dhahab and concluded his short prologue to Haft awrang with a disclaimer indicating that he did not intend to impose a particular structure to his work (li-nafāsatihi wa-ittiṣālihi baʿḍihi bi-baʿḍin min ghayri fāṣilati faṣlin wa-lā bābin, mulaqqab mīgardad ba Silsilat al-dhahab).15 In contrast, the three other mathnavīs that elaborate on the theme of love are finely crafted works that each explore different aspects of the multiple dimensions of the topic. Among Jāmī’s romances, we may set aside Salāmān u Absāl (893/1488), which also reflects on Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine and the function of love; in this poem, Jāmī’s approach is different and less explicit than in the more paradigmatic mathnavīs YZ and Laylī u Majnūn.16 Jāmī wrote the latter in a span of three months in 889/1484 and mentioned in its prologue that it was because his thirst for love remained unquenched after the composition of YZ that he took up the writing of a mathnavī on this famous love-story:17 Of all that eloquent men know and read from the tablet of eloquence, the most welcome story is that of love, the most agreeable melody is that of love. 14   būd dar dil chunān ki īn daftar/nab’vad az niṣf-i avvalī kamtar. lek khāma zi junbish-i payvast/chūn ba-d-īn-jā rasīd sar bish’kast. charkh agar bāz bug’dharad zi sitīz/sāzad-am gizliki ʿazīmat tīz. daham az sar tarāsh-i ān khāma/birasānam ba maqṭaʿ īn nāma. Jāmī, “Silsilat al-dhahab,” 326, lines 5280–83. 15  Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Mathnavī-i Haft awrang, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād et al. (Tehran: Markaz-i muṭālaʿāt-i īrānī, 1997), 1:57. 16  On Salāmān u Absāl, see Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran. 17  But it may be a trope borrowed from Niẓāmī who already stated in his prologue of Laylī u Majnūn: īn chār hazār bayt akthar/shud gufta ba chār māh kamtar. Niẓāmī Ganjavī, Laylī u Majnūn, ed. Bihrūz Tharvatīyān (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1387), 47, line 91.

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As I lifted the veil off this secret, and performed this wondrous melody, the parrot within me began crushing the sugar of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā’s story. In this sugar-spill, from my pen sprung sweet words mixed with sugar. It created a tumult in the world, it rejoiced the lovers’ mind. It was the very source of grace but it did not quench my thirst. The bird of my heart from somewhere else wished to play another tune. When I threw the pebble for an auspicious omen, it fell on the story of Majnūn’s life.18 Once again, we observe spontaneity in the way Jāmī handled the writing of his works. But the sequence and the temporal proximity between the composition of Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt, the second daftar of Silsilat al-dhahab, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā and Laylī u Majnūn evince a will to increasingly systematize his poetic and narrative treatment of love. After the scholastic and didactic exposition of his doctrine, Jāmī offered a poetic expression of the Shaykh’s teachings. 2

Akbarian Love in the Prologue of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā

In order to notice the semantic shifts in the Bengali versions, it is necessary to draw the outlines of Jāmī’s discourse on love. The prologues of Persian 18   az harchi sukhanvarān bidānand/v’az lawḥ-i sukhanvarī bikhwānand. maqbūltarīn fasāna ʿishq ast/maṭbūʿtarīn tarāna ʿishq ast. z’īn rāz chū parda bāz kardam/v’īn ṭurfa tarāna sāz kardam. shud ṭuṭī-i ṭabʿ-i man shakar-khā/az qiṣṣa-yi yūsuf u zulaykhā. jast az kilk-am dar ān shakar-rīz/shīrīn sukhanān-i shakkar-āmīz. dar ʿālam az-ān futād shūr-ī/dar khāṭir-i ʿāshiqān surūr-ī. sar-chashma-yi luṭf buvad lákin/z’ān tishnagī-m na-gasht sākin. murgh-i dil-i man zi jāy-i dīgar/mī-khwāst zanad navāy-i dīgar. chūn qurʿa zadam ba fāl-i maymūn/ uftād ba sharḥ-i ḥāl-i majnūn. Jāmī, “Laylī u Majnūn,” 235–36.

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mathnavīs—and of their vernacular adaptations—are always valuable passages in understanding the agenda behind the poem’s composition. In YZ the keys to the understanding of the poem are also to be found in the prologue. A well written prologue should be a treatment of the main themes of the poem using all the conventional sections: the ḥamd, naʿt, a miʿrāj of the Prophet, an encomium (madḥ) of the Sultan and sometime of the pīr, a praise of speech, and the exposition of the reasons behind the poem’s composition. The prologue of YZ is, in this respect, a masterpiece of the productive usage of literary conventions. The ḥamd and the sections devoted to the Prophet Muḥammad provide an elaborate illustration of the doctrine of divine epiphanies, which give a framework for the explanation of the nature of love in the final sections of the prologue. Another noteworthy aspect of the composition of the prologue is the significance of each title. The titles already provide a metaphorical illustration of the content of each section, and they use a terminology that allows the informed reader to identify which aspect of the doctrine will be discussed. The sections that I want to focus on constitute a three-fold exposition of the nature of love and its manifestation in the world and in the poet’s own life. In his Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, Ibn ʿArabī states that “love is the essential principle (aṣl) of universal existence (wujūd).”19 The exposition of the nature of love thus requires that we observe the role it plays in divine epiphanies; this is why Jāmī goes back to the beginning of the unfolding of Creation from the unqualified, primeval unity. The discourse on love is also a way to discuss the relativity of subjectivity in the context of vaḥdat-i vujūd (“unicity of existence”). Jāmī emphasizes the fact that each and every element of the process of love implies the presence of God, and none is devoid from it. Love itself is not an autonomous concept, but a dynamic principle by which the various parts of the manifested world of plurality interact, moved by an irresistible attraction to the essence; this idea is most clearly expressed in the opening section of the second daftar of Silsilat al-dhahab: The essence is manifest through each attribute; the attribute turns the lover into a madman. Whether the attribute is pleasing or cruel, from both the lover’s soul benefits.20 19  Ibn al-ʻArabī, Traité de l’amour, 40. 20   dhāt bā har ṣifat shavad paydā/ʿāshiq az ān buvad shaydā. gar riḍā bāshad ān ṣifat v’ar qahr/jān-i ʿāshiq zi har dū yābad bahr. Jāmī, “Silsilat al-dhahab,” 252, lines 3758–59.

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The understanding of love becomes the underlying principle behind the quest for gnosis. It somehow replaces the ancient stimulus of the contemplation of impermanence in the created world of poets like Niẓāmī (535–606/1141– 1209) or ʿAṭṭār (618/1221), which presented an invitation to engage on the path of wisdom. The titles of the three sections devoted to love and speech in YZ are as follows: dar bayān-i ān-ki har yak az jamāl va ʿishq murgh-ī’st az āshyān-i vaḥdat parīda va bar shākhsār-i maẓāhir-i kathrat āramīda; agar navā-yi ʿizzat-i maʿshūq-ī’st az ān-jā’st va agar nāla-yi miḥnat-i ʿāshiq-ī’st ham az ān-jā’st.21 Discourse on the fact that each [attribute] is a bird of beauty and love that flew away from the nest of unity and rested on the branches of the manifestation of plurality. Whether it is a melody praising a beloved or a complaint about the torment of a lover, it comes from there. nakhl-i bayān-i faḍīlat-i ʿishq bastan va shākhcha-yi āghāz-i sabab-i naẓm-i kitāb ba ān payvastan.22 Planting the palm-tree of discourse on the excellence of love and grafting on it the small branch of the reason behind the composition of this book. dasta-gul az chaman-i faḍāʾil-i sukhan chīdan va rishta-yi itmām-i sabab-i kitāb bar ān pīchīdan.23 Gathering of a bouquet from the prairie of the virtues of speech and its binding with the thread of the final part on the reason behind the composition of the book. Not only do these titles give the main themes of each section, but they also provide the general structure of its discourse. The first of those three sections opens with the evocation of Beauty in its non-manifested form (that is to say when the essence of God was still in its primeval unity, not yet conscious of its beauty):

21  Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 34. 22  Ibid., 36. 23  Ibid., 38.

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jamāl-i muṭlaq az qayd-i maẓāhir ba nūr-i khwīsh ham bar khwīsh ẓāhir24 A beauty, free from the fetters of manifestation; by his own light manifest to himself. But, as the poet puts it, beauty cannot remain concealed: nikū-rū tāb-i mastūr nadārad bi-bandī dar, zi rawzan sar bar ārad25 A fair-face cannot suffer concealment; close the door, she pops her head out from the window. At this point, Jāmī starts drawing a parallel with eloquent speech inspired by the experience of Truth in the mind of the poet, which is also unable to remain concealed and must be manifested in the form of a poem. When it was manifested throughout the creation it produced a great tumult—first among the higher spheres of the angels, and then in the phenomenal world. Again, Jāmī weaves his discourse on the manifestation of Beauty with speech: he presents the famous love stories of the past as participating in the same movement of epiphany: From this effulgence a spark fell on the rose; from the rose passion fell on the nightingale’s heart. His face lit the candle with this fire; in each nest burnt a hundred moths. From His light Laylī adorned her face; from each of Majnūn’s hairs sprung a longing. He made Shīrīn’s lips spill sugar; He took Parvīz’s heart and Farhād’s life.

24  Ibid., 34, line 309. 25  Ibid., 35, line 317.

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He brought forth the moon of Kanʿān and ruin to Zulaykhā’s life and soul.26 We see in these lines how Jāmi articulates beauty’s cosmological function with the composition of a love story in order to illustrate the overwhelming manifestation of love in the phenomenal world. In his prologue, we see that it is this very attraction to primeval beauty that is called love, and more specifically ʿishq—“passionate love” (in Maurice Gloton’s French translation of Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt: “spiration d’amour”).27 ʿIshq is one of the four names for love in Ibn ʿArabī’s terminology.28 The first one is ḥubb (or maḥabbat), selfless love. It is characterized by the lover’s renunciation of his own will for the sake of the beloved’s will. The second name of love is wadd; it refers to the firmness and stability of the sentiment of love. It is related to the divine name al-Wudūd. The third name for love is ʿishq. Unlike ḥubb, the lover is still experiencing his own will; and unlike wadd, it is an unstable state. It is characterized by its dynamic nature and it is manifested in famous love stories.29 Already Ibn ʿArabī had given the wife of the ʿAzīz of Misr (i.e. Zulaykhā) as an example of a lover tormented by the feeling of ʿishq.30 There is no divine name derived from this root because ʿishq suggests the ensnarement of the lover by the emotion of love; God, who is all-pervasive, cannot undergo such an experience. The fourth and last name of love in Akbarian terminology is hawā, or the sudden inclination to love. It is also an important element of love-narratives, because it is the feeling of the first attraction to beauty, either by sight or sound.31 It is also crucial to notice that hawā in this context does not bear any intrinsically negative meaning; it is a necessary stage of the recognition of love in its phenomenal manifestation.32 Each name represents a stage of the path to essential beauty and is neither right nor wrong as long as one stays in the dynamic of love and remains conscious of all its forms. 26   az ān lamʿa furūgh-ī bar gul uftād/zi gul shūr-ī ba jān-i bublbul uftād. rukh-i khwud shamʿ az-ān ātish bar afrūkht/ba har kāshāna ṣad parvāna rā sūkht. zi nūr-ash rūy-i khwīsh ārāst laylī/ba har mūy-ash zi majnūn khāst mayl-ī. lab-i shīrīn ba shakkar-rīz bug’shād/dil az parvīz burd u jān zi farhād. sar az jayb-i mah-i kanʿān bar āvard/zulaykhā rā damār az jān bar āvard. Ibid., 35–36, lines 328–33. 27  Ibn al-ʿArabī, Traité de l’amour, 43. 28  Ibid., 41–46. 29  Ibid., 181–98. 30  Ibid., 43–44. Ibn ʿArabī quotes Quran 2:165 and 12:30—the latter is the Sura Yūsuf. He does not give the name of the ʿAzīz’s wife. 31  See below the discussion on the story of Bāzigha and the opening comments on the ways love is induced in the lover’s heart through audition or vision. 32  See for instance Jāmī, “Silsilat al-dhahab,” 268–70.

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The ignorance of the entire chart of the feelings induced by the contemplation of beauty is the root of torment and suffering; this is illustrated by Zulaykhā’s desperate pining in the mathnavī. What distinguishes the divine from the mundane lover is not the nature of love itself, but the awareness of its cause:33 dil-ī k’ū ʿāshiq-i khūbān-i dil-jū’st agar dānad v’agar ne ʿāshiq-i ū’st. A heart in love with attractive beauties, whether he knows it or not, is in love with Him.34 But, at the level of experience, each stage is a necessary step on the way to contentment. The acknowledgement of the entire paradigm of love is illustrated in the prologue of YZ with the story of the disciple and his spiritual master. The lesson of this story lies in the necessity to experience mundane love (ʿishq-i majāzī) in order to experience true love (ʿishq-i ḥaqīqī). It is introduced by the following verses: Do not turn away from love, even if it is profane, because it is a means to reach its true form. If, first, you don’t read the alphabet from the slate, you are unable to study the Quran.35 It is through this lens that the emotions and behaviors of Zulaykhā, who is unconventionally playing the role of the ʿāshiq in this story, must be understood.36 The moments of doubt and torment she is experiencing are, in Jāmī’s rendering of the story, the result of the confusion (ḥayrat) one must face as long as the true nature of love—the manifestation of divine beauty in the phenomenal world—is not uncovered.

33  In his Silsilat al-dhahab Jāmī stresses that the awareness of the cause (sabab) is what distinguishes the “praiseworthy” from the “blamable confusion” (ḥayrat-i maḥmūd/ḥayrat-i madhmūm). Ibid., 279–81. 34  Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 36, line 337. 35   ma-tāb az ʿishq rū gar khwud majāzī’st/ki ān bahr-i ḥaqīqī kārsāzī’st. ba lawḥ avval alif be tā nakhwānī/qurʾān dars khwāndan kay tavānī. Ibid., 37, lines 358–59. 36  See A. Irani’s contribution on the question of gender in the Bengali renderings of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā.

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In the last section of the discourse on love and just before he starts focusing on speech (sukhan), Jāmī testifies to his own experience of love all throughout his life: Praise be to God that since I am in this world, I swiftly treaded the path of love. When the nurse saw that my musk had no pouch,37 she severed my umbilici with the blade of love. When my mother put her breast against my lips, she fed me the milk of thirst for love.38 Since he is an ʿāshiq, he identifies himself with Zulaykhā, who must be understood as the voice of the poet himself in the poem. The guile (makr) Zulaykhā displays to obtain Yūsuf is born from the overwhelming motion of the ʿāshiq attracted to his beloved; nothing can be done about this except by the lover herself, who needs to open her eyes to the true nature of this attraction. She needs to convert to the wholesomeness of love, and reach its selfless stage, maḥabbat. Bāzigha, charmed by Yūsuf’s beauty, first wishes to purchase him when he is sold at the market in Misr; but after listening to his speech on the 37  The exact meaning of this verse is obscure to me. In his French translation, A. Bricteux skips the problematic part of this hemistich: “Dès ma naissance, ma nourrice me trancha avec le glaive d’amour le cordon ombilical […].” Jāmī, Yoûssouf et Zouleïkha, trans. Auguste Bricteux (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1927), 23. Ḥakīm Muḥammad Sājid’s commentary also suggests that traditional commentators had a hard time construing this image: “ ‘Musk’ signifies existence and the body, and ‘pouch’ is the mother’s womb. That is to say, when the nurse saw that the musk of my bodily existence was ‘without pouch’ (i.e. separated from my mother’s womb)—that is, when she took me at the moment of my birth—she severed my umbilici with the sword of love. Otherwise, I (i.e. Md. Sājid) would say that when the nurse perceived [in me], without veil (i.e. outside the mother’s womb? ), the meaning of love, which is similar to musk, she smelt me and, in accordance with this [smell], cut my umbilici with the sword of love.” He then quotes a variant reading: chū dāya nāf-i man bīmushk dīda (“When the nurse saw that my umbilici had no musk”), which he construes as: “[…] when the nurse found my existence and body without the musk of love, that is to say that in me she found no trace of love, she severed the umbilici with the sword of love and through this action impressed the seal of love upon me.” Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and Ḥakīm Muḥammad Sājid al-Qādirī al-Jahnjānavī, Sharḥ-i Zulaykhā, ed. Mawlavī Muḥammad Shāh (Cawnpore: Naval Kishor, 1884), 54–55. 38   bi-ḥamd Allāh ki tā būdam dar-īn dayr/ba rāh-i ʿāshiqī būdam sabuk-sayr. chū dāya mushki man bī-nāfa dīda/ba tīgh-i ʿāshiqī nāf-am burīda. chū mādar bar lab-am pastān nihāda’st/ zi khūnkhwārī-i ʿishq-am shīr dāda’st.

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true nature of physical beauty, she gives everything away to lead the life of an ascetic. Zulaykhā—unlike Bāzigha—needs to burn down entirely and see her youth and wealth fade away in order to achieve selfless love. Although Jāmī is very systematic in his recourse to Ibn ʿArabī’s terminology, we should not see the narrative of YZ as a purely allegorical story in which each character would represent one abstract notion of the doctrine of love. The doctrine of love exposed in YZ actually does not allow the identification of any of the character with the “divine beloved,” and Zulaykhā as well as Yūsuf and the other characters of the story are all parts of the divine epiphany. Jāmī seizes every occasion to contemplate beauty. The wujūdī terminology is used in the treatment of every manifestation of beauty, be it through Yūsuf’s appearance or that of any other character—including Zulaykhā, whose sarāpā also contains a poetical terminology of mystic poetry.39 In Persian technical literature on poetics and rhetoric, the very category of “mystic poetry” seems to have been formulated for the first time in Jāmī’s milieu—by his disciple Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 910/1504–5) in his Badāʾiʿ alafkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār (Wondrous Thoughts on Poetical Tropes). The term that he used to designate mystic poetry was asrār (pl. of the Arabic sirr “secret”). Of course, composing mystic poetry as such was not new in the Persian literary tradition, but, as Futūḥī pointed out in his study of the rhetoric and the so-called “Indian style” (sabk-i hindī), the identification of a specific kind of poetry characterized by the use of images and tropes meant to convey spiritual meanings was a novelty in the science of rhetoric (badīʿ) in Persian.40 In the opening section of the treatise (muqaddima), in a survey of terms that ought to be used to categorize poetry (dar bayān-i alfāẓ-ī ki dar anvāʿ-i shiʿr mustaʿmil mī-bāshad), Kāshifī gives the following definition under the entry “asrār”: Asrār—plural of sirr (secret); something hidden is called a secret. As a technical term it is a poem based on divine gnosis and states, and it draws from the principles of Sufism and the concepts of gnosticism, like the poems of Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn Muḥammad ʿAṭṭār, Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, Shaykh Fakhr al-Dīn Ibrāhīm ʿIrāqī, and the like. It is called “secrets” because their meaning remains hidden to most creatures. Without the help of divine guidance and the support of heavenly inspiration, this kind of speech cannot reach the realm of comprehension.41 39  Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 44–48. 40  Maḥmūd Futūḥī Rūdmuʿjanī, Naqd-i adabī dar sabk-i hindī (Tehran: Sukhan, 1385), 140. 41   asrār—jamʿ-i sirr ast; va sirr chīzī pūshīda rā gūyand; va dar iṣṭilāḥ, shiʿr-ī bāshad mubtanī bar maʿārif-i rabbānī va mavājīd-i subḥānī; va mubnī az qavāʿid-i ḥaqāʾiq-i taṣavvuf

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The Poetics of asrār in South Asia

Shifting directly from Herat to Bengal will not do, and we need to briefly stop in Northern India to look at the development of Persian and vernacular mystic literature. While Jāmī was writing his oeuvre in Herat, and other members of the courtly milieu worked at describing the features of mystic literature, IndoPersian authors in the Indian Subcontinent were also elaborating on similar topics. Fifteenth-century Hindustan witnessed the rise of Indo-Afghan power and the formation of a multilingual literary culture that comprised both classical (Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian) and vernacular features. The Persian literature produced during this period is characterized by the development of lexicography and a regional Sufi literature that increasingly engaged with vernacular traditions.42 In Kashmir, it was the period of the rule of Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (r. 823–875/1420–1470) who also created a major center of multilingual literacy and played a key role in the transmission of the courtly culture of Herat in South Asia.43 The main poet of the Lodi court in Delhi was Shaykh Jamālī (d. 942/1535). A boon-companion (nadīm) of Bahlūl Lodī (r. 855–894/1451–1489), Jamālī also spent long periods of time travelling and composed his most famous poem, Mihr u Māh, for friends in Tabriz.44 It has been recorded in several tadhkiras that Jamālī actually met with Jāmī on his way to Mecca.45 Jamālī also contributed in his way to the systematization of the symbolic reading of asrār poetry by composing the Mirʾāt al-maʿānī (The Mirror of Meanings), a versified treatise on the spiritual meaning of the descriptions of the limbs of the beloved

va qavānīn-i daqāʾiq-i taʿarruf; chūn ashʿār-i shaykh farīd al-dīn muḥammad ʿaṭṭār va mawlānā jalāl al-dīn muḥammad rūmī va shaykh fakhr al-dīn ibrāhīm ʿirāqī va mānand-i ān; va īn nawʿ-i shiʿr rā ba jihat-i ān asrār khwānand ki maʿānī-i ān bar bīshtar khalāʾiq pūshīda bāshad; va juz ba dastyārī-i tawfīq-i ilāhī va ta‌ʾyīd-i jadhabāt-i nā-mutanāhī, ba sar-ḥadd-i idrāk-i īn nawʿ-i sukhan natavān rasīd. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, Badāʾiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār, ed. Mīr Jalāl al-Dīn Kazzāzī (Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1369), 81. 42  Stefano Pellò, “Local Lexis? Provinicializing Persian in Fifteenth-Century North India,” in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166–85; Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545, ed. Wendy Doniger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 43  On YZ in Kashmir, see Luther Obrock’s contribution in this volume. For the later reception of the text in the same region, see also Ryan Perkins and Sunil Sharma. 44  Ḥāmid ibn Faḍl Allāh Jamālī, Mathnavī-i Mihr u Māh: 905 H. (Rawalpindi: Intishārāt-i markaz-i taḥqīqāt-i fārsī-i īrān va Pākistān, 1974). 45  For references on this event, see Muzaffar Alam’s chapter in this volume.

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from head to toe (sarāpā).46 This poetic form was widely used since the beginning of the mathnavī tradition, but judging from the several specimens found in YZ, Jāmī seems to have been particularly fond of this form, which was then directly associated with asrār literature. Vernacular Muslim literature equally integrated the poetics of asrār, as poets and commentators adapted it to the various regional idioms of the Subcontinent. One striking example of the recourse to this type of symbolic reading is Mīr ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Bilgrāmī’s (b. 915/1509–10, d. 1017/1608) Ḥaqāʾiq-i hindī (974/1566).47 In this treatise the author, who was a Sufi shaykh of Awadh, argues in favor of the use of Hindavi songs and Vaiṣṇava imagery in samāʿ sessions. The method that he used to unfold the hidden meaning of images drawn from Kr̥ṣṇa’s life is that of the poetics of asrār, in which Indic tropes and specific terms are given a technical meaning within the domain of taṣavvuf. In the same region of Awadh, another vernacular tradition developed in regional courts and Indo-Afghan milieus that would permanently and more deeply reconfigure the way poetry, and especially narrative poetry, would be read in the following centuries: the Avadhi Sufi romance. The genre often called Sufi romance is the product of a regional reading of Islamic mysticism.48 In its structure, it evinces the influence of Persian mathnavīs, but the metre and poetic conventions link these texts to Middle Indic lyric and narrative literary traditions.49 Considering Avadhi Sufi romances only from the point of view of their composite aspects, and only as a derivative genre, would miss the point of what these texts represented in the literary culture of Hindustan: a coherent literary tradition that, once its standards were fixed in the form of what could be called a canon around the mid-sixteenth century, evolved parallel to Persian mathnavīs in the Subcontinent.50 More than a parallel trend in Islamicate 46  Hamid Ibn Fazl Allah Jamali, The Mirror of Meanings, ed. Nasr Allah Purjavadi, trans. Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2002). This versified manual for the interpretation of poetic tropes, along with its implicit model Shabistarī (d. 740/1320)’s Gulshan-i rāz and the commentaries upon it, was actually used by commentators in the Subcontinent. See for instance Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān “Khatmī” Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ʿirfānī-i ghazal-hā-yi Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Bahāʾ al-Dīn Khurramshāhī, Kūrush Manṣūrī, and Ḥusayn Amīn, 4 vols. (Tehran: Nashr-i Qaṭra, 1378). 47  Francesca Orsini, “ ‘Krishna Is the Truth of Man’: Mir ʿAbdul Wahid Bilgrami’s Haqāʾiq-i Hindī (Indian Truths) and the Circulation of Dhrupad and Bishnupad,” in Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India, ed. Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch, Brill’s Indological Library 46 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 222–46. 48  Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545. 49  Ibid.; Thomas De Bruijn, Ruby in the Dust: Poetry and History of the Padmāvat by the SouthAsian Sufi Poet Muhammad Jāyasī (Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2012). 50  Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545.

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narrative poetry, Avadhi romances became a prominent lens through which Persian poets themselves conceived of the romance genre. Poems based on the story of Lorik and Satī Maynā—such as the foundational text of the genre, Mawlānā Dāʾūd’s Candāyan (781/1379)—or the story of Padmāvatī or Mr̥gāvatī were later composed in Persian. One could argue that even classical Persian romances by Niẓāmī, Khusraw, or Jāmī were eventually read with the poetics of these vernacular texts in mind; at least this was clearly the case for Bengali poets who rendered Persian romances like Jāmī’s YZ.51 It is noteworthy that love in its Indic form—premarasa (lit. “the nectar/ delight of love”)—is the central concept of the tradition. Conceptually, premarasa is loosely connected to the Sanskrit theory of “aesthetic emotions” and it shares the all-pervasiveness of love in waḥdat al-wujūd as treated by Jāmī in his prose and verse works. But the aesthetics and semantics of the premarasa have a history of their own that cannot be entirely explained by investigations on the Arabo-Persian or Sanskrit sides.52 When discussing the reception of Jāmī’s works in South Asia, and particularly in the case of YZ, the Avadhi corpus provides an alternative Sufi poetic idiom that evolved in dialogue with the poetics of asrār in the Subcontinent. In Bengal, where both Avadhi and Persian texts constituted the traditional background of vernacular poets, this deśī (regional) poetics of asrār provided vernacular authors with alternative approaches to interpret and recreate the semantic content of their Persian models. Yūsuf u Zulaykhā was an immensely successful poem and lived a life of its own beyond the collection of Haft awrang.53 This success can be seen through the many translations, poetic responses, and commentaries that were written on the text (as far as I know, mainly in South Asia). The composition of running (sharḥ) or marginal (ḥāshiya) commentaries on YZ was part of a larger tradition in South Asia.54 In most cases, the marginal glosses aimed at clarifying the meaning of each verse at a grammatical and sometime rhetorical level without 51  For a discussion on the intertext of the Persian readership of Avadhi romances, see Shantanu Phukan, “Through a Persian Prism: Hindi and Padmavat in the Mughal Imagination” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2000). 52  On premarasa in the context of early Bengali Muslim poetry, see Ayesha Irani’s contribution to the present volume. 53  For a study of several versions of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Persian in the larger context of romance mathnavī literature, see Ḥasan Dhū al-Faqārī, Yakṣad manẓūma-yi ʿāshiqāna-yi fārsī (Tehran: Charkh, 2013), 1098–1145, and especially 1111 for references to translations and commentaries. See Sunil Sharma’s essay in this volume on the illustrated manuscripts of YZ, which gives a sense of the great success of the mathnavī in various contexts. 54  Javād Sharīfī, “Jāmī dar shibh-i qārra,” in Dānishnāma-yi adab-i Fārsī: Adab-i fārsī dar shibh-i qārra-yi Hind (Hind, Pākistān, Banglādish), ed. Hasan Anushe, vol. 4 (Tehran: Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1996).

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further comments on the spiritual teachings conveyed by the text. But there are some examples of mystical commentaries that rely on the entire range of exegetic tools provided by the poetics of asrār.55 The presence of marginal glosses in manuscripts and lithograph editions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries point to the study of YZ in South Asian maktabs.56 We can trace references to Jāmī in the curriculum of munshīs at least from the first part of the seventeenth century.57 His letters and poems were considered to be models of good style and were therefore closely studied by any individual wishing to make a career in the Mughal administration.58 For Bengal proper, we can gather data on a larger scale from the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century the systematic discovery and adoption of Indo-Persian literary culture by the Europeans provides a wealth of information on the way Persian literacy was acquired.59 Then, during the second phase of the British settlement in India, surveys about the state of education in traditional institutions show that Jāmī’s works, and especially YZ, were on the curricula of most madrasas in Bengal.60 Hence, for the later Bengali versions at least, we know that YZ was a part of the basic Indo-Persian literary culture of Muslims and Hindus trained in Bengal’s maktabs and madrasas.61 55  This spiritual reading is somewhat reflected in Ḥakīm Muḥammad Sājid’s commentary, but Mawlavī Muḥammad Multānī had an even more systematic recourse to such symbolic readings in his commentary on YZ in a manuscript copied in Ramadan 1234/June 1819 and preserved in the library of McGill University in Montreal. 56  Chander Shekhar and ʿAbdurrashid, Fihrist-i kutub-i Maṭbaʿ-i Munshī Naval Kishor: 1896 (New Delhi: Dillī Kitāb Ghar, 2012), 122–23. 57  On the presence of Jāmī in the education of Mughal princes, see Muzaffar Alam’s contribution in this volume. 58  See for instance the curriculum drawn from the Khulāṣat al-makātib (1688) in which the section on poetry opens with Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā. See Muhammad Aslam Syed, “How Could Urdu Be the Envy of Persian (Rashk-i -Fārsi)! The Role of Persian in South Asian Culture and Literature,” in Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order, ed. Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway, Penn Museum International Research Conferences 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012), 289–90. 59  For instance the French interpreter Augustin Aussant (fl. 1769–1785) gives a detailed list of the Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani works that he read in the order in which he studied them. In this list, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā is the twentieth item, between Saʿdī’s Būstān and Abū al-Faḍl’s collection of letters. See Augustin Aussant, “Exemplaire persan” (Paris, 1779– 1780), fol. 1b, Supp. Persan 393, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 60  William Adam, Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar: Submitted to Government in 1835, 1836, and 1838; with a Brief View of Its Past and Present Condition, ed. James Long (Home Secretariat Press, 1868), 103, 114, 201. 61  See the example of the Hindu (Vaidya) Gaurkiśor Sen who first studied in a maktab and became munṣif before he converted to Islam and took the name Sādek Ālī.

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The success of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā as a work independent from the collection of Haft awrang and from Jāmī’s other works calls for an approach different from that used in looking at the significance of the poem within Jāmī’s intellectual biography. The separate reception of YZ implies at least three possible readings: – A reception by readers aware of Jāmī’s other works and his commentary on Ibn ʿArabī and waḥdat al-wujūd; – A reception by readers familiar with wujūdī theology and the poetical terminology of asrār literature—but not necessarily aware of the details of Jāmī’s rendering of this doctrine; – A reception by readers unaware of the significance of Jāmī’s larger discourse on the subject, readers whose understanding is based on a different literary and religious idiom. I have given an example of the first reading in the first section of the present article. The second kind of reception characterizes the South Asian commentarial tradition, in which the terminology is unpacked according to a conventional understanding of Sufi images, but not necessarily according to Jāmī’s more specific rendering of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine. The third approach, in which a new set of concerns and a different literary and religious idiom constitute the basis of interpretation, is found in the Bengali renderings composed between the seventeenth and nineteenth century. 4

Four Bengali Versions of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā

Now that we have some idea of the agenda of Jāmī in his poem, and explored the development of affiliated genres in the Persian and vernacular literatures in North India, I will turn to the corpus of Bengali texts adapted from Jāmī’s YZ. There are several versions of the story of the prophet Yūsuf in Bengali, but I will focus on four that constitute specimens of the reception of Jāmī’s text and represent the main trends of Muslim vernacular literature in Bengal between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.62 The four versions belong to the same narrative form of Bengali poetry: the pā̃cālī.63 All four predominantly use the same metre that is characteristic of this form: the paẏār. Some versions, 62  In addition to the Bengali versions of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā discussed in the present article, Raziya Sulatana gives the references of later Dobhāṣī versions, several of which are derived from Śāh Garībullāh’s poem. See Raziya Sultana, Ābdul Hākim, kavi o kāvya (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1987), 53–54. 63  John E. Cort, “Making It Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by SeventeenthCentury Jains,” in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance Cultures in North

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like the one of Muhammad Sagīr, display a slightly more elaborate use of other lyric metres in songs inserted into the narration.64 The earliest two versions from Southeastern Bengal are composed in a highly Sanskritized Middle Bengali that contains a very limited number of loan words from Arabic and Persian.65 The third version is from western Bengal, from the region of today’s Kolkata, and is composed in a language called Dobhāṣī (lit. “made of two languages”) by historians of Bengali literature.66 The language has acquired this name because, in addition to the more standard features of the late Middle Bengali poetic idiom, Dobhāṣī contains a high amount of Arabo-Persian loan words and some Hindustani grammatical forms. The fourth version is written in a language akin to Dobhāṣī, but with strong influences of the Sylheti (northeastern) dialect on its phonology and, to some extent, on its vocabulary.67 We can also observe a remarkable diversity in the scripts in which these four versions of YZ were written. The southeastern versions were preserved in manuscripts written in the eastern type of the Bengali alphabet.68 The Dobhāṣī version was preserved mainly in printed texts from the second half of the nineteenth century. I also located three manuscripts of the Dobhāṣī version of YZ from southeastern Bengal, two of which were copied in the Arabic script.69 From the colophon of one of these manuscripts, we learn that it was India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherin Brown (Cambridge: Open Books Publishers, 2015), 61–105. 64  Max Stille, “Metrik und Poetik der Josephsgeschichte Muhammad Sagirs” (Master Thesis, Heidelberg, 2013); Max Stille, “Śāh Muhammad Śagīrer Iusūph-Jolekhā: paẏār evaṃ tripadī chander adal-badal,” Vabnagar 2 (April 2015): 177–90. 65   On Muhamamd Sagīr’s language see Śāh Muhammad Sagīr, Iusuph Jolekhā, ed. Muhammad Enamul Haq, reprint (Dhaka: Māolā Brādārs, 2009), 315–17. 66  Thibaut d’Hubert, “Dobhāshī,” ed. Denis Matringe, Everett Rowson, and Gudrun Krämer, Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (Brill Online, 2014), http://dx.doi.org.proxy.uchicago. edu/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27851. 67   Thibaut d’Hubert, “Sylhet Nagari,” ed. Denis Matringe, Everett Rowson, and Gudrun Krämer, Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (Brill Online, 2014), http://dx.doi. org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_25653. 68  Thibaut d’Hubert, “La diffusion et l’usage des manuscrits bengalis dans l’est du Bengale, XVIIe–XXe siècles,” ed. Maria Szuppe and Nalini Balbir, Eurasian Studies, Special Issue: Lecteurs et copistes dans les traditions manuscrites iraniennes, indiennes et centrasiatiques ; Scribes and readers in Iranian, Indian and Central Asian manuscript traditions 12 (2014): 337–38. 69  Sukumār Viśvās, Bāṃlā ekādemī pũthi paricaẏ (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1995), 191–92, MSS Bā. e. s. pũ. no. 30 garī 1/i.u. 1 and no. 31/garī. 2/i.u. 2; Abdul Karim, A Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Manuscripts in Munshi Abdul Karim’s Collection, ed. Ahmed Sharif, trans. Syed Sajjad Husain (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1960), 17–18, MS no. 557. J.M. Bhatarcharjee also recorded the presence of a manuscript copied and kept in Comilla.

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actually copied from an edition printed in the Bengali script.70 We thus have an interesting case of a shift from print to a local manuscript tradition—copying Bengali manuscripts in the Arabic script is a local practice typical of southeastern Bengal.71 Rounding out our tour of Bengali Muslim forms of literacy, the northeastern version by Munsī Sādek Ālī (b. 1798) was published in the local Sylheti Nagari script.72 In the eighteenth century, Jāmī’s YZ was already included in the curriculum of traditional education in Bengal. In spite of the debates on the exact date of the composition of the text, it seems fair to say that Muhammad Sagir’s Iusuph Jolekhā is the first Bengali adaptation of Jāmī that is still extant. The discoverer and editor of the text, Muhammad Enamul Haq (1902–82), in an article published prior to the publication of the edition of the text, claimed that Sagīr lived during the reign of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Aʿẓam Shāh (792–814/1389–1410).73 This extremely early date, in the context of Bengali literature, implies that Sagīr’s text was not an adaptation of Jāmī’s YZ. In a later article, Raziya Sultana convincingly argued against this early date and proved that even though Jāmī is not mentioned as a model in the text, a close comparison of both poems shows that Sagir had Jāmī’s poem in front of his eyes when he composed his version.74 The other southeastern version is from the seventeenth century and was composed by Ābdul Hākim (ca. 1600–1670). According to Raziya Sultana, the text was probably written early during the poet’s life, sometime around 1625 and 1645.75 The author was a rural scholar who lived in the small kingdom of Bhuluya, between the expanding Mughal province of Bengal and the Arakanese kingdom, which was then home to a rich Bengali literary tradition.76 Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharjee, Catalogus Catalogorum of Bengali Manuscripts (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1978), 16. 70   bānghālā asīlu pastuk (read: pustak) likhīlūm ʿarabīti. “The book was in Bengali [script], I wrote it in Arabic [script].” Viśvās, Bāṃlā ekādemī pũthi paricaẏ, 192, Bā. e. s. pũ. no. 31/ garī. 2/i.u. 2, 261, lines 6–7. The date of the completion of the manuscript—1233 of the Arakanese era (ca. 1871) is given twice in the Bengali and the Persian colophons. 71  d’Hubert, “La diffusion et l’usage des manuscrits bengalis dans l’est du Bengale, XVIIe– XXe siècles,” 338–39. 72  Munsī Sādek Ālī, Mahabbata nāmā: Iuchupha Julikhā, ed. Muhammad Abdul Mannan (Dhaka: Utsa Prakāśan, 2009). 73  See Ayesha Irani’s contribution in the present volume for a detailed study of Sagīr’s work and further comments on the dating of the poem. 74  Sultana, Raziya, “Śāh Muhammad Sagīrer kāl nirṇaẏ samasyā,” Bāṃlā Ekāḍemī Patrikā 30, no. 1 (BA 1393): 71–88. 75  Ābdul Hākim, Ābdul Hākim racanāvalī, ed. Sultana, Raziya (Dhaka: Dhaka University, 1989), 6; Sultana, Ābdul Hākim, kavi o kāvya, 23–46. 76  Thibaut d’Hubert, “Pirates, Poets, and Merchants: Bengali Language and Literature in Seventeenth-Century Mrauk-U,” in Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early

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We do not have much information about the life of Ābdul Hākim, but we have several other texts that he composed.77 Śāh Garībullāh ( fl. 1765) is the author of the western Dobhāṣī version. Garībullāh’s version became extremely popular and we see several illustrated editions of his text published from the Baṭtalā—the neighborhood of Calcutta where affordable popular books were printed.78 Finally, Munsī Sādek Ālī ( fl. 1798–1851) is the author of the Sylheti, or northeastern, version. He can also be considered a figurehead of the Sylhet Nagari literary tradition. His life of the Prophet Muḥammad, entitled Hālatun Nabī, became very popular in Bengal, and was also printed in the Bengali script in Calcutta.79 Following the trail of the several versions of Jāmī’s YZ leads us to an encounter with the main trends of Bengali Muslim literature. The diversity one can see in the scripts used and in the literary idioms themselves is often overlooked in favor of a selective discourse on Bengali Muslim literature. From the point of view of scholarship on Bengali literature, the study of the translations and adaptations of YZ in Bengali allows us to realize how fragmented this tradition is, not only because of the use of different alphabets and literary idioms, but also because the various renderings of YZ give the impression that each trend starts anew from the beginning, without mentioning the existence of the previous versions. In each case, the author turns implicitly or explicitly to Jāmī’s authoritative text to establish the foundations of the tradition. One reason for this systematic recourse to Jāmī is the fast inclusion of his work into the South Asian curriculum and the canonical status that Yūsuf u Zulaykhā gained almost instantly. But, as I mentioned above, bringing newness into the realm of mathnavī writing by drawing inspiration from a Quranic story was also part of Jāmī’s agenda. Yūsuf u Zulaykhā combines several features that were perfectly relevant to his time and to the larger trends that were then developing in the Persianate world—most significantly, the fusion of the ethos of love and its spiritual hermeneutic with a courtly adab designed to spread Modern India, ed. Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch, Brill’s Indological Library 46 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 47–74. 77  In addition to Raziya Sultana’s works on this author and his oeuvre, see Thibaut d’Hubert, “ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Denis Matringe, Everett Rowson, and Gudrun Krämer (Leiden: Brill Online, 2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_ COM_27231; Thibaut d’Hubert, “La réception d’un succès littéraire persan dans les campagnes du Bengale: une traduction de Jāmī par le poète Ābdul Hākim,” Bulletin d’Études Indiennes 24–25 (2006–2007): 121–38. 78  Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 79  Munsī Sādek Ālī, Ketāb Hālatunnabī, ed. Muhammad Abdul Mannan (Dhaka: Utsa Prakāśan, 2009).

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beyond the court through newly established educational institutions and the formation of new curricula. In YZ, the Sufi and courtly ethos find a point of equilibrium in the frame of a poetical commentary on the Quranic text. The Quranic background of the story was also instrumental in allowing its reception in a variety of cultural milieus throughout the Islamicate world. Rather than the reiteration of yet another romance from the past, and more than the story itself, which significantly differs from the one found in the twelfth sura of the Quran, the focus of Jāmī’s discourse is on the illustration of “Truth” (rāstī). Bearing in mind the debate around poetry as a means to produce deceptive images, he distinguishes himself from the poets of the past by highlighting the non-deceptive intent of his poetic discourse.80 As we shall see when discussing the two later versions in Dobhāṣī and Sylhet Nagari, the relative “newness” of the Quranic inspiration and, in Sādek Ālī’s case at least, the claim of truthful speech were well perceived by Jāmī’s Bengali readers and contributed to making his Maḥabbat-nāma one of the foundational texts of Bengali Muslim narrative poetry. Why did Garibullāh and Sādek Ālī choose the title Mahabbat-nāmā for their Bengali renderings of YZ? As a matter of fact, Jāmī in his prologue designated his poem as īn maḥabbat-nāma, “this book of selfless love”; the translation “selfless love” here referring to the Akbarian hierarchy of love discussed above.81 But there is another reason behind the choice of this title instead of the more well-known and, relative to the khamsa-navīsī tradition, paradigmatic title Yūsuf u Zulaykhā: the fact that it was mainly through the appellation Mahabbatnāma that Jāmī’s text was known and studied in South Asia. As a matter of fact, as Hamid Algar states in his monograph on Jāmī, “Yusuf va Zulaikha has been judged the most successful of Jami’s narrative masnavis, in large part because the theme of love, with its multiple connotations, excited his imagination more effectively than any other throughout his life.”82 80   shiʿr dar ʿurf-i ḥukamā kalām-ī’st muʾallif az muqaddimāt-i mukhayyala yaʿnī az sha‌ʾn-i ān bāshad ki dar khayāl-i sāmiʿ andāzad maʿānī rā ki mawjib-i iqbāl bāshad bar chīz-ī yā iʿrāḍ az chīz-ī, khwāh fī nafsihi ṣādiq bāshad va khwāh ne, va khwāh sāmiʿ iʿtiqād-i ṣidq-i ān dāshta bāshad yā ne. Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Bahāristān va rasāʾil-i Jāmī: mushtamil bar risāla-hā-yi mūsīqī, ʿarūḍ, qāfīya, Chihil ḥadīth, Nāʾīya, Lavāmiʿ, Sharḥ-i Ta‌ʾīya, Lavāyiḥ va Sar-rishta, ed. Aʿlákhān Afṣaḥzād, Muḥammad Jān. ʿUmarʿuf, and Abū Bakr Ẓuhūr al-Dīn (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2000), 122–23. 81   ṭamʿ dāram ki gar nāgah shigarf-ī/bikhwānad z’īn maḥabbat-nāma ḥarf-ī. natābad nāma-sān bar rūy-i man pusht/nasāyad khāma-vash bar ḥarf-am angusht. Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 40, lines 416–17. “I hope that if some great man/reads a few letters from this book of selfless love,/he won’t turn his back on me like a book;/that using his finger as a pen he won’t cross my words.” 82  Algar, Jami, 79.

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The emphasis on the term maḥabbat is thus a way to locate Jāmī’s work in the romance tradition, of which it soon became the epitome, replacing the archetypal model of Laylī u Majnūn. The connection of the mathnavī with the Quranic revelation, rather than the non-Islamic love stories or afsānas that Jāmī mentions in his prologue, also made Jāmī stand out within the Persian tradition: May I reveal my inner secret; may I please and sadden the world. Old became the fortune of Shīrīn and Khusraw, with sweetness I shall bring a new Khusraw /with a Shīrīn I shall seat a new Khusraw.83 Laylī and Majnūn’s story came to an end; now I should create a new model of perfection. Like the parrot, my inspiration shall crush the sugar of Yūsuf’s beauty and Zulaykhā’s passionate love. Since God told the most beautiful of all stories, in the most beautiful way I shall retell it. Since the witness is the Revealed Book, no entry should be granted to lie. The mind is not pleased by untruthfulness, even if you say that it is like truth. There is no ornament for speech like truth; the moon has beauty only when it lacks nothing.84 83  In his commentary, Ḥakīm Muḥammad Sājid highlights the second reading (ba-yā-yi majhūl-i vaḥdat, murād az Zulaykhā). Jāmī and Ḥakīm Muḥammad Sājid al-Qādirī alJahnjānavī, Sharḥ-i Zulaykhā, 57. The German translator Vincenz von Rosenzweig gave the first reading but indicated the pun in a note. See Joseph und Suleïcha: historischromantisches Gedicht aus dem Persischen des Mewlana Abdurrahman Dschami, trans. Vincenz Edlem von Rosenzweig (Vienna: Anton Schmid, 1824), 35. 84   daham az dil birūn rāz-i nihān rā/bikhandānam bigiryānam jahān rā. kuhan shud dawlat-i shīrīn u khusraw/ba shīrīn-ī nishānam khusraw-i naw. sar-āmad nawbat-i laylī u majnūn/ kas-ī dīgar sar-āmad sāzam aknūn. chū ṭūṭī ṭabʿ rā sāzam shakar-khā/zi ḥusn-i yūsuf u

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The kind of love displayed in those narratives—the lesser “passionate love” (ʿishq) still tainted with egotism—contrasts with the “selfless love” (maḥabbat) that Zulaykhā ultimately reaches, the same love that characterizes Yūsuf’s emotional realm from the outset of the story up to the end. As we have seen above, the four Bengali versions of Yūsuf u Zulaykhā/ Maḥabbat-nāma can be divided into two groups: the early versions from southeastern Bengal and the later versions of western and northeastern Bengal. Within both groups, we can observe some clear intertextual connections: Raziya Sultana highlighted some in the cases of Sagīr and Ābdul Hākim,85 and we will observe more in the cases of Śāh Garībullāh and Sādek Ālī. This reminds us of a crucial feature of the study of the reception of such popular texts: the reading and rendering of the source text implies the building of localized intertextual relationships that include the previous renderings of the same work in the target language. In the present case, what makes the relevance of this phenomenon even stronger, and the philological work of identifying this intertextual nexus more exciting, is the total absence of explicit reference to other vernacular works whatsoever. 5

Muhammad Sagīr and Ābdul Hākim

It is in Southeastern Bengal that we find the earliest specimens of Bengali literature written by Muslim authors.86 Among other things, this literature is characterized by its recourse to Sanskrit in order to translate Islamic thought and by the role of yoga and bio-cosmological principles in the religious idiom of Muslim authors.87 What seems particularly appealing when one studies the texts produced in this frontier region between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries is that it forms an actual tradition. What do I mean by “actual tradition”? Besides the homogeneity of the vocabulary and religious terminology used by the authors, the corpus shares a complex intertextuality, ʿishq-i zulaykhā. khudā az qiṣṣa-hā chūn aḥsan-ash khwānd/ba aḥsan vajh az-ān khwāham sukhan rānd. chū bāshad shāhid ān vaḥī-i munzal/nabāshad kidhb rā imkān-i madkhal. nagardad khāṭir az nārāst khursand/v’agar khwud gūʾī ān rā rāst mānand. sukhan rā zīvar-ī chūn rāstī nīst/jamāl-i mah bajuz nākāstī nīst. Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 38–39, lines 393–400. 85  Raziya Sultana, Ābdul Hākim, kavi o kāvya (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1987), 68–69. 86  d’Hubert, “Pirates, Poets, and Merchants.” 87   Tony K. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40, no. 3 (2001): 260–87; Shaman Hatley, “Mapping the Esoteric Body in the Islamic Yoga of Bengal,” History of Religions 46, no. 4 (2007): 351–68.

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which is not only vertical—from the cosmopolitan to the regional languages—but also horizontal. By “horizontal,” I mean that their intertextuality includes other vernaculars like Avadhi, Brajabuli, and Bengali texts written in southeastern Bengal. The versions of YZ composed by Muhamamd Sagīr and Ābdul Hākim are other testimonies of the creation of such horizontal intertextuality. Even if Muhammad Sagīr’s IJ is not the oldest text of Bengali literature, as its editor first claimed it to be, it is nevertheless the oldest Bengali version of the story based on Jāmī’s poem. The archaic features of the language are still relevant to establish a relative chronology between the two versions.88 On the basis of the formulaic expressions used by the poet and the courtly etiquette described in the text, it is probable that Sagīr was a member of the elite milieus of the Arakanese kingdom and thus belonged to the early seventeenth century, slightly before Ālāol, a court poet and translator of Avadhi and Persian narrative poetry.89 If we consider Sagīr as a slightly older poet, Ābdul Hākim borrowed from him to compose his version of YZ. Several passages contain verbatim quotes from Sagīr’s text as well as similar comparisons and metaphors; but this does not mean that Hākim did not use Jāmī’s Persian text at all. We know from his other texts that Hākim knew Persian well, and some verses of the Persian text are translated verbatim in his Bengali version.90 None of these versions is a literal translation of the text. Bengali translators of Persian texts in the seventeenth century always had recourse to dynamic translation. In the works of Ālāol, who provided the largest corpus of such translations, it is clear that translation derives from commentarial practices in which literal translation is present as the basis for further literary creation following the rules of regional poetics. 91 The structure of both texts closely follows Jāmī’s version. Muhammad Sagīr adds several episodes after the story of Jāmī’s mathnavī. Besides episodes drawn from the Quranic version of the narrative that Jāmī did not include in his poem, the stories told by Sagīr in this addendum share common motifs with the courtly literature of Arakan. In the additions he made to the source 88  Sagīr, Iusuph Jolekhā, 20–21. 89  Thibaut d’Hubert, “Ālāol,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Denis Matringe, Everett Rowson, and Gudrun Krämer (Leiden: Brill Online, 2013), http://referenceworks.brillon line.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/alaol-COM_27295. 90  For a detailed comparative analysis of Hākim’s poem with Sagīr and and Jāmī, see Sultana, Ābdul Hākim, kavi o kāvya, 58–74. 91  Thibaut d’Hubert, “‘Bhāṅgiẏā kahile tāhe āche bahurasa’: Madhyayuger kavi Ālāoler anuvād-paddhati,” Vabnagar 1 (April 2014): 59–76.

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text, Sagīr, like Ālāol, used motifs found in dāstān literature in Persian as well as the kathā cycles in Sanskrit. After the wedding of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, the Bengali poet turns to the plot of the Quranic story and relates that a terrible time of drought struck the world, leading Yūsuf’s brother to go to Misr hoping to obtain some food. This is the occasion for Yūsuf, his brother, and his father to be reunited. Then Yūsuf performs a digvijaẏa—a conquest of the world— and he reaches a place called Suvarṇapura. Not only do we find more typically South Asian narrative motifs, but the action itself is relocated to Bengal. 92 The episodes elaborate on the theme of dreams, but this time follow the trope as it is found in Avadhi romances—that is, involving a human dreamer and a fairy. In this story, Yūsuf’s younger brother marries a fairy, the daughter of Śāhbāl, king of all fairies—just as in the story of Sayf al-Mulūk adapted into Bengali by Ālāol.93 These additions to Jāmī’s plot bring us closer to the regional literary world of the Chittagongian author. Besides the dynamic translation performed by Sagīr and Hākim, who both render Jāmī’s text in a typically regional idiom, we also witness an inclusion of the Persian text in the local literary culture by the juxtaposition of another narrative that fulfills the expectations of the local audience. We may note that the shift in register created by the dāstān-like stories appended to the Quranic narrative hardly suits Jāmī’s original purpose. As aforementioned, the overall rhetoric of the text was not preserved, and the didactic and poetic dimensions are not so closely interwoven in the Bengali versions. Only the explicitly didactic parts can give us a sense of how the poets understood the poetics of asrār in Jāmī’s poem. A crucial episode for understanding the meaning of Jāmī’s text is the story of Bāzigha, a rich and pious woman who, unlike Zulaykhā, understood the true nature of Yūsuf’s beauty and engaged in an ascetic way of life.94 In the rendering of this story, we see that the Bengali poets kept the overall structure of the passage, but adapted each element of Jāmī’s poetics and rhetoric to the regional idiom. The first thing we notice when looking at the structure of the episode is the absence of the short prologue in which Jāmī unveils the inner meaning of the story. His language and the content of his discourse refer to Ibn ʿArabī’s 92  Haq sees in the name Suvarṇapura (“The Golden City”) a reference to the capital of the Indo-Afghan rulers of Bengal Sonargaon (Sanskrit Suvarṇagrāma, “The Golden Village”). Sagīr, Iusuph Jolekhā, 97. 93  Thibaut d’Hubert, “Living in Marvelous Lands: Persianate Vernacular Literatures and Cosmographical Imaginaires around the Bay of Bengal,” in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, ed. Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 84–104. 94  On the story of Bāzigha, see Irani and Obrock in this volume.

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exposition of the three ways in which hawā is induced: naẓar (vision), samaʿ (audition), and iḥsān (good behavior):95 na tanhā ʿishq az dīdār khīzad basā k’īn dawlat az guftār khīzad96 Not only does love occur through vision, often is this fate induced by speech. In the Bengali versions, we thus observe a tendency to remove purely didactical passages, especially when these are not part of a dialogue but provided by the narrator himself. Such omissions have significant consequences on the interpretation of the story by the Bengali audience. But the two Bengali authors do not use the exact same strategy in this regard. In the lines quoted below, we observe that Ābdul Hākim comes back to the theme of audition as an alternative way to induce love, but does so within the narration. This passage also allows us to see that Muhammad Sagīr synthesizes Jāmī’s account and barely keeps any comparison or metaphor. On the other hand, Ābdul Hākim is sometimes surprisingly close to Jāmī’s text, even translating some of his metaphors, or at least seeking equivalents in the local poetic idiom: Jāmī— ba-yūsuf guft chūn vaṣf-at shanīdam ba-dil dāgh-i tamannāy-at kashīdam97 She told Yūsuf: “When I heard your speech, I marked my heart with the brand of desire for you.” Sagīr— ichuphaka mukhe śuni aśakya kāhinī |98 tattva-jñāna labhileka sei se kāminī ||99 95  Ibn al-ʻArabī, Traité de l’amour, 118. 96  Jāmī, “Yūsuf u Zulaykhā,” 100, line 1686. 97  Ibid., 102, line 1741. 98  The term aśakya (lit. “impossible,” that is to say “extraordinary, unheard of”) may actually be a wrong transcription of eśaka (vairāgya) arises, again giving pleasure.

19  K ’param. Accepting this reading gives much the same sense: “In this world there is nothing unsurpassable …” 20  Here and throughout I translate the words citta and its synonyms as “heart” to provide a parallel to Jāmī’s key Persian term dil. Such a translation as opposed to the usual “mind” is justified by the Sanskrit lexicographical tradition, see for instance Amarakośa 1.4.315: cittaṃ tu ceto hṛdayaṃ svāntaṃ hṛn mānasaṃ manaḥ. I would like to thank Thibaut d’Hubert for pointing out Śrīvara’s translation of dil and the Amarakośa reference.

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In this verse Śrīvara presents in broad strokes his underlying philosophical schema. He provides a translation for ʿishq—here and throughout the Kathākautuka he uses the term rāga—as well as names the ultimate salvific goal, vairāgya, or dispassion. In Śrīvara’s translational project, vairāgya stands parallel concept to Jāmī’s final stage of selfless love, maḥabbat. Śrīvara’s schema will be enlivened by parallels to Tantric Śaiva cosmology, but here it must be stressed that for Śrīvara, the ultimate goal is vairāgya, or dispassion, which is the necessary precursor to spiritual liberation. This word is especially important in Kashmir following the teachings of the Mokṣopāya, a Kashmiri text teaching liberation to the warrior class (the Mokṣopāya gained great fame outside of the Valley as the Yogavāśiṣṭha and related texts.21 These Mokṣopāya-related texts remained quite popular in Muslim courts, garnering several translations into Persian).22 An episode in Śrīvara’s Sanskrit history of Sultanate Kashmir shows Śrīvara himself teaching the Mokṣopāya to Sultān Zayn, underlining the importance of this text and its underlying philosophy in the Sultanate court.23 As the introduction to the Kathākautuka will show, the Mokṣopāya’s central concept of vairāgya24 is essential not only to Śrīvara’s historical imagination but also to his telling of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. Given Śrīvara’s close association to the concept of vairāgya, he must explain how the rāga of the Kathākautuka as a translation of the ʿishq of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā fits into his understanding. We see in the preceding verses that Śrīvara resorts to a clever verbal play here, drawing on the derivation of the term vairāgya from vi- meaning without and rāga meaning passion, which is made into the abstract noun vairāgya. He first states that there is nothing except for (vinā) the passion of rāga. The first half of the verse gives the necessary building blocks, which can be transformed into dispassion; indeed, even grammatically there is no dispassion without passion. This rāga-vairāgya

21  The Mokṣopāya is the subject of an ongoing research project under the direction of Walter Slaje at the Martin-Luther Universität in Halle an der Saale. For the textual history, diffusion, and reception of this important text, see Walter Slaje, Vom Mokṣopāya-Śāstra zum Yogavāśiṣṭha-Mahārāmayaṇa (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994). 22  The Persian Jog Bashisht and its Sanskrit source(s) has received more attention recently. Heike Franke provides an overview of the source’s transmission into Persian in “Die persischen Übersetzungen des Laghuyogavāśiṣṭha,” in The Mokṣopāya, Yogavāsiṣṭha and Related Texts, ed. Jürgen Hanneder (Aachen: Shaker, 2005), 113‒29. 23  See Obrock, “History at the End of History,” esp. 228‒30. 24  For an outline of vairāgya in the Mokṣopāya, see Slaje, “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement: On the Concept of the Jīvan-mukti in the Mokṣopāya,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 28 (2000): 171–94.

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relationship provides the philosophical and soteriological core of Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka and will animate the text on every level. Such ingenious displays continue throughout the creation of Śrīvara’s parallel cosmology, requiring, at times, the reading of radical equivalences into Sanskrit literary history to provide the conceptual space for a creative retelling of the Persian. Here, I provide a reading of Śrīvara’s account of Jāmī’s account of creation. I have abridged the text, but the flow of his account should be read as an argument. The main ingredients in Śrīvara’s account are the rāga/ vairāgya relationship and a Tantric Śaiva cosmology, in which the great god Śiva emanates and manifests the world. Tantric Śaivism provides a vocabulary and Śrīvara resorts to its somewhat technical lexicon of concepts, all in the service of linking ʿ ishq/rāga to an accepted Śaiva worldview. In his introduction of the concept of ʿishq, Śrīvara shows the centrality of ʿishq/rāga in three separate but interconnected instances. The first account is largely “mythological” in that it concentrates on the god Śiva creating the world. The second is more “theological” since it tries to align rāga with specifically Śaiva theologies. In the third, Śrīvara returns to a close translation of the Persian, his telling enlivened and deepened by the previous accounts. The Kathākautuka’s account of creation begins in the following verse: cittāsaktivaśenaiva sa svayaṃ bhagavāñ śivaḥ25 | śaktyaiva saha saṅgamya26 sarvam etad avāsṛjat ||1.51|| The Lord Śiva himself created all of this through the power inherent in the mind having come together with the Goddess Śakti/power. Here Śrīvara provides an overview for his entire account of creation to come. The verse highlights two key elements: the primacy of Śiva and the importance of Śakti. We will see later in the account how he integrates this into a cosmogony animated by rāga. This verse introduces the key term śakti, which can either mean the dynamic power that allows creation to go forward, or Śakti as the proper name of Śiva’s consort. The following verse backtracks to the beginning of the process of creation. Śrīvara here depicts the oneness and aloneness of the great God Śiva before the process of creation begins. He writes:

25  K bhagavañ chivaḥ. 26  Em. LO; S, K saṅgasya. The akṣara-s ma and sa are often confused in the Śāradā script. I would like to thank Dr. Whitney Cox for this suggestion.

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dvitvahīne ’py anideśye jagannāmavivarjite | kaivalye kevalaṃ tasminn āsīd eko maheśvaraḥ ||1.52|| In that solitude (kaivalya) even being devoid of duality, non-discriminated (anideśya), devoid of the name “world” there was only Maheśvara.27 With echoes to great cosmogonic works such as the Nāsadīya (Ṛg Veda 10.129), Śrīvara starts at the beginning, although for him the existence of Śiva is taken as the starting point. From this absolute unity and aloneness (kaivālya), how does creation occur? Śrīvara continues in the following verses: nānārūpamayaṃ divyaṃ sarvalāvaṇyasaṃyutam | anekakautukākīrṇam anavadyam anaśvaram ||1.53|| paśyann evātmanātmānaṃ svadhāmādarśamaṇḍale28 | samaye ’smin sa deveśo babhūvānandanirbharaḥ ||1.54|| kasmaicid darśayāmy etad yāvac cintānvitaḥ śivaḥ | tāvad icchā samutpannā prādurbhūtāsya mohinī ||1.55|| Seeing his own self through his self—made of various forms, divine, endowed with every beauty, overstrewn with many wonders, faultless (anavadya), indestructible—in the mirror of his own splendor (dhāman), at that moment the lord of gods became a mass of bliss (ānandanirbhara). As Śiva became occupied [with the thought]: “I should show this to someone,” then icchā (desire/volition) arose, which became manifest for him as beguiling woman (mohinī). This account of creation shows that the unitary singleness of Śiva is instigated toward proliferation. Śiva’s awareness of himself makes a desire to reveal himself arise. This desire (here called icchā, a technical term that will be discussed in greater detail later) then seems to become physically manifest as a beautiful woman. The emanation can thus begin. In these verses, we have all the ingredients necessary for creation, yet at this moment Śrīvara stops, and two verses later, seems to begin his cosmogony again. The second account of creation is largely parallel to the first, but here, the connections between Śiva, rāga, and creation are expanded by tying them to specific theological concepts. The terms śakti and icchā appear again but in a

27  Although maheśvara simply means “great God,” this is simply a name of Śiva. 28  K sudhāmādarśamaṇḍale.

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slightly different way. Śrīvara begins the account of creation again, with the insertion of the term rāga, which for him stands in for ʿishq. He writes: icchāśaktyātha saṃgamya29 rāgeṇāpy30 āśritāśrayaḥ | sa hi devo mahādevaḥ tanmayaṃ vyasṛjaj jagat ||1.58|| And so that very God Mahādeva whose heart was occupied by passion too, united with the power (śakti) of desire (icchā) and created the world which consists of that. In this verse, as in the previous one, we see that Śrīvara brings the term rāga (his translational equivalent for the Persian ʿishq) into a different conceptual space. He seeks to align ʿishq as rāga with certain Tantric cosmologies. The first line provides two conditions for the creation of the world: first, Śiva unites with his31 power of volition (icchā), and second, his heart or mind as the locus of sensory perception (āśraya) is resorted to (āśrita) by rāga. Once these conditions are met, God can create (or emanate, vi+√sṛj) the world. In the Kathākautuka’s cosmogony, Śrīvara ties rāga to the orthodox notion of the tattvas, or the basic building-blocks of the world. In Śaiva cosmologies, icchā or volition refers to Śiva’s will, the first force that allows for the emanation of the world. Following the Kiraṇatantra, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa states: “icchā designates the will of God, that is considered as his sole instrument.”32 The compound icchāśakti takes this concept further; icchāśakti is the first of the three powers though which Śiva manifests the universe. Śrīvara begins creation in a way that is completely understandable within a specifically Kashmiri Śaiva Tantric cosmology: by invoking the first power through which God manifests the world. How then does this line up with his second condition, containing the all-important term rāga, a term that, although not unknown in Tantric writings, never assumes the same cosmological significance as icchā? I think that, for Śrīvara, the two conditions shown in the first half of verse 58 are not separate but parallel. In this way, Śrīvara unites Jāmī’s key concept of ʿishq and the Śaiva concept of icchā. Rāga, then, acts as a bridge mediating 29  Em. LO; S, K saṅgasya. 30  S rāgiṇāpy. 31  It is important to note that this is Śiva’s power of volition. According to the monistic Śaivism espoused by Śrīvara, the śaktis are his alone and have no independent existence, compare verse 1.52 quoted above. I would like to thank Walter Slaje for pointing this out to me. 32  Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, 213. The Sanskrit passage from the Kiraṇa runs: icchaiva karaṇaṃ tasya yathā sadyogiṇo matā. “Icchā alone is his instrument (karaṇa), so think true yogins.”

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and negotiating these ideas in this new Sanskrit telling. We see both the power of volition (icchāśakti) and passion (rāga) used in the instrumental case after a verbal element meaning something like “coming together” (sam+√gam)33 or “pervading” (ā+√śri), allowing the reader to draw parallels between the two concepts. The dense interbraiding of Śrīvara’s account allows for a layering of different ideas (both Sufi and Śaiva) and terms (both in Sanskrit and their unspoken Arabo-Persian homologies). Though the audacious constellation of these concepts, Jāmī’s ʿishq can become a fundamental and dynamic part of Śrīvara’s Śiva-centered Tantric cosmology. The next verses continue this Tantric emanationist cosmogony. After the introduction of rāga, the process of the creation of the world continues, now in terms of rāga rather than icchā: vidhāya vividhāṃ sṛṣṭiṃ svakīyāṃśayutāṃ tataḥ | kurvan rāgamayīṃ līlāṃ vibhāty asyāṃ svayaṃ vibhuḥ ||1.59|| tenecchayā jagat sarvaṃ racitaṃ yac carācaram | rāgeṇāpi na taj jātu virāgaṃ jāyate kvacit ||1.60|| He then made the variegated creation, all connected to a part of him (svakīyāṃśayutām) and the Lord, making this divine game (līlā) which consists of passion (rāga), shone forth in it. By him the entire universe was created through his desire, what is moving and what is fixed [was created] by passion too. Even through passion, the world will never at any time become dispassionate (virāga). These verses show the shift to an entirely rāga-based cosmology. Rāga here expands to become the animating principle for the act of creation. Śrīvara depicts Śiva’s divine play of emanating the world of saṃsāra as ultimately permeated by rāga. This passion cannot be extricated from the world, given that the cause is materially identical with its effect. Since the icchā of Śiva produces the world, everything that exists cannot but be permeated by rāga. This centering of rāga and this shift in terminology is essential to re-link Śrīvara’s Śaiva frame to Jāmī’s own introduction to the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. For Śrīvara, raga is the force that underlies and binds the existence of everything in the universe. While rāga is common in Brahmanical and Buddhist philosophies as one of the defilements that cause saṃsāra (kleśa), Śrīvara’s radical broadening of its range of meaning is necessary to link the Śaiva worldview to 33  The term sam+√gam resonates with the previous more sexualized account in verse 51 discussed above. This layering is no accident.

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the Sufi ideas underlying the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. Śrīvara provides an illustration for the broadened role of the rāga in verse 64: dṛṣṭvaivācetanaṃ baddharāgaṃ gharmarucāmbujam | sudhāṃśunā ca kumudaṃ tatsiktāḥ kiṃ na mānavāḥ ||1.64|| As soon as one sees that insentient lotus is bound by love for the light of light of the sun, and the [insentient] water-lily [is bound by love] for the moon, would not humans not [also] be drenched in it [=love]? Here, Śrīvara asserts that the pervasive force binding things together is nothing but rāga. In more orthodox Śaiva accounts, this underlying animating and unifying force would not be termed as such (nor even be governed by icchā as rāga’s homologue). However, in the Kathākautuka’s account, after anchoring ʿishq as rāga in a specific Tantric understanding of the cosmos, rāga can assume an all-pervading importance. Śrīvara’s vision of the world permeated by rāga can now come into conversation with Jāmī’s own Sufi cosmology animated by ʿishq. After his long digression from the Persian text of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, Śrīvara returns to a close translation of Jāmī’s words, which are now able to be enlivened by the connections to Śaiva contents. A side-by-side comparison of Śrīvara’s Sanskrit text to the Persian shows the Śiva-centered Tantric cosmology was a preamble to a careful translation of Jāmī’s use of ʿishq. In his Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, Jāmī writes: dilī fārigh zi dard-i ʿishq, dil nīst tan-i bī dard-i dil juz āb u gil nīst A heart free of love’s pain is no heart A body without the heart’s pain is nothing but clay and water.34 In these lines, Jāmī presents ʿishq as a being the driving force causing pain and agitation in the human heart. In verse 67 of the Kathākautuka, Śrīvara transforms Jāmī’s Persian quite literally, but with a few interesting changes. Formally speaking, Śrīvara must fill out the original Persian to fit the longer thirty-twosyllable Sanskrit śloka meter.

34  The Persian verses quoted here were translated by Prashant Keshavmurthy. I would like to thank Dr. Keshavmurthy for reviewing the Persian text of these verses with me.

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yadi cittaṃ bhaved rāga35 vyathāhīnaṃ na tan manaḥ | tanus tatpīḍayā tyaktā36 na sā mṛd vāriṇā37 vinā ||1.67|| If a heart (cittam) might exist devoid of agitation by passion, then that is not a heart (manaḥ). A body abandoned by the pain of it [i.e. passion]. It is nothing but clay without water. The translation is quite close; Śrīvara as usual transforms the heart (dil) of the Persian into Sanskrit words dealing with the mind and mental processes (citta, manas). The second line is an almost verbatim translation of the Persian, although the Sanskrit is at times difficult to construe. However, when read together with Jāmī’s original, it is clear that Śrīvara followed the Persian ­closely—he even uses the cognate tanuḥ for Jāmī’s tan.38 The crucial element here is Śrīvara’s use of rāga, which has been given its bearing by the previous verses; rooted in its Śaiva context and explained as the animating and binding force of the world, Jāmī’s verses can begin to make sense in Sanskrit. In the following verse Jāmī continues on the theme of the pain that comes from ʿishq, and how to transform this worldly, painful love into transcendent happiness. He writes: zi ʿālam rūy āvar dar gham-i ‘ishq ki bāshad ʿālam-ī khush ʿālam-i ‘ishq Turn your face from the world to love’s grief For a happy world is the world of love.

35  K rāśa(?). The characters śa and ga are easily confused in the Śāradā script, so much so that it has become almost proverbial. 36  Em. LO; K vyaktā, S tyaktvā. This verse is difficult to construe. Schmidt’s reading of tyaktvā is difficult because one would expect an accusative object, not the instrumental. Parab’s reading of vyaktā is possible, but in this case the emendation tyaktā suggests itself as highly likely. Such an emendation would produce a reading which could be construed as broadly parallel with the first line tanus tatpīḍayā tyaktā na sā mṛd vāriṇā vinā “a body abandoned by the pain of it is not [a body, it is] clay without water.” This reading, while elliptical, is plausible. A careful comparison of both the manuscript evidence and Śrīvara’s translational strategies is necessary. 37  S mṛddhāriṇā. 38  I would like to thank Thibaut d’Hubert for his insightful comments on construing and understanding this verse. He pointed out both the extreme literalness of his translation as well as Śrīvara’s clear use of the cognate Sanskrit tanuḥ for Persian tan.

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Again, Śrīvara expands on the ideas in Jāmī’s Persian. The Kathākautuka’s version reads: vivṛtya vadanaṃ lokāt tatrārpaya mukhaṃ mudā | saṃyojanādhikaḥ prokto rāgo harṣāya rāgiṇām ||1.68|| Turn your face from the world! Joyfully fix your sight (=lit. face) on that [passion]! Rāga for those possessed of rāga (rāgins), proclaimed as that which surpasses [even] sexual pleasure (saṃyojanādhika),39 causes joy. Again, the Sanskrit verse comes very close to the Persian in meaning while taking a different rhetorical path. In the Sanskrit there is no reference to grief (Persian gham) since the use of the Sanskrit word loka (“the mundane world”) is wide enough to conjure ideas of saṃsāra, the unsatisfactory realm of transmigration. Where Jāmī paradoxically juxtaposes “love’s grief” (gham-i ʿishq) to “a happy world” (ʿalam-ī khush), for Śrīvara, once one turns away from the world, one realizes the basic truth of rāga as the unifying and underlying force of the world. This idea is continued in the following verse. Jāmī writes: gham-i ʿishq az dil-i kas kam mabādā dil bī ʿishq dar ʿālam mabādā May no one’s heart want in love’s grief May no loveless heart exist in the world. Jāmī strongly emphasizes the paradox of love’s grief and love: while love is the cause of suffering, it is also what one should look towards for liberation from that pain. Śrīvara translates this as: taccintā hṛdi sarveṣāṃ nyūnā mā bhūt kadācana | mano manasvināṃ tena vihīnam api jātu cit ||1.69|| May the worry about it (taccintā) never at any time wane in the hearts of the entire world! [May] the minds of the wise never [be] deprived of it! 39  Following a suggestion by Walter Slaje, I translate the word saṃyojanādhika as “surpassing (adhika) sexual pleasure (saṃyojana).” However there seems to be some idea underlying the term meaning “binding together,” suggesting the meaning of “surpassing [even] the binding together,” perhaps even the binding together of the world of saṃsāra. Again, it is possible that Śrīvara intended valences.

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Here, Śrīvara shifts Jāmī’s term gham to the Sanskrit word cintā. No longer is it centrally about pain, suffering, or sadness, but rather care, worry, or anxious thought. While the Persian term can have these valences as well, the Kathākautuka here highlights the mental cogitative aspects. In the three Sanskrit verses, Śrīvara modulates his translation of gham from vyathā to pīḍā in the first verse, leaving it out entirely in the second, and cintā in the third. It seems to me that after setting up rāga as a basic force of the universe, Śrīvara is able to begin to place Jāmī’s original, but the ideas of gham and gham-i ʿishq are unable to be fully realized within this system. Notice that while for Śrīvara ʿishq keeps a single unified translation throughout, gham is translated variously and not entirely consistently. Śrīvara’s system allows rāga to act as a binding and pervasive force, but Śrīvara is unable to systematically integrate the concept of gham in the same way. Perhaps because the idea that the world (as saṃsāra) is unsatisfactory is so deeply engrained in Sanskrit literature that gham becomes unnecessary (or even redundant). A reading of these verses shows what is important for Śrīvara, but we may well ask ourselves why some concepts are given so much room to grow and breathe while others are marginalized. To answer this question, we must return to Śrīvara’s larger theoretical framing of the Kathākautuka. These three verses show both how closely Śrīvara read the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, and how this reading remains constrained by Śrīvara’s own worldview which demands that vairāgya, dispassion for the world, supersede rāga. This reading of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā is very much Śrīvara’s creation and would not be possible without the work put into providing a cosmological backdrop for his telling. Enlivened by its resonance with the key soteriological concept of vairāgya or dispassion, once Śrīvara ties rāga to the tantric cosmogonical principle of icchā, he is able to triangulate between these theological pulls. He presents a Sanskrit version of ʿishq, which can operate in consort with canons of Sanskritic thought while opening a space for his own telling to move beyond Persianate and Islamicate expectations. Śrīvara opens this space to provide the bases for the conceptual vocabulary that will make his translation possible. In the end, he parallels Jāmī’s movement from the passionate love of ʿishq to the selfless love of maḥabbat by detailing the transmutation of rāga into vairāgya.40 The Kathākautuka is self-aware in its originality, conscious of both Sanskritic and Persianate canons but moving outside of both. 40  Jāmī’s construction follows Ibn ‘Arabī’s movement from active ‘ishq to selfless maḥabbat and Śrīvara himself parallels this in his movement from rāga to vairāgya. The story of Baghiza (Sanskrit Deyā) provides an interesting example of this; in Śrīvara’s telling she moves from the state of active passionate love (rāga) to the vairāgya of a Śaiva ascetic, see Obrock “Muslim Mahākāvyas.” I would like to thank Thibaut d’Hubert for his helpful insights into Jāmī’s use of Ibn ‘Arabī’s categories and their relation to Śrīvara’s own schema.

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I will now turn to the Sanskrit literary theoretical concepts Śrīvara deploys, and their connections both to Jāmī’s text and to the overarching narrative design of the Kathākautuka. Until this point, this essay has concentrated on cosmological and theological aspects of love/ʿishq/rāga. However, rāga is not the only way “love” is translated, nor is tantric cosmogony the only source for Śrīvara’s textual imagination. Śrīvara frames his translation not only theologically through an investigation of love’s cosmogonic function, but also literarily through the canons of Sanskrit aesthetic criticism. The literary structure of Kathākautuka depends on rasa, or poetic savor, particularly śṛṅgāra rasa, the aesthetic experience of erotic love, and śānta rasa, or the aesthetic experience of the cessation of desires. For Sanskrit authors, śṛṅgāra rasa is based on the lived experience of passionate love (rati), while śānta rasa is based on the lived experience of worldweariness (nirveda). Through a process of imaginative cultivation, a work of literature transforms a worldly emotion (for instance passionate love) into an emotion that can be savored in the self-contained universe of the aesthetic experience. In this way, the basic human emotion of passion can be felt as śṛṅgāra rasa, dependent upon nothing but the work of art itself. For Śrīvara the concept of rasa is essential for the construction and conceptualization of the Kathākautuka.41 For the Kashmiri aesthetic theoreticians, there are nine basic human emotions, and nine corresponding rasas. As previously stated, the first is rati or “passion,” which manifests as śṛṅgāra rasa when engendered by a literary work, and the ninth and last is nirveda, which is felt by a poetic connoisseur as śānta rasa.42 Of the nine rasas, Śrīvara only mentions the first and the last. From this basic outline, we can see that these two aesthetic concepts map rather well onto the two poles of Śrīvara’s theology: rāga equates with śṛṅgāra rasa, while vairāgya equates with śānta rasa. In this way, the underlying theological premises created through Śrīvara’s innovative reading of Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, the Mokṣopāya, and the Śaiva tantric corpus can be brought within a rubric of aesthetic expectations laid out in Sanskrit (especially Kashmiri Sanskrit) literary theory. Through this basic insight, the Kathākautuka’s underlying architecture becomes more clear. Śrīvara’s concept of ʿishq as rāga meets the aesthetic canons 41  This schema was theorized five centuries earlier in Kashmir by Ānandavardhana ( fl. ca. 950) and his commentator Abhinavagupta ( fl. 1000). 42  Earlier theoretical accounts do not include śānta rasa. However, the Kashmiri theoreticians who Śrīvara follows accept śānta rasa. Abhinavagupta gives it special importance in his own system. For the controversy over śānta see V. Raghavan, The Number of Rasas (Madras: Adyar Library, 1940), esp. chap. 1–3.

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of rasa theory to provide the literary shape for the entirety of the text. The text moves from a celebration of rāga as ʿishq marked by the experience of śṛṅgāra and ends on vairagya, which is equated with spiritual liberation marked by the experience of śānta. Yet how does he link this to the Persian text and Sufi imagination of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā? Śrīvara justifies this literary and philosophical intervention in verses 14 and 15 of his introductory chapter. He writes: kiṃ tu pūrvam apūrvaṃ yat paraṃ yoganirūpaṇam | kṛtaṃ manīṣayā tena tad ante kathyate mayā ||1.14|| sarvatrāyaṃ kramaḥ pūrvaṃ śṛṅgārarasasaṃyutām | abhidāya kathāṃ pūrvaiḥ śānto ‘nte parikīrtitaḥ ||1.15|| But the new (apūrva) and extraordinary (para) description of contemplation (yoganirūpaṇa) which was placed by Jāmī in his wisdom at the beginning (pūrva), I put at the end. This is the order [of text] in all cases: First previous authorities speak of a story which is marked by śṛṅgāra rasa and they announce śānta rasa at the end.43 These two enigmatic verses point to another re-imagination of “love” as the emotional core of his textual world. Śrīvara has two interconnected aims in the two verses: the first makes an argument about the Kathākautuka’s structure, and the second implicitly deals with untranslatable religious elements of in the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. In the first, he appeals to an established tradition of previous authorities (in the Sanskrit simply pūrvaiḥ, “those who have come before”), tacitly arguing that his text moves within a certain set of expectations. To my knowledge, there is no place in the theoretical literature that argues for this śṛṅgāra to śānta progression within the context of a single work. Here Śrīvara seems to extrapolate from the order of the Kashmiri aesthetic theory wherein śṛṅgāra is the first rasa to be discussed and śānta stands as the last. In the context of an entire work, he presents his own innovative reading of both Sanskrit tradition and Jāmī’s trajectory from ʿishq to maḥabbat. This brings us to the second point of these two verses. What does he mean by that part of the text that Jāmī put at the beginning in his Yūsuf va Zulaykhā? Contextually, it is clear that Śrīvara refers circuitously to the Persian poem’s bismillah, the praise of God, which should occur at this place of the text. For all of Śrīvara’s claims to follow Jāmī’s text in strict succession, he constantly reworks the text from its very ideological foundations and literary structure. In these verses, he points out that while there is no praise of God at this point, 43  Again, I would like to thank Walter Slaje for his help in understanding these verses.

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the Kathākautuka itself ends with a thirty-four-verse praise poem to Śiva which takes its place. In this way, by an innovative reading of Sanskrit aesthetic theory, Śrīvara is able to find a place for the bismillah, as a hymn of praise in an ecstatic and devotional mode that caps off the entire poem. The rasa of this is not given as śṛṅgāra precisely because of the larger theoretical model that underlies his translational methodology: one must move from rāga to vairāgya.44 This awareness shapes the entirety of the Kathākautuka. Structurally, Śrīvara is aware of what should be at certain places in the text in Persian. While he acknowledges this, he instead moves the expected Persian introductory praise of God to the end of the entire text, allowing the beginning of his text to focus purely on the passionate love felt by Zulaykhā/Jolekhā for Yūsuf/Yosobha. This also explains Śrīvara’s choice to introduce the princess Jolekhā first in his Sanskrit tale rather than Yosobha, since the passionate love felt by Jolekhā centered on Yosobha.45 Such an arrangement of his reading of Sanskrit aesthetic theory will be a tale marked by śṛṅgāra rasa. Śrīvara also allows his work to be shaped by another set of expectations defined by his own incorporation of rasa philosophy. Notice that his reordering of the text begins with śṛṅgāra or the erotic and ends with śānta or the peaceful. By alerting the reader to this progression, Śrīvara again makes an argument for his understanding of “love.” The connection of a romance with the śṛṅgāra rasa is fully understandable, but why does this story not begin and end in this mode? In the end, Śrīvara’s surprising adaptation of the Sanskrit literary-theoretical concept of rasa further underlines his basic cosmological, theological, and philosophical understanding of the world. Just as an understanding of and deep engagement with rāga is necessary before one can move into the desired end of vairāgya, so too the literary text moves from the erotic śṛṅgāra rasa to the aesthetic experience of detachment from the world in śānta rasa. Again, 44  This point is driven home in the first verse of chapter fifteen of the Kathākautuka, which parallels verse 1.15 quoted above. Śrīvara writes: abhidhāya kathām etāṃ śṛṅgāradvirasāṅkitām | adhunā vakṣate śānto lokadvayahitāvahaḥ ||15.1|| “Having stated this story (kathā) that is marked with śṛṅgāra as one of two rasas, [I] will now state śānta rasa which brings benefit (hita) to the two worlds.” 45  This basic feature of Sanskrit literature has been little remarked upon, but Sanskrit “romantic” texts move from the experiencer of love to the experienced object of love. For example, in Kalidāsa’s famed drama, the Abhijñānaśākuntala, the hero of the tale, Duṣyanta is introduced first as the subject of desire, while Śakuntalā is conceptualized secondarily as the object of desire. A similar pattern occurs in the Kathākautuka, in which the reader first encounters Jolekhā, and hears of the mysterious stranger who haunts her dreams as the object of her desire. Only later does the reader hear the tale of Yosobha. In an interesting inversion of Sanskritic gender roles, he remains the object of desire.

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Śrīvara’s translation is a deep transformation, structurally reworking Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā into what he sees as a cohesive whole. It must be stressed, however, that Śrīvara’s particular imagination remains just that—a particular imagination. His work is strikingly original in terms of both his treatment of the Persian sources and actual Sanskrit composition. While he draws upon earlier Kashmiri kathā literature, Śaiva theology and cosmogony, and traditional rasa-based aesthetic criticism, Śrīvara’s composition places these concepts in a new constellation in which each component is enlivened by its surprising juxtaposition with the others and deepened by their implicit conversation with the Persian text, itself in conversation with its own literary and theological influences. This stunning world of thought in which the Kathākautuka operates must negotiate a space of relevance between two sets of śāstras. As the story progresses, new problems and new equivalences begin to arise from large issues of theology. For example, how should specifically Islamicate concepts such as prophethood be understood within Sanskrit? How is beauty to be expressed within Indic literary registers? Even the small details of realia require transformation, so that the ladies of Egypt are cutting cucumbers instead of oranges when they see Yūsuf for the first time!46 Each negotiation requires careful planning to ensure that it makes sense in Sanskrit; the translation must walk a thin line between staying true to the original text and staying true to Sanskrit expectations. In such a way, the world of the Kathākautuka is a world cognizant of both Persian and Sanskrit canons, but circumscribed by neither. Overall, this points not to the religiosity of the text or its interpretation being central to Śrīvara’s translational project, but rather the complex interplay between textualized sets of literary? Courtly? expectations. In this way, Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka is not “cosmopolitan” since, although written in the classical (or classicizing) “Language of the Gods,” the Kathākautuka cannot be totally confined within or explained by the Sanskrit canon, nor was it ever expected to travel out of the court of Moḥammad Shāh. Nor was it an “encounter,” since with winks and nods Śrīvara shows a deep engagement with both Sanskrit and Persian literary expectations. This sort of attitude presupposes an audience that would be familiar with both Sanskritic and Persianate worldviews, and would delight in Śrīvara’s own navigation of the space between śāstras. Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka shows a deep and surprising engagement with Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā. Śrīvara is quite forthright about his own qualms, emendations, and re-imaginings. Realizing that Jāmī’s words were written under the constraints of a different intellectual canon (śāstra), he takes pains 46  Sanskrit urvāruka. See Kathākautuka 13.46–50.

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to put the Kathākautuka in conversation with his own set of traditions. A careful and sympathetic reading of Śrīvara’s own telling of the Yūsuf va Zulaykhā can help us begin to conceptualize the creative ferment of the Sultanate period in the elite sphere of the Kashmiri court. While the movement of Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā both historically and spatially from Timurid Herat to Sultanate Kashmir maps the mechanics of circulation between Central and South Asia, the reception of the text within the court of Moḥammad Shāh shows the complicated dynamics of textual reception in pre-Mughal elite culture. Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka does not aim to comprehend the original; rather, through historically situated translation strategies, it transforms the very foundation of reading and interpreting the story in a different literary world. A reading of Śrīvara’s text shows that neither a literal translation for understanding a new and strange “other” nor a religiously motivated project of polemic or syncretic accommodation underlies the creation of the Kathākautuka. Rather, the work expects an audience knowledgeable about the Persian original and its underlying presuppositions as well as the Sanskrit ideas Śrīvara uses and plays with. Śrīvara’s final result stands as an expression of an already intertwined court culture in which Persian and Sanskrit constantly sought new ways of being relevant. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Hannah Lord Archambault, Thibaut d’Hubert, Sudev Sheth, and Walter Slaje for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Robert Goldman read through much of the Sanskrit with me and provided numerous helpful suggestions.

Bibliography Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s commentary on the Kiraṇatantra. Edited and translated by Dominic Goodall. Vol. 1: chapters 1–6, Critical Edition and Annotated Translation. Publications du Département d’Indologie 86.1. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 1998. Cox, Whitney. “Literary Register and Historical Consciousness in Kalhaṇa: A Hypothesis,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 50/2 (2013): 131–60. Digby, Simon. “Export Industries and Handicraft Production under the Sultanates of Kashmir,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 44/4 (2007): 407‒23. Dutt, Jogesh Chandra. Medieval Kashmir. Edited by S.L. Sadhu. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributers, 1993.

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Flood, Finbarr Barry. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “HinduMuslim” Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Franke, Heike. “Die persischen Übersetzungen des Laghuyogavāśiṣṭha.” In The Mokṣopāya, Yogavāsiṣṭha and Related Texts, edited by Jürgen Hanneder, 113‒29. Aachen: Shaker, 2005. Hasan, Mohibbul. Kashmir under the Sultans. 1959, new ed. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2005. Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Kalhaṇa. Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī: a Chronicle of the Kings of Kaśmīr. Edited and translated by Marc Aurel Stein. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1970. Masson, J.L. and M.V. Patwardhan. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Bhandarkar Oriental Series No. 9. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969. Minkowski, Christopher. “King David in Oudh: a Bible Story in Sanskrit and the Just King at an Afghan Court.” Inaugural Lecture for the Boden Professorhip, University of Oxford, Mar. 7, 2006. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball2185/Minkowski.Inaugural.pdf. Nemec, John. “Translation and the Study of Indian Religions.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77/4 (2009): 757‒80. Obrock, Luther. “Abhinanda’s Kādambarīkathāsāra and the Development of a Kashmiri Style.” In Highland Philology: Results of a Text-Related Kashmir Panel at the 31st DOT, Marburg, 2010, edited by Roland Steiner, 107‒19. Halle: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittemburg, 2012. Obrock, Luther. “History at the End of History: Śrīvara’s Jainataraṅgiṇī.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 50/2 (2013): 223‒38. Obrock, Luther. “Muslim Mahākāvyas: Sanskrit and Translation in the Sultanates.” In Texts and Tradition in Early Modern North India, edited by Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley, 58–76. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018. Orsini, Francesca. “Śṛṅgāra, ‘Ishq, Love: The Many Meanings of Love in South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 36/1 (2002): 99‒102. Orsini, Francesca. “How to Do Multilingual History? Lessons from Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century North India.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 49/2 (2012): 225‒46. Parmu, R.K. A History of Muslim Rule in Kashmir. 1320–1819. New Delhi: People’s Pub. House, 1969. Raghavan, V. The Number of Rasas. Madras: Adyar Library, 1940. Ramanujan, A.K. “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwardker, 131‒60. New Delhi-New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Schmidt, Richard. Das Kathākautukam des Śrīvara Verglichen mit Dschāmī’s Jusuf und Zuleikha. Kiel: C.F. Haeseler, 1893. Slaje, Walter. Vom Mokṣopāya-Śāstra zum Yogavāśiṣṭha-Mahārāmayaṇa: philologische Untersuchungen zur Entwicklungs- und Überlieferungsgeschichte eines indischen Lehrwerks mit Anspruch auf Heilsrelevanz. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994. Slaje, Walter. “Liberation from Intentionality and Involvement: On the Concept of Jīvanmukti According to the Mokṣopāya.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 28 (2000): 171–94. Slaje, Walter. “Medieval Kashmir and the Science of History.” The University of Texas at Austin, Madden Lecture, 2003–2004. Slaje, Walter. “On the Genesis of the So-Called Jaina-Rāja-Taraṅgiṇī.” Journal of Oriental and African Studies 125/1 (2004): 379–88. Slaje, Walter. “ ‘In the Guise of Poetry’—Kalhaṇa Reconsidered.” In Śāstrārambha: Inquiries into the Preamble in Sanskrit, edited by Walter Slaje, 207–44. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2008. Slaje, Walter. Kingship in Kaśmīr (AD 1148‒1459) From the Pen of Jonarāja, Court Paṇḍit to Sulṭān Zayn al-‘Ā bidīn. Halle: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2014. Śrīvara. Śrīvara’s Zaina Rājataraṅgiṇī. English Translation and Annotations by Kashi Nath Dhar. New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research and People’s Publishing House, 1994. Śrīvara. The Rājataraṅgiṇī of Śrīvara and Śuka. Edited by Srikanth Kaul. Hoshiarpur: Vishveshvaranand Vedic Research Institute, 1966. Śrīvara. Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka: Die Geschichte von Joseph in Persisch-Indischem Gewande Sanskrit und Deutsch. Ed. Richard Schmidt. Kiel: C.F. Haeseler, 1898. Stewart, Tony K. “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter Through Translation Theory.” History of Religions 40/3 (2001): 260‒87. Vittor Jr., Charles Frank. “The Herat School: Persian Poetry in the Timurid Period.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978.

chapter 21

A Bounty of Gems

Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Pashto C. Ryan Perkins At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the son of Khushḥāl Khān Khaṭṭak (d. 1100/1689), ʿAbdul Qādir Khān (ca. 1063–1126/1652–1714), completed his Pashto translation of Jāmī’s beloved mathnavī, Yūsuf u Zulaykhā (hereafter YZ). During these decades, numerous poets and several brothers of Qādir reworked a dozen Persianate romances into Pashto. In addition, they re-narrated indigenous oral tales. It was a period of great literary productivity, not only in Pashto, but in other regional languages as well. The story of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā has been one of the most beloved of Quranic tales and parallels the Biblical account in many aspects. In Jāmī’s hands, it becomes a tale of romance between Yūsuf and the vizier’s wife, Zulaykhā. Jāmī’s telling hinges on Zulaykhā’s longing for Yūsuf and works its way towards their union after the passing of her husband. Jāmī chose the form of the mathnavī—one of the most popular genres of literature in the Persianate world, known by its rhyming couplets (aa, bb, cc, etc.)—to transform this well-known story into one of the most widely translated and circulated romances in the Islamicate world. Mathnavīs often operate on several levels involving both human and divine love. In the South Asian context, as demonstrated by the work of the late Aditya Behl, these romances or mathnavīs gave expression to Sufi concepts of divine love.1 The results were beautiful compositions that served as entertainment for a wide audience and guidance for those on the spiritual path. The broad appeal and popularity of Jāmī’s YZ speaks not only to his literary genius and the vibrant literary networks operating throughout the Persianate world and Asia, but also to the significant work of translation undertaken by the respective translators in many languages. Through an examination of the Pashto translation of YZ, this essay seeks to contextualize the production of the available Pashto manuscripts of YZ and their function in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When paired with this volume’s other essays about Bengali, Georgian, and Sanskrit translations of YZ, it is hoped that a more complete picture of the diverse contexts might emerge in a comparative sense and 1  Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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in a way that clarifies the specific developments that went into the creation of Pashto as a literary language and YZ’s role in this. Another area of inquiry seeks to understand the lives of these manuscripts and the contexts of their production. This essay will also look to the translations themselves, and examine how Qādir sought to map Pashto onto the literary world of Persian and mark Pashto as a language even “sweeter than Persian.”2 The primary sources for this analysis are manuscript copies of YZ in Pashto that range in date from the early part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, and whose locations of production include Shahjahanabad and Kashmir.3 The creation of a high literary tradition, of which Jāmī’s YZ was an intricate part, served the needs of an elite tribal class of Pashtuns seeking to shore up their political gains, consolidate social networks, and ward off political and cultural challenges from without. If the number of extant manuscript copies available today of any one particular text is indicative of that text’s popularity, then Jāmī’s YZ would have to be considered one of the most popular Pashto literary texts during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. In the second millennium, or what has been called the “vernacular millennium,” regional languages in South Asia began supplementing Sanskrit and then Persian for literary purposes. The process of vernacularization involved the supplementation and gradual replacement of “universalistic orders, formations, and practices of the preceding” period with localized forms.4 While one unified theory will not suffice to explain the manifold diversity of social changes and political ambitions that went into this process in different contexts, it is safe to say that a new prestige was involved in going vernacular and “an imitative quality” informed the entire historical development.5 At the same time, it is important to recognize that such texts in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were more than just symbols of prestige. They were also part of educational curricula followed by an increasing number of people in South Asia due to the further development

2  Rebecca Gould, in the present volume, recognizes a similar trope in the case of Teimuraz’s Georgian Lailimajnuniani where he compares the sweetness of Persian with the heaviness of Georgian. In Central Asia, the famous al-Birūnī classified languages according to their qualities and ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī composed in 1499 a treatise to prove the superiority of Chaghatay over Persian in Muḥākamat al-lughatayn. 3  There are many other manuscript copies available in Peshawar at the Pashto Academy, in the British Library in London and in the John Rylands’ Library in Manchester. 4  Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millenium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,” Daedelus 127/3, Early Modernities (Summer, 1998): 41. 5  Ibid., 69.

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of bureaucracy and the appeal of Persianate culture and the Persian language.6 It is therefore not surprising that of the works translated by Qādir, three were Persian classics, Saʿdī’s Gulistān and Bustān, as well as Jāmī’s YZ. The choice to write in a language, or even create a language by the production of texts, as Sheldon Pollock underscores, is a choice to affiliate “oneself with a particular vision of the world … with an existing sociotextual community,” or to summon a “potential community into being.”7 The history of Pashto, from Bāyazīd Anṣārī’s Khayr al-Bayān (ca. 1585) to Khushḥāl Khān Khaṭṭak’s literary efforts, demonstrates that both choices were at work, sometimes simultaneously. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi has described Khushḥāl’s writings as a bridge between Anṣārī’s text, Ākhund Darweza’s (ca. 1549–1638) Makhzan al-Islām (ca. 1615), and the many Pashto writings in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.8 In particular, Khushḥāl mapped Pashto onto Persianate literary models and sought to create a class of Pashtun elites who could navigate empire and its peripheries.9 At the death of his father Shahbāz Khān in 1641, Khushḥāl, as the eldest son, was chosen to succeed him as khān of the Khaṭṭak tribe in the Peshawar valley and the emperor Shāh Jahān recognized him as such. In this key transit zone, he and his tribe helped keep the peace that allowed trade to flow. Even after Aurangzeb’s accession to the throne in 1658, Khushḥāl continued working with the Mughals to keep the trade routes secure. But by 1663, he had become the victim of intrigue between the governor of Kabul and some of his own kinsmen. This saw him imprisoned in Delhi, Ranthambore, and Agra until he was allowed to return home in 1669. Khushḥāl wrote extensively while imprisoned and his works spread fairly quickly. His respect for Shāh Jahān was matched in equal measure by his disdain for Aurangzeb and he was not one to shy away from scathing criticisms. While Khushḥāl was able to secure enough support to be a thorn in the side of Aurangzeb, most of the Pashtun tribes found it more advantageous to align with the Mughals, thus explaining Khushḥāl’s frustration in the later years of his life.10 6  The Khulāsatu’l-Makātib from 1688 provides the Persian curriculum during Aurangzeb’s time. As cited in G.M.D. Sufi, Al-Minhāj (Delhi: Idāra-e Adabiyāt, 1977), 77‒78. 7  Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,” 46. 8  Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “The Combined History of Pashto Printing and Resistance to Print” (SOAS Swat, June 2010), 6. Accessed online on 1 May 2014 at: https://www.soas .ac.uk/cccac/swat-pathan/file59663.pdf. 9  For more details of uses of Pashto from Anṣārī to the time of Ḳhushḥāl, see James Caron, A History of Pashto Literature: Or, Pashto Histories of the World (London: Hurst, 2016). 10  For an extremely helpful look at Ḳhushḥāl and his writings from a historical perspective, see Sayed Wiqār ʿAlī Shāh, Ḳhushḥāl Ḳhān Khaṭṭak ao tārīḳh nawisī (Peshawar: University Book Agency, 1992).

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Pashto had functioned as one of many languages used from Herat, Kabul and Kandahar to Delhi. Jos Gommans has looked in detail at how different groups of Afghans (Pashtuns) in Herat and Kandahar “became part of a chain which united India, Iran and Central Asia.”11 There was a continual flow to India of Afghan traders and those seeking employment. While the focus of Gommans and others have been on the trade of horses, other material commodities, and a dynamic military-labor market, it is important to keep in mind the cultural exchanges that were also taking place along these trade routes and into surrounding regions as individuals returned home. Texts, which traversed these same routes, comprised at least one significant part of such cultural exchanges. The significant Afghan diaspora residing in Hindustan and the prominent role of Pashtuns in trade contributed to this wide circulation. It was particularly among Afghan centers of governance where manuscript production in Pashto seems to have been most prolific. While Khushḥāl’s influence on the Pashto language is undeniable, his sons, particularly Qādir Khān, also had a tremendous impact, and it is to him that our attention now turns. Born in 1652, and described by Raverty as the “most eloquent writer and poet of all Khushḥāl’s sons,” Qādir Khān also seems to have been the most prolific of them.12 Upon the death of Khushḥāl, Qādir Khān’s elder brother Ashraf Khān became tribal chief of the Khaṭṭaks, but his brother Bahrām Khān sought the chieftainship and in 1681 succeeded by helping the Mughals entrap Ashraf. Sent as a prisoner to Bijapur, Ashraf died in captivity ten years later. Following Bahrām, Afẓal Khān, son of Ashraf, became chief despite Qādir’s attempts to fill the role. Afẓal wished to eliminate any potential rivals to his chieftainship, forcing Qādir to spend at least some of his years on the run. While Raverty reports that Afẓal eliminated Qādir along with ten of his brothers and some of their sons in a single day, the dates of Qādir’s compositions suggest otherwise. In the preface to his translation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān, Qādir describes the vicissitudes of fate, which had brought him to Nowshera where he lived in a hut of sorrow without a friend or sympathizer, like an animal of the desert in its cave. Qādir wrote as follows: On account of many worries I came upon this counsel that instead of spending the rest of my life sitting by myself in anger on the outskirts 11  Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 34. 12  Raverty wrote that Qādir Ḳhān’s descendants claimed he wrote close to sixty different works, most of which had been lost. See Captain H.G. Raverty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century: Literally Translated From the Original Pushto; with notices of the different authors, and remarks on the Mystic Doctrine and Poetry of the Sufis (London: Williams and Norgate, 1862), 270.

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of tranquility it is better if I occupy myself with buying and selling books for the mosque, which is counted as prosperity in this world and a blessing in the end. As per my duty I would usually sit alone. Sometimes a few friends would come by seeking to gain knowledge from engaging with Persian and Arabic. Some friends came having read the Gulistān. Many of them told me “there are so many books in Persian and Arabic, but nothing in the Pashto language. Although you have the strength to compose translations, if you would take the trouble upon yourself of the Gulistān, which is pleasing and beautiful to both the great and the common (‘ḳhāṣo ʿāmo’), a great man would take great counsel from it and the youth would also take great blessings from it. Generally people read the text once and only upon the second time do they ascertain the meaning. If it were translated into the Pashto language, Pashtuns, both the great and the commoners, would receive great benefit with ease.”13 Qādir thus turned his hand to translating the Gulistān, completing it in 1712. Qādir’s description of the circumstances that led to his decision to translate Saʿdī’s Gulistān is revealing. It underscores the need to foreground the local and individual context behind the production of translations and texts. Any attempt to answer the larger question as to why people started writing in languages that circulated much less widely and had less political and cultural capital than the imperial language of the time should give equal attention to the individual and local circumstances behind each translation when such information is available. While the desire to summon a socio-political community into existence or align oneself with a socio-political community allows us to explain at the generic level why people began writing in vernaculars, Qādir’s personal explanation underscores the fact that at the local level, a decision to translate is motivated by specific circumstances. And while the process that leads to the undertaking of such a project is experienced at the local level as a response to immediate requests or concerns, the impact of Qādir’s translation transcended the local. Drawing from the richness of Persian, it connected Pashtuns to a trans-regional community that in the midst of empire could be experienced as local, whether that was in Nowshera, Kandahar, Rampur, or Delhi. For the Gulistān—the most famous Persian work in the “mirrors for princes” genre—to be translated into the local language meant that it could provide instruction to people of all social classes. Saʿdī’s divān, along with Jāmī’s Yūsuf va Zulaykhā was part of the core Persian curriculum during the time of 13  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Guldasta, MS Or. 4504 (British Library, 1855), fols. 7a–7b.

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Aurangzeb.14 With the spread of this curriculum, it is not surprising to see an increased desire for translations in one’s own language. However, Qādir’s description does not provide insight into the possible connection between the increased need for translations and their intended uses. Was the increased desire for translations connected with the study of these texts in an official curriculum whereby translations would serve as study aids? Or was the desire for translations separate from curricular issues? Whatever the case may be, the emphasis in Qādir’s exchange on the translation’s benefit to Pashtuns from all classes sheds light on the intended social reach of this translation and, by implication, other translations as well. Later in this essay, when looking at specific manuscript copies of Jāmī’s YZ, it will become clear that these texts were not merely confined to courtly settings, but were read in multiple settings by diverse segments of society. Khushḥāl and his sons were involved in Pashto’s transformation into a literary language, and there was surely an imitative quality to this. The concerted efforts of Khushḥāl and his progeny were connected with the idea that a literary canon in one’s language was not only necessary in a landscape where this was more and more common, but that it could also help create a shared sense of belonging for Pashtuns caught between the Mughal empire on one side and tribal politics on the other. Yet it is also important to understand the pleasure and comfort that Khushḥāl, Qādir, and others found in poetry. Whether in prison or on the run, both turned to poetry as a source of inspiration and comfort, hoping that their efforts would inspire and provide pleasure for others. The following couplets from Qādir’s translation of YZ illustrates this well: Yūsuf was a prophet, governorship restored to him, ablaze with a tale of love it is manifest in the Quran […] In this he would refuse to be counted amongst the unbelievers. Because of the Pashto language I have made this story a marvel.

14   Khulāsatu’l-makātib as cited in G.M.D. Sufi, al-Minhāj (Delhi: Idāra-yi adabiyāt, 1977), 77‒78.

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First, this story was in Persian , in Persian it was first. Reciters of Persian put it in Persian as a boon for poets/eloquent ones. I also separated it into sections I put this story into Pashto. Every Pashtun who beholds it delighted he will be.15 It is clear in these couplets that Qādir was conscious of the relationship between Persian and Pashto and the place of his own work in relationship to the two. By this time Afghani, or Pashto, had become a language of and for Pashtuns. The growth of this exclusive affiliation between Pashto and Pashtuns is illustrated by the movement from the Pashto language or tongue in the fourth couplet above, to the one possessing the tongue of Pashto, the Pashtun, in the last couplet. Pashto was in no position to challenge Persian with its rich literary tradition, and this does not seem to be Qādir’s aim. Rather he underscores the beauty of the Persian original along with the appeal of Pashto. His focus on the background details of the story and the hoped-for communal experience of poetical delight casts the work and story as transcending time itself. Why would prospective translators, subsequent patrons, and copyists have chosen Jāmī’s YZ? Could authors have chosen to translate this work because of the weight it lent to vernaculars that were in competition with one another? YZ’s Quranic origins and its composition in the most cosmopolitan of languages, Persian, by the well-known poet, Jāmī, gave it a tremendous appeal to prospective translators. There is, however, one complicating factor in this: Qādir did not mention Jāmī by name in his translation. In fact, in the couplets quoted above, he indicated, not that one author by the name of Jāmī composed the text, but that reciters of Persian (Fārsī ḳhwāno or in some manuscripts, Fārsīyāno) were responsible for its composition. Qādir skipped the couplets in the introductory sections where Jāmī had included his name. In the verses 15  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Yūsuf Zulayḳha, MS I.O. Islamic 3099 (British Library, 18th century), fol. 11. The manuscript from 1815, produced in Kashmir by the copyist Walī Muḥammad for Rustam Ḳhān Achakzai has some differences in these couplets. This is also true for the copy from the eighteenth century that was produced in Shahjahanabad by the copyist, Sulemān of Rampur during the time of Navāb Najīb al-Dawla.

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preceding the section on the praise of Muḥammad, Qādir includes his own name, but not Jāmī’s. Rather than seeing such omissions and substitutions as an attempt to take credit for Jāmī’s original, it is more helpful to understand such moves as working within a spectrum of translation. Translation was not understood as or meant to be a strictly word-for-word affair, but instead operated on a spectrum of possibilities where the primary limits were the creative ones of the translator. Just as Qādir did not feel the need to reproduce sections where Jāmī contextualized his own production, many subsequent copies experimented with the beginning or concluding sections of Qādir’s translation. Qādir’s YZ adhered fairly closely to Jāmī’s original in many places, but he also felt the freedom to branch out and compose his own couplets in the style of Jāmī. Perhaps Qādir did not mention Jāmī by name because, by this time, the mathnavī circulating in his region had been modified to the extent that as individuals added their own variations, it transcended Jāmī. Considering that by this time YZ had been translated into numerous other languages that bordered on or overlapped with Pashto speaking regions, it is possible that YZ had been copied and translated so frequently that the relationship to Jāmī was no longer relevant. The story’s Quranic origins already gave it an authority that Jāmī’s name would not necessarily have supplemented. Jāmī himself made use of the Quranic story and those who translated and supplemented it took advantage of its scriptural origins. Is it possible to see the many translations and subsequent copying of manuscripts as a form of collective authorship? Qādir’s attribution of collective authorship (Fārsī ḳhwāno or Fārsīyāno) is significant, less for what it tells us about the composition of YZ than about contemporary ideas of its composition. It points to the oral nature of poetry, in which it is often experienced as a communal endeavor and questions of authorship are given less importance. The production and circulation of subsequent manuscripts came at a time of tremendous literary output in Pashto and exciting literary developments. It was quite the family affair as Qādir’s younger brother, Ṣadr Khān Khaṭṭak, put a local romance, Adam Khān o Durxanei, into verse form in 1117/1705, just a few years after his brother’s translation of YZ. He also composed the romance of Dili Sahai, the daughter of Ḥayāt Khān.16 Through examining the translation of Jāmī’s YZ into a vast number of languages and the process of transmitting orally circulating romances into written form, we can see an increasing concern 16  For a more detailed look at versified romances in Pashto, see Farkhanda Hayat, “Tales in Pashto Verse (An Analysis & Critical Study) Da Paxto manẕūmī qīṣai” (PhD diss., Peshawar University, 2009).

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for the creation of texts. Regional courts were often centers for such literary production, and the eighteenth century was notable for the increasing significance of regional centers, particularly when it came to cultural production. Individuals like Qādir were most likely aware of the production of translations of YZ into different languages. The cultural zone from Hindustan to what is now Afghanistan was interconnected. With Chinese and Russian expansion in the eighteenth century, routes opened up for new outlets for the Central Asian economy, linking it to the markets of Europe and China.17 For our purposes, what these networks meant was that producers of these translations would likely have been exposed to other translations. Perhaps it was this type of awareness that had prompted Qādir’s friends to request he translate the Gulistān. And when Qādir’s decision to begin a translation was not prompted by such requests, his awareness of similar work in other languages would have likely provided an added impetus for him in his work of translation. Scholars have looked at the impact of trade networks, the flourishing horse trade, raids, and other forms of exchange. In addition to recognizing the translations of Jāmī’s works as literary products, it is also important to recognize them as records of the exchanges and interactions taking place between different linguistic worlds. For example, the first Punjabi version of Jāmī’s YZ that we know of was composed as early as 1679–80 by Ḥāfiz Barkhurdār, a Ranjha Jat born near Ranjha’s village of Takht Hazra in District Jhang, who became a teacher, moved to Lahore and then to Sialkot.18 The circulation of people, horses, literature and other goods between culturally diverse zones gave rise to linguistic identities that were being newly formulated and imagined. While Qādir’s YZ could have been merely an exercise in translation, he displayed a conscious awareness of his own project as more than an exercise for his own enjoyment. His desire to provide a source of pleasure for other Pashtuns through his translation is evident in the previously quoted couplets. In other places, Qādir displays a self-conscious choice to use Pashto and positions it in relationship to Persian: Thou has rendered it sweeter than Persian, Abdul Qādir! Although the Pushto language was so bitter before.19

17  Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780, 33. 18  Christopher Shackle, “Scripture and Romance: The Yusuf-Zulaikha Story in Panjabi,” South Asia Research 15/2 (Autumn 1995), 164. 19  As quoted in Raverty, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, 284.

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This trope, expressed as the difficulty or bitterness of the Pashto language before the particular poet’s composition, was also expressed in the poetry of his father Khushḥāl. In this particular couplet, Qādir stresses the transformation of Pashto from a bitter language to one that is sweeter than Persian. Yet, as the following couplets from his translation of YZ reveal, Persian, Pashto, and even Arabic were seen as forming a complementary relationship. He writes: The difficulties of the Pashto language which have been put forth become blessings. When mixed with Persian it (Pashto) becomes entertaining and pleasant. When Arabic is with it, it gains more respect becoming even greater. Because this poem has been mixed (āmeza) it has become sweet (shakar rez), a scattering of gems (gohar rez)20 Qādir describes his translation of the poem as a mix of Pashto, Persian, and Arabic, each of which is represented as a different gem scattered about. While the Persian shakar rez can simply mean sweet or elegant language, it can also refer to items thrown about at weddings that include money, sweets, or gifts sent from the bridegroom’s house to the bride’s. The beauty of Qādir’s translation is thus not simply the fact that he has put a Persian classic into Pashto, but that he has combined it with Persian and Arabic whereby the couplets and the words contained in them are like gifts distributed at a wedding, each sought after with joy and thanksgiving as part of the wedding festivities. Taking the simile one step further, the composition of the poem itself can be seen as a marriage of words, the joining together of linguistic families in a sort of strategic alliance. Whereas Persian adds to the pleasure or entertainment value of the poem, Arabic imparts a greater respect to Pashto. Qādir’s claim of making Pashto even sweeter than Persian should be understood in this context whereby Persian and Arabic made Pashto’s rise from a “difficult” or “bitter” language possible. Pashto benefited from its relationship with languages like Arabic and Persian that had more political, literary and/or religious capital.

20  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Yūsuf o Zulayḳā, MS Afghan 15 (John Rylands Library, 1815), fol. 211.

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Marriage alliances were one significant way in which Pashtuns incorporated themselves into the social and political world of the Mughal Empire.21 The literary efforts of Khushḥāl and Qādir represented other avenues through which Pashtuns connected with the wider Persianate world and the Mughal Empire in particular. Yet their efforts also represented an assertion of a unique identity and increasing independence. These seemingly contradictory processes often occurred simultaneously. During a time when Pashto was becoming more closely tied to the geographic regions on the peripheries of the Mughal Empire, Qādir appears intent on renewing ties to the imperial center. Thus, in the conclusion of Qādir’s YZ the critical stance Khushḥāl had expressed towards Aurangzeb has shifted to a panegyric of Aurangzeb: The sultanate of Alamgir (Aurangzeb) is without compare in its age. It has gained even more splendor for the unbelievers the land has become oppressive. These days he is the ruler of Hind, his name is blessed by God. Wherever he extends his rule affairs have become difficult for the unbelievers. He destroyed the idol houses building other monuments out of devotion. Day and night he praises the Almighty that the name of his sultanate remain. Grant him the grace of justice! Grant him success in his age! Grant him eternal aid! Bestow your mercy upon Aurangzeb!22

21  Caron, A History of Pashto Literature, 8. 22  Qādir Khan, Yusuf o Zulaykha, 1815, fol. 211.

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While it is impossible to discern Qādir’s personal feelings towards Aurangzeb from these formulaic couplets of praise, they should be understood as fulfilling a political function. It reveals less about Qādir’s true feelings towards Aurangzeb than about the political world in which his translation was meant to circulate. Apart from demonstrating that alliances were often shifting during this period, Qādir’s supplication for God’s blessings upon Aurangzeb draws attention to the importance of ʿadl (societal justice). Implied is the understanding that one cannot rule effectively without being just. Does drawing attention to the request for justice also underscore Aurangzeb’s lack of justice and harken back to Khushḥāl’s criticisms of Aurangzeb and his treacherous dealings with his own father and brothers? The context of the eulogy is all the more striking when considering the similarities between Yūsuf’s brothers’ treachery towards him when they sold him into slavery and Aurangzeb’s dealings with his own brothers. This raises the question of what can be expected from one who would wipe out his family to gain power. Functioning both within the Mughal imperium and also on its peripheries, Qādir’s eulogy praises Aurangzeb but can also be read as subverting this praise. Qādir was well-known for his Sufi leanings, and his poetry is full of Sufi imagery. Apart from the popularity and literary beauty of Jāmī’s YZ, one of the primary reasons YZ might have appealed to Qādir was due to the Sufi influences in the text and the powerful imagery of untethered devotion to God. Qādir adheres to many of Jāmī’s couplets but he also exhibited a freedom to branch out from a couplet for couplet translation. Instead, he provided many of his own innovative verses in the style of Jāmī. The beginning of his translation is as follows:

ʿināyat-e rab pamā kṛa da omīd ġhuncha mai wākṛa paḳhanda kē bāgh źmā kṛa muʿaṯṯar damāġh źmā kṛa shināsā mē pa niʿamat kṛa mā goyā paḳhpal ṣifat kṛa ṣafā-ī de ẓamīr rā kṛa ẓamīr mā ta munīr rā kṛa

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che pa zṛa fikr dē tā kṛm tal pa ḳhwala ẓikr dē tā kṛm

A Bounty of Gems

Shpa wraź pa ṡanā stā sham pa ṡanā dē da ṡanā sham har nēk baḳht che ṡanā stā kā pa maʿani dē źān ṡanā kā che momin yam ḥaq shanās yam tal yai źaka pa sipās yam ʿināyat yai pa mā wūkṛa munauwur yai źmā zṛa kṛa 10



tuwān taufīq rā ʿiṯṯā kṛa kashf dai rā ta ʿiṯṯā kṛa ḥaq lāʿiq da kul ṣifat (ṡinā) dī la nuqṣān mubarrā dī che ṣifat yai bar kamāl dī ẓa ul jalāl dī la īzāl dī kul ṡinā paḥaq xāʿīna che qudrat muṯlaq larīna



Bestow upon me God’s bounty! Cause my bud of hope to blossom! Fill my garden with laughter! Fill my head with a sweet fragrance! Grant me to know your grace that I might share in your praise! May you grant to me purity of conscience! Illumine my thoughts

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that I might meditate upon you in my heart, that the zikr of you might forever be on my lips! Night and day I praise you. In praise of you I am your devotee.

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Each fortunate one who has praised you have in reality sung their own praises. As long as I am faithful, I know truth; I will forever remain in praise of you. Bestow me with his bounty! Illumine my heart! 10



Grant me the truth of the Quran! May it be revealed to me! God is worthy of all praise He is free of all harm All that is good is perfect, complete; God is glorious, without blemish. All praise of God is right, He who is supreme over all.23

Qādir is even more explicit than Jāmī in these introductory verses concerning a desire to be caught up in praise of the divine. In contrast to Jāmī’s introduction, there is little to no reflexivity expressed on Qādir’s part about the work he is just beginning to undertake. In his seventh couplet, Jāmī asks for God’s aid in turning his reed into a sweet tongue of verse and for his book (nāma) to spread a fragrance of amber. In Qādir’s introductory couplets, this is absent. In Qādir’s seventh couplet, he expresses the idea that offering praise to God, who created mankind, is by extension also an act of praising humankind. If God is perfect, then his creation is an extension of his perfection, and it is in praise of God that mankind rightly understands his own position in relationship to the divine. 1

Manuscript Copies of Qādir’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā

One of the key points throughout this essay has been that Qādir’s translation of YZ, along with its reproduction and circulation, were but a few of the many exchanges taking place from Afghanistan to Hindustan in what was a vibrant period of literary production. While it is safe to assume that most manuscript 23  Ibid., fols. 1b–2a.

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copies of Qādir’s YZ have not survived, there are still enough extant manuscripts to paint a fairly complex picture of the context surrounding YZ. One of the manuscripts of Qādir’s YZ was produced in Shahjahanabad by the scribe Sulaimān of Rampur during the time of Navāb Najīb al-Dawla, also known as Najīb Khān (d. 1770), a Rohilla Yusufzai Pashtun. He had been in the Mughal service before joining forces with Aḥmad Shāh Durrānī in 1757 when he attacked Delhi and subsequently held court there from ca. 1759–1770. While Blumhardt notes that this manuscript is a copy of an earlier manuscript, there are subtle differences, most likely attributable to differences in Pashto dialects.24 The first and last pages of the manuscript, which are usually left blank, contain couplets in Urdu, Pashto and Persian.25 Not part of the text itself, these couplets produced by different hands (most likely different readers) provide a perfect picture of the diverse linguistic climate in north India at the time. Pashto itself functioned alongside and in relationship to other languages, as it still does today. While there are several extant manuscripts from the eighteenth century, most of the manuscripts held in Peshawar and in the U.K. date from the nineteenth century, with Kashmir being a major center of production. Two of the manuscripts examined as part of this essay were produced in Kashmir. The first, copied by Mullāh Walī Muḥammad in 1803 for Mawla Dād Khān, includes a note by the British Major, Henry George Raverty, describing his purchase of it in Kandahar in 1854.26 The same copyist also produced another copy from Kashmir in 1815. He produced it for Rustam Khān Achakzai, and it included thirty-three half-page and five full-page miniatures. Achakzai’s patronage of it reveals it as a Kandahari initiative. The presence of this manuscript in Kandahar decades later further underscores the links between literary production in Kashmir and developments in Kandahar.

24   James Fuller Blumhardt and D.N. MacKenzie, Catalogue of Pashto Manuscripts in the Libraries of the British Isles (London: Trustees of the British Museum and the Commonwealth Relations Office, 1965), 96. One example of a minor difference between the texts is found in the beginning couplets, which were quoted previously. In the 1815 manuscript we see the first couplet written as: ʿināyat-e Rab pamā kṛ/da omīd ġhuncha mai wākṛ. In the 18th century manuscript we see: ʿināyat-e rab pamā kṛē/da omīd ġhuncha mai wākṛī. For a summary of linguistic scholarship on Pashto, particularly as it relates to different dialects of Pashto, see Walter Hakala, “Locating ‘Pashto’ in Afghanistan: A Survey of Secondary Sources,” in Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors: The Changing Politics of Language Choice, ed. Harold F. Schiffman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 65‒70. 25  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Yūsuf o Zulayḳhā, MS Afghan 1 (John Rylands Library, 18th century). 26  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Yūsuf o Zulayḳhā, MS Or. 4503 (British Library, 1803). Henry George Raverty provided the date and location for the composition of his personal note (Multan, June 1855).

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Blumhardt mentions that the seal of Muḥammad Aʿẓam Khān Barakzai, governor of Kashmir, was on fol. 58a of the 1815 manuscript.27 He was a sardār of the Barakzai clan and one of twenty-one sons of Pāyinda Khān who had fragmented Kandahar away from Kabul-based Sadozai rule and governed it independently. Aʿẓam Khān served as the governor of Kashmir from 1813 until losing it to Ranjit Singh in 1819.28 In Barakzai Kandahar, one of the five ruling brothers was Sardār Mihr Dil Khān Mashriqī (d. 1855). He was a poet and began a literary circle that met regularly and worked in Pashto. Despite knowledge of this dabistān and a few of its key players, little is actually known about the dabistān. It appears that this 1815 manuscript was connected to their activities. Perhaps individuals in the literary dabistān in Kandahar were involved in ordering manuscripts from Kashmir like the one copied by Walī Muḥammad. With the quality of manuscripts produced in Kashmir surpassing that from many other areas, it would not have been surprising considering the connections. Containing thirty-three half-page miniatures and five full-page miniatures, this manuscript is the most striking of all Pashto copies of YZ. While the paintings themselves are fairly rustic in their style, they adhere to the storyline and each miniature is situated near the relevant couplets. Even though Kandahar was no longer the capital of the Durrānī Empire when the 1803 Kashmir manuscript by Walī Muḥammad was produced, Kandahar was still a trading center and Kashmir was on its Tibet and China route via Rohilkhand and Peshawar. The manuscript from 1803 has little to do with the dabistān, since it predates it. Instead of being part of a Kandahar-centered court initiative, this manuscript appears connected to wider and older networks of circulation where an interest and taste for pan-regional Pashto literature thrived. When British annexations around the Doab took place and Kandahar was cut off politically from the east and north, the dabistān served to institutionalize these literary interests and tastes.29 The cultivation of Persian as the language of the Mughal court and its expanding reach provided an added impetus for local Afghan governors and rulers to create their own similarly styled corpus of literary texts that would 27  While I have been unable to locate this seal on the manuscript itself it is possible that it has faded over time. 28  For a more detailed historical account of this period up to the death of Muḥammad Aʿẓam Ḳhān, see The History of Afghanistan: Faiz Muhammad Katib Hazarah’s Sirāj al-tawarikh, vol. 1. The Saduza’i Era 1747–1843 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 95‒177. 29  I want to thank James Caron for drawing my attention to this Kandahar dabistān and the possible connections with these manuscripts. James Caron, e-mail message to author, August 8, 2013. Also see Zalmay Hēwādmal, Da Paxto naṡr āta sawa kāla (Lahore: Millat Printers, 1996).

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identify them as both functioning within the larger Persianate world of letters, but also as distinct in their own right. From the time of Khushḥāl, Pashto was used to try to create a class of Pashtuns who would be in essence Persianized Pashtuns with their own corpus of Pashto literary texts, many of which were Persian classics. Khushḥāl’s descendants followed in their father’s footsteps with original compositions, translations, and reworkings of oral narratives in written form. YZ continued to remain one of the more popular Pashto texts for individuals to reproduce. In 1815, the scribe Muḥammad Nasīm produced a copy of YZ in Utmanzai, which lies about forty kilometers to the northeast of Peshawar. At the end of the poem he included a mathnavī of about one hundred couplets that describes the obligations and rights of wives.30 It appears that YZ circulated widely among women in the early colonial Peshawar valley. These couplets added to the end of the text attest to its different uses and the diverse contexts in which it operated. While spiritual readings of the text have been a focus of commentators, most readers would not have been familiar with the details of Akbarian terminology and complex references to taṣawwuf. On the other hand, the story itself was entertaining and a source of pleasure for reading and listening audiences. This helps explain the many manuscripts still in existence today. Describing reading practices in nineteenth century India, Francesca Orsini has commented that reading for pleasure, or “sensuous reading,” was necessary to win people over to the printed page.31 Once they gained an interest in reading, even if it was purely for pleasure, they were one step closer to reading “useful” texts. The idea that one develops a taste for reading through encountering entertaining texts can be extended to include this earlier period before the spread of print in South Asia. “Sensuous reading” did not merely serve to win people over to the printed page, but to the scribe’s page as well. This manuscript copy of YZ is a prime example that clearly illustrates this process. The ability to use YZ in a wide variety of contexts is arguably what gave it such a broad appeal across the many regions in which it was translated. As mentioned previously, Qādir felt free to branch out from a literal translation and add his own couplets. In the concluding section, he added a description of the context for the translation of the work. The translator was not 30   Descriptive Catalogue of Pashto Manuscripts Pashto Academy, Library (Peshawar: Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar, 2009), 535. I have not yet been able to examine this manuscript in person. 31  Orsini has drawn her understanding of sensuous reading from Ermanno Detti, “La Lettura Sensuale,” in Il Piacere Di Leggere (Firenze: la Nuova Italia, 2002), 19‒20. As cited in Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 22‒23.

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alone, though, in adding to or omitting particular passages. In the 1815 Kashmir manuscript, the last pages consist of three full-page miniatures of the Kashmir pleasure gardens and two contain miniatures of musicians and dancing women performing for men who appear to be nobles. One of them is seated in a position of more authority, and attendants are standing ready to serve.32 In the beginning of one manuscript copy from 1834, the scribe included couplets from the most popular of Pashto poets, Raḥmān Bābā. In another nineteenthcentury manuscript, the scribe skips the introductory verses in praise of God, Muḥammad, the Caliphs Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān and ʿAlī as well as the munājāt. Instead, it starts with nine couplets that condense these praises and picks up from the middle of the preface. It begins in the following manner: First I will praise God (ḥaqq) who is supreme over all things. The creator is without decline, the provider is without wrangling (qīl o qāl). Now let me praise the Prophet who will be an advocate for sinners on doomsday.33 In another manuscript copy from the nineteenth century, the first folio is missing and is replaced by an Arabic prayer. The last section offering advice to the poet’s son is also absent. The changes made to Jāmī’s original text and subsequent changes made to Qādir’s translation ranged from changing particular words or spellings, which accounted for differences in dialect, to larger changes such as omissions of sections. This points to the fact that the work of translating Jāmī’s YZ into Pashto did not begin and end with Qādir. Rather, it was a process whereby patrons and scribes, Pashtun elites, and others engaged with the text anew at each juncture, appropriating, adding, and making changes deemed appropriate. Yet despite these diverse engagements with the text, by the middle of the nineteenth century Qādir’s YZ had truly become a Pashto classic. It possessed a cultural and social value that added not only prestige but pleasure for Pashtuns as they moved from the shadow of the Mughal Empire to a landscape increasingly controlled by regional elites and then the British. They 32  More research is needed to determine whether these are generic scenes or if they portray specific individuals either at the court in Kashmir or elsewhere. 33  ʿAbdul Qādir Ḳhān, Yūsuf o Zulayḳhā, MS I.O. Islamic 4836 (British Library, 19th century), fol. 1.

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produced and consumed Pashto literature while emulating Persianate models of refinement, thus connecting themselves with the broader world of empire. They participated in furthering vernacular literary production and consumption, while also making a case for their own cultural traditions. Drawing from the best of many worlds, they created a bounty of gems. In the process, they helped create a Pashto literary tradition that continues to this day.

Figure 22.1

[Pashto] Afghan MS 15, 1815, John Rylands Library, fol. 1b–2a

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Bibliography ʿAlī Shāh, Sayed Wiqār. Khushḥāl Khān Khaṭṭak ao Tārīḳh Nawisī. Peshawar: University Book Agency, 1992. Behl, Aditya. Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Blumhardt, James Fuller and D.N. MacKenzie. Catalogue of Pashto Manuscripts in the Libraries of the British Isles. London: Trustees of the British Museum and the Commonwealth Relations Office, 1965. Caron, James. A History of Pashto Literature: Or, Pashto Histories of the World. London: Hurst, 2013. Descriptive Catalogue of Pashto Manuscripts Pashto Academy, Library. Peshawar: Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar, 2009. Detti, Ermanno. “La Lettura Sensuale.” In Il Piacere Di Leggere. Firenze: la Nuova Italia, 2002. Gommans, Jos. The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c. 1710–1780. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Hakala, Walter. “Locating ‘Pashto’ in Afghanistan: A Survey of Secondary Sources.” In Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors: The Changing Politics of Language Choice. Edited by Harold F. Schiffman, 53‒88. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud. “The Combined History of Pashto Printing and Resistance to Print.” SOAS Swat, June 2010. Accessed online on 1 May 2014 at: https://www.soas. ac.uk/cccac/swat-pathan/file59663.pdf. Ḥayāt, Farḳhanda. Tales in Pashto Verse (An Analysis & Critical Study) Da Paxto Manẕūmī Qīṣai. Peshawar: Peshawar University, Unpublished Doctoral Diss, 2009. Hazarah, Faiz Muhammad Katib. The History of Afghanistan: Faiz Muhammad Katib Hazarah’s Sirāj al-tawarikh, vol. 1. The Saduza’i Era 1747–1843. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Hēwādmal, Zalmay. Da Paxto Naṡr Āta Sawa Kāla. Lahore: Millat Printers, 1996. Orsini, Francesca. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009. Pollock, Sheldon. “India in the Vernacular Millenium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500.” Daedelus 127/3, Early Modernities (Summer, 1998): 41‒74. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Guldasta. MS Or. 4504. British Library, 1855. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Yūsuf Zulayḳhā. MS I.O. Islamic 3099. British Library, 18th century. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Yūsuf Zulayḳhā. MS Afghan 1. John Rylands Library, 18th century. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Yūsuf Zulayḳhā. MS Or. 4503. British Library, 1803. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Yūsuf Zulayḳhā. MS Afghan 15. John Rylands Library, 1815. Qādir Khān, ʿAbdul. Yūsuf Zulayḳhā. MS I.O. Islamic 4836. British Library, 19th century. Raverty, Captain H. G. Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, From the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century: Literally Translated From the Original Pushto; with notices

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of the different authors, and remarks on the Mystic Doctrine and Poetry of the Sufis. London: Williams and Norgate, 1862. Shackle, Christopher. “Scripture and Romance: The Yusuf-Zulaikha Story in Panjabi.” South Asia Research 15/2 (Autumn 1995): 153‒88. Sufi, G.M.D. al-Minhāj. Delhi: Idāra-e Adabiyāt, 1977.

chapter 22

Sweetening the Heavy Georgian Tongue Jāmī in the Georgian-Persianate World Rebecca Ruth Gould There is a manuscript of Jāmī’s Haft awrang (Seven Thrones), the seven narrative and didactic texts that constitute the poet’s major literary output, in the Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts in the Republic of Georgia.* The paper is thick and gilded. The body of the text is in black ink and the titles are inscribed in bright red ink. This manuscript is stored in a case covered with leather, of Georgian manufacture. Joining thousands of Persian manuscripts that circulated within Georgian borders from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, and the hundreds of manuscripts of Jāmī’s works that have traversed the Caucasus, this Haft awrang is dated 1021/1613.1 Like the other manuscripts with which it is stored, this Haft awrang circulated at a time when Persian was the major literary language for Georgia’s elite, a status it held until the end of the eighteenth century.2 While it is not the case that every Georgian spoke Persian, the migrations from Georgia to Iran that proliferated under Safavid dominion (907–1135/1501– 1722) contributed immeasurably to the Persianization of Georgian literature. Under the reign of Shāh ʿAbbās I (993–1038/1587–1629), the practice of using Georgians as military and domestic slaves replaced the earlier Safavid institutional reliance on the Qizilbash, a tribe of Turkmen origin. With the trend towards increasing institutional reliance on Georgian slaves, “the slave chapter * Revisions on the draft of this article were made as I was involved in the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under ERC-2017-STG Grant Agreement No 759346. I would like to extend my gratitude to Thibaut d’Hubert for his detailed comments and for sharing his expertise on Bengali and other South Asian literatures, Pranav Prakash for obtaining materials relevant to this research, and to the staff of the Kekelidze Institute, Tbilisi, who showed me many Persian and Georgian manuscripts. Given the absence of a satisfactory system for transcribing Georgian terms, diacritics have been removed in transliterating from Georgian for the main body of the text but preserved in the footnotes. 1  Katalog persidskikh rukopisei Instituta rukopisei im. K. S. Kekelidze: kollektsiia AC (Tbilisi: Mec’niereba, 1977), PAC 296 (poetry); p. 21. A partial listing of the manuscripts of Jāmī’s works held by the Kekelidze Institute is given on p. 181. 2  For the shift in Georgia’s literary orientation, and the turn to Russian, see inter alia Harsha Ram, “The Sonnet and the Mukhambazi: Genre Wars on the Edges of the Russian Empire,” PMLA (Journal of the Modern Language Association) 122/5 (2007): 1548–70.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_024

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of Safavid history” begins.3 With this shift in the Safavid social order also began a new era in Georgian literary history, marked by new tensions between the poetic visions of Georgian kings and the violence of Safavid sovereignty. At the same time, the violence of the Safavid-Georgian encounter was also marked by an unprecedented flourishing of Georgian poetry in a Persianate idiom. This chapter examines one text within the oeuvre of the Georgian poet-king Teimuraz I (1589–1663), arguably the most significant poet who came of age during Safavid rule, with particular attention to the effect of the disjuncture between poetic inspiration and political constraint on literary form. Teimuraz I may well have consulted the Haft awrang currently held in the Kekelidze institute when he set about to do in Georgian what his predecessors had done in Persian during the early decades of the seventeenth century. If not this specific one, the manuscripts he accessed would have been as elegant and finely wrought. From 1605–1648, Teimuraz I resided in Kaxetia, in eastern Georgia.4 Under the close surveillance of Safavid rulers, it was from here that he served as the nominal, and powerless, king of Georgia, ruling over a kingdom that had become a vassal state of the Safavid Empire following the incursions of Shāh ʿAbbās I.5 While much of his literary output dates to the reigns of ʿAbbās I and Ṣafī (r. 1038–1052/1629–1642), the last two decades of Teimuraz’s life coincide with the reign of ʿAbbās II (r. 1052–1077/1642–1666). Notably, the last two of these rulers had a mother who was a slave (ghulām) from the Caucasus.6 Each of the three Safavid rulers whose reigns spanned 3  Sussan Babaie, Kathryn Babayan, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad, Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 6. For further scholarship on the institution of the ghulām (slave) in Safavid-Georgian relations, see Hirotake Maeda, “On the Ethno-Social Background of Four Gholām Families from Georgia in Safavid Iran,” Studia Iranica 32/2 (2003): 243‒78. 4  For Teimuraz’s biography, see, in Persian Ḥasan Anūshah, Dānishnāma-yi adab-i Fārsī (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī va Intishārātī-yi Dānishnāma, 1375/1996–), 5:172‒77 (I thank Paul Losensky for this reference), and in Georgian, Meri Gugushvili, T’eimuraz pirvelis c’xovrebis gza (Tbilisi: Mec’niereba, 1979). 5  For Georgia under Safavid rule, see Willem M. Floor and Edmund Herzig, eds., Iran and the World in the Safavid Age (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Pierre Oberling, “Georgians and Circassians in Iran,” Studia Caucasica 1 (1963): 127‒43; and Rudolph Matthee, “Georgia vii. Georgians in the Safavid Administration,” Encyclopedia Iranica (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2001), 10:493‒96. 6  Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2002), 401‒2, n. 91. Said Amir Arjomand’s observation that “From Shāh Safi I (r. 1629–42) onward, the mothers of all the Safavid shahs were Georgians” is relevant in general terms but is contradicted by Babayan, n. 91 (“The Salience of Political Ethic in the Spread of Persianate Islam,” Journal of Persianate Studies 1 [2008]: 5).

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Teimuraz’s life actively recruited Georgians to Isfahan so as to limit their involvement “in movements of resistance in their homeland.”7 In contrast to the hundreds of thousands of his fellow Georgians who were forced to emigrate to Iran and pressured to convert to Islam, Teimuraz was permitted to remain in Georgia for most of his literary career. His position between exile and home, Christianity and Islam, and Georgia and Iran conditioned the form and the content of his verse. Although his relations with all three Safavid rulers were tense, they were also intimate, as evidenced by his gift of his daughter Tinatin as a bride to Ṣafī in 1634 (she was ultimately strangled to death by order of her husband, the Shah).8 These tragic decades were also some of the brightest of Teimuraz’s literary career, for they enabled and indeed compelled the poet to write for an absent audience. Consisting of royal predecessors and literary successors, this audience constituted a unique literary public peculiarly suited for the condition of the poet-king, a figure that features widely in the circuits of literary production across the early modern Persianate world.9 Due in large part to the narrative poems (mathnavīs) gathered in his Haft awrang, Jāmī, more than any other Persian poet, was central to the Georgian-Persian confluence that reached its acme in Teimuraz’s oeuvre. Less prolific than Jāmī, the only works Teimuraz left behind are poetry. He collected his major poems into a single, five-part work, which he referred to, in Persian style, as his khamsa (quintet), thereby directly affiliating himself with the Persian poet Niẓāmī (535–606/1141–1209) from nearby Ganja whose khamsa had been imitated by countless poets in Persian and Persianate languages and which had acquired an authoritative status as an arbiter of authorship, as well as of taste, genre, and narrative. Consisting of two poems in imitation of Niẓāmī’s Khusraw and Shīrīn and Laylī and Majnūn, one poem in imitation of Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, and two poems without any known predecessor, the composition of Teimuraz’s khamsa spanned the years 1624–1635, and traversed the reigns of Shah ʿAbbās I and Ṣafī.10 In addition to his khamsa, 7  David M. Lang, “Georgia and the Fall of the Safavi Dynasty,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 14 (1952): 524. For Georgians in Isfahan during this period, see again Pierre Oberling, “Georgians and Circassians in Iran,” 127–43. 8  Donald Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 199. 9  For Dakani (early modern Urdu), the literary and political ambitions of the poet-kings of South India, Ibrāhīm ʿAdil Shāh of Bijapur (1579–1627) and of Muḥammad Qulī and ʿAbdallāh of the Quṭbshāhī dynasty (1518–1687) bear comparison with that of Teimuraz. 10  The most complete edition of Teimuraz’s works, and the only one to include his khamsa in full, is Teimuraz I, eds. A. Baramidze and G. Jakobia (Tbilisi: Pʻederatsʻia, 1934). All references in this chapter are to this edition.

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Teimuraz eulogized his predecessor, Queen Tamar (1184–1213), in verse, and composed lyric poems on melancholy themes. He was not the only Georgian poet to engage closely with the Persian literary tradition, and yet, at least for the early modern period, from among his Georgian contemporaries, Teimuraz used the Persian tradition to enrich Georgian literary form. Teimuraz had many important twelfth-century Persianizing predecessors. These included Sargis Tmogveli, who rendered Fakhr al-Dīn Gurgānī’s eleventh-century romance Vīs and Rāmin into Georgian prose.11 His famed predecessor, Rustaveli, authored the most famous Georgian romance on a Persian model.12 Chakrukadze composed Georgian courtly panegyrics that resembled the qaṣīdas that Persian poets had composed for their rulers during the same time in nearby Shirvan and Ganja.13 The age of Niẓāmī coincided with prosperity in Georgia, presided over by Queen Tamar, who acquired a near-legendary status in subsequent literary history as a patron of Georgian culture.14 The Shirvānshāh dynasty to the east, where such poets as Niẓāmī, Khāqānī, Mujīr al-Dīn Baylaqānī, Falakī, and Abūʾl ʿAlāʾ Ganjavī rose to fame, were weaker than the Georgian Bagratids, and there was no other viable competitor for power in the region, Persianate or otherwise, until the Mongol invasions.15 Hence, when medieval Georgian poets imitated the Persian masters, they could express without envy or resentment their admiration for a high literary culture that, since the beginnings of secular Georgian literature, had served as a model of excellence for Georgian writers.16 The intimacy and admiration that these medieval Georgian poets, prosaicists, and translators felt towards Persian culture was articulated in a world wherein Georgia’s political sovereignty was unchallenged. 11  See Sargis Tmogveli, Visramiani, eds. A. Gvaxaria and Magali Tʻodua (Tbilisi: Mecʻniereba, 1962), available in English as The Story of the Loves Vis and Ramin: a Romance of Ancient Persia, translated from the Georgian version, trans. Oliver Wardrop (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1914). 12  Shota Rustaveli, Vepʻxistqaosani (Tbilisi: Sakʻartʻvelo, 1997), available in English as The man in the panther’s skin; a romantic epic (Tbilisi: Literatura da khelovneba, 1966). 13  For Chakrukadze’s panegyric poem for Queen Tamar, see Tamariani, ed. Shalva Nutsubizde (Tbilisi: Izd-vo. Tbilisskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta um. Stalina, 1943). 14  For Tamar’s legacy in subsequent Georgian literary history, see Anthony Eastmond, “Gender and orientalism in Georgia in the age of Queen Tamar,” in Women, men, and eunuchs: gender in Byzantium, ed. Liz James (London: Routledge, 1997), 100–18. 15  For Georgia’s political conditions during this period, see Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 93–186. 16  For these beginnings, see the still useful overview by Robert P. Blake, “Georgian Secular Literature: Epic, Romance, and Lyric (1100–1800),” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (1933): 25–48.

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By the seventeenth century, following the Mongol invasions of the 1230s and the ascendency of the Safavids, Georgia had become a shadow of her former self.17 Particularly during the reign of Shāh ʿAbbās I, Safavid rule from a Georgian perspective was a succession of forced deportations, territorial annexations, the removal of some regional kings from power, and the reduction of others to vassalage status.18 Georgian political sovereignty had become a myth, a subject of literary reminiscence of times long past. Georgian poets now had to deal with the new ambiguities of Safavid hegemony. They had to confront the politics of Persian in an era of Safavid sovereignty, forced conversion, and state persecution. For Teimuraz, in the words of D.M. Lang, “the atrocities committed by the Persians against his native country roused him to fanatical patriotism.”19 Karst similarly alludes to the ambiguities of Safavid dominion for the Georgian king when he notes that this “vassal of the powerful emperor Shāh ʿAbbās was able to maintain the dignity and culture of his small nation” even under the watchful eye of a “suzerain conquérant.”20 By the time Teimuraz ascended the throne, royal Georgian lineage was practically a guarantee of personal catasrophe. The trauma of being Georgian under Safavid rule was most fully epitomized for Teimuraz by the martyrdom of his mother, Ketevan (1565–1624), who was killed with a branding iron by Shāh ʿAbbās’ executioners for refusing to convert to Islam.21 Even as this event epitomized the violence of the encounter between Georgian Christianity and Safavid Islam in the early modern period, it also contrasted with other aspects of Georgian-Safavid relations. Even as he executed select individuals who refused to convert, ʿAbbās I also “showed a great interest in people of different faiths and liked to converse with Christians, both those living in his own

17  For Georgia under Mongol rule, see Jürgen Tubach, G. Sophia Vashalomidze, and Manfred Zimmer, eds., Caucasus during the Mongol Period–Der Kaukasus in der Mongolenzeit (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2012). 18  For Safavid deportations from the Caucasus, see Iskandar Munshī, Dhayl-i tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿAbbāsī Ta‌ʾlīf-i Iskandar Bayg Turkmān shahīr bi Munshī va Muḥammad Yūsuf-i muʾarrikh, ed. Suhaylī Khwānsārī (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Islāmiyya, 1317/1939), 88, and Edmund Herzig, “The deportation of the Armenians in 1604–1605 and Europe’s myth of Shah ‘Abbas I,” Pembroke Papers 1 (1990): 59–71. 19  David M. Lang, The Last Years of the Georgian Monarchy: 1658–1832 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 122. 20  Joseph Karst, Littérature géorgienne chrétienne (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1934), 141. 21  On this event, see David M. Lang, Lives of the Georgian Saints (new ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1976), 171–72. Teimuraz’s version of this event is discussed in Z. Avalishvili, “T’eimuraz and his poem: The Martyrdom of Queen K’et’evan,” Georgica: A Journal of Georgian and Caucasian Studies 4/5 (1937): 17–42.

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realm and those visiting from abroad.”22 As one European visitor to ʿAbbās’s court in Isfahan stated at the time, “Persians will allow Franks to do everything except forcing the harams of the elite, because the Shah so wills it.”23 Hence the violence of forced conversion was attended by an unprecedented degree of inter-religious contact within Safavid Iran, much of which was peaceful. While acknowledging the negative impact of Safavid persecution on Georgian culture, and the way in which this violence has framed Georgian history, this chapter argues on the basis of Iosebzilixiani (Teimuraz’s version of Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā) for an understanding of Safavid-Georgian contact that is less monolithic than that which dominates most accounts of this encounter. The Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story is an ideal text with which to advance such an argument, for it is itself a conversion narrative and a palimpsest of cultural and religious difference. The narrative chronicles the journey of Zulaykhā, who is overtaken with lust for her beloved Yūsuf, towards a pinnacle of spiritual love that enables her to transform her erotic desire into a pious encounter with the cosmos.24 Given its investment in cultural and religious difference, Yūsuf and Zulaykhā is an ideal text through which to explore the encounter between early modern Georgian and Safavid Iran as refracted through literature. The resonance commanded by this story across the many different languages and literary traditions that were captivated by it was due in no small part to its inscription of religious difference as a stimulus to narrative, in the figure of a Persian poet narrating a Quranic encounter in pre-Islamic Egypt. Having traversed multiple temporalities and cultures, the protagonists of the Persian text are pious without being bound to any particular sectarian affiliation. Each time they are reinvented in varying historical, cultural, and religious contexts (spanning Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism), the lovers Zulaykhā and Yūsuf epitomize the quest of the soul towards God, and the perpetual making and unmaking of the self that is intrinsic to the experience of sexual desire.25 22  Rudolph P. Matthee, “Christians in Safavid Iran: Hospitality and Harassment,” Studies on Persianate Societies 3 (2005): 17. 23   A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1939), 1:104. 24  For one of the best treatments of the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story (in its Quranic iteration) as a conversion narrative, see Gayane Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29 (1997): 485–508. 25  With respect to the porosity of religious categories in the Georgian Iosebzilixiani, mention should be made of its predecessor, Rustaveli’s Vepxist’q’osani. Set in India and making no mention of Christianity, this text tells of a princess closely resembling Tamar who is “destined to inherit her father’s throne” (Eastmond, “Gender and orientalism,” 109). Such indifference to religious categories widely characterizes the mathnavī form.

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Although Georgia’s proximity to Iran deprived him of his mother and daughter, Teimuraz was arguably the most important Persianate author within Georgian literature. Some might say that Teimuraz did not choose this role, given that Persianized Georgian was the only viable literary idiom at the time of his writing, but the turn away from Persian that ensued in subsequent centuries and which is discussed below attests to the viability of non-Persianate registers for literary Georgian alongside Persianate ones. Regarding himself as the greatest Georgian poet of his age, Teimuraz was persuaded that the only way in which his poetic gifts could become manifest was by cultivating a sweet Persianate register in what he was to call “the heavy Georgian tongue.” Aspiring to be the greatest Persianizing poet in Georgian literature, Teimuraz composed three Georgian mathnavīs modeled on Persian examples, in the shairoba meter (the name for which derives from the Arabic shiʿr, “poetry”) that had been pioneered by Rustaveli.26 The first of these, Xusroshiriani, is modeled after Niẓāmī’s mathnavī. A second, Lailimajnuniani, combines influences from Niẓāmī and Jāmī, both of whom composed a mathnavī dealing with the love affair of Laylī and Majnūn. The third, Iosebzilixiani, is modeled after Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, a text that is in turn based on the Quranic story (12:21–34), as well as on earlier Persian versions. Both Georgian texts are not so much translations as intertextual appropriations, in senses I explore below, of the original Persian text. Both texts also participate in the widespread tradition of naẓīr (imitation, Georgian naziroba) that conditioned the circulation of Persian literary culture during the early modern period.27 The circulation and imitation of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā outstandingly illustrates the mutilingual and global scope of the Persian naẓīr (as well as of the khamsa genre into which many of these imitations were classed), for Jāmī’s narrative was imitated in Sanskrit, Dakani, Bengali, Pashto, Turkish, as early as within a century of its completion in 1483.28 Most geographically proximate to Teimuraz’s milieu is the seventeenth century Kurdish version of Selim ibn 26  Another narrative in Teimuraz’s khamsa, on the martyrdom of his mother Queen Ketevan, utilizes the structure of the Persian mathnavī form, but the plot is taken from an historical event. 27  For a sophisticated account of this literary convention, see Paul Losensky, “The Allusive Field of Drunkenness,” in Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 230–32. Also see M.D. Kazymov, Posledovateli Nizami: k problemam nazire v persoiazychnoi literature XIII–XVI vv. (Baku: Azerbaidzhanskoe gos. izd-vo, 1991) and by the same author, “Khaft peikar” Nizami i traditsiia nazire v persoiazychnoi literature XIV–XVI vv. (Baku: Elm, 1987). 28  In addition to the essays in this volume, see Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s discussion of the Dakani version by Shaykh Aḥmad Gujrātī in Early Urdu Literary Culture and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 94–7, and Thibaut D’Hubert, “La réception d’un

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Sleman, which is in dialogue with folkloric Kurdish versions as well as with Jāmī’s poem.29 At the culmination of these Persianate convergences, a nineteenth-century Albanian version produced by Muhamet Kyçuku establishes an identification between the poet and the male protagonist.30 This chapter tracks some of the ways in which Jāmī’s text circulated in the GeorgianPersianate sphere, with a view to better understanding the place of Persian, and of Jāmī specifically, in early modern Georgian literary culture. 1

Ambiguities of Safavid Sovereignty

In Lailimajnuniani, playing on the double meaning of ena/zaban as tongue/ language in both Georgian and Persian, and masterfully deploying a series of verbs (musikobani, txrobani, mbobani, shexma-mkobani) in the causative mood, Teimuraz insists on the superiority of Persian to Georgian for the purpose of poetic composition (LM, v. 4):31 sparsta enisa sitkboman masurva musikobani mdzimea ena kartvelta da ver dzalmits misebr txrobani mat metsmasnilta sitqvta minda martivad mbobani ac gamochndebis leksita mijnurta shesxma-mkobani With a sweet Persian tongue I wished to make music from the heavy Georgian tongue, but feared I could not use it for poetry. With [Georgian’s] twisted words I wanted to make a simple story so that a lover [mijnurta] could henceforth appear in verse and elicit praise.

succès littéraire persan dans les campagnes du Bengale: une traduction de Jāmī par le poète Ābdul Hākim,” Bulletin d’Etudes Indiennes 24–25 (2006–2007): 121–38. 29  Sleman’s Yūsuf and Zuleykha was published in a critical edition by M.B. Rudenko, Literaturnaia i fol’klornye versii kurdskoi poemy “Iusuf i Zelikha” (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 179–292. See the introduction, “Vvedenie i izuchenie pamiatnika,” (p. 40) for a discussion of Jāmī’s influence on the Kurdish version. 30  This text has been published as Muhamet Çami, Jusufi e Zulejhaja: dashuri përvëluese (Tirana: Tiranë Shtëpia Botuese Vetjake Hasan Tahsini, 1992). For a brief discussion, see Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature: A Short History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 41–42. 31  All citations from Teimuraz’s oeuvre are taken from Teimuraz I, eds. Baramidze and G. Jakobia. References to Lailimajnuniani are abbreviated LM and references to Iosebzi­ lixiani are abbreviated IZ.

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This early declaration of Teimuraz’s debts to Persian set the stage for his even more creative use of Persian narrative forms in Iosebzilixiani, his version of the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story. Rustaveli had already composed the major Georgian epic romance, Knight in the Panther’s Skin (Vepxistqaosani), around the theme of love madness (mijnuroba), which is also the keynote of Jāmī’s tale.32 But the rapid appropriation of Persian narrative romances for Georgian literary ends had to wait until Teimuraz’s khamsa. For most of Georgian literary history, the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story was known to literate Georgians from the Biblical narrative of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39:7–23). As a result of Jāmī, the Persian narrative became as local to the Georgian literature as the Biblical story. Aside from a pun on jām in the sense of a goblet towards the end of Iosebzilixiani (IZ, v. 302), Teimuraz does not name his Persian predecessor. Other details, aside from the pun, fill in the missing pieces. Jāmī’s works circulated more widely throughout early modern Georgia than that of any other poet. Even though Teimuraz did not name him, his Georgian contemporaries, such as Nodar Tsitsishvili (discussed below), underscored Jāmī’s importance to Georgian literary culture. The first Georgian editors of Teimuraz’s Iosebzilixiani stated in the early decades of the twentieth century that Teimuraz’s sources had not been established (dadgenili).33 This uncertainty was, however, displaced a few decades later, when Alexsandre Gvaxaria published a full-length monograph in Georgian on the Persian sources of the Georgian Iosebzilixiani.34 In this work, Gvaxaria makes Teimuraz’s debt to Jāmī clear. Notwithstanding Gvaxaria’s important contribution, Teimuraz’s Persian debts merit much closer scrutiny than they have received to date, and the topic remains undiscussed outside the narrow circle of Georgian-language scholarship. This chapter uses Jāmī’s place in the Georgian-Persianate world to advance our understanding of this particular juncture in Georgian literary history, and in particular to better understand the interface between the cosmopolitan and vernacular literary idioms that, as has recently been argued, influenced the circulation of literary

32  For the concept of majnūn in Islamic literatures, see A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing (Leiden: Brill, 2003) and Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 33  Jakobia, “Tsinasitqvaoba,” in Teimuraz I. 34  Alexsandre Gvaxaria, “Iosebzilixianianis” kartuli versiebis sparsuli tsqaroebi (Tbilisi: Sakʻartʻvelos SSR mecʻnierebatʻa akademiis gamomtsʻemloba, 1958). Gvaxaria unfortunately says little about Teimuraz’s text per se, and devotes most of his attention to tracing the dissemination of the Persian versions of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā.

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culture across much of the early modern world.35 While my primary focus is on Georgian engagements with Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, Jāmī’s place in Georgian literature is best understood in light of the other Georgian mathnavīs that were influenced by Teimuraz’s work, and which I engage towards the end of this analysis. Teimuraz’s Iosebzilixiani follows on another Georgian version of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, also entitled Iosebzilixiani, which is attributed to the preceding century.36 This anonymous work, also held by the Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts, is extant in a unique unpublished manuscript, for which the ending is lost. In contrast to Teimuraz’s eastern Georgian register, the anonymous Iosebzilixiani uses a western Georgian lexicon, is over twice as long (736 stanzas), and incorporates elements of the Biblical story alongside Jāmī’s Persian retelling of the Quran.37 Given its complete lack of influence on subsequent Georgian literary history and my present interest in tracing a genealogy of influence, the anonymous Iosebzilixiani is not considered here, although it surely merits further scrutiny.38 Notwithstanding the ambiguous status of Teimuraz’s Persian sources, the frequent references in both of his mathnavīs to the marvels of the Persian tongue (sparsuli ena) attest to Teimuraz’s acute consciousness of his literary debts. The pages that follow consider how Teimuraz reconciled his Persian debts with his goal to become the greatest poet in the Georgian tongue, and to surpass his formidable Persianizing predecessor Rustaveli. I argue that Teimuraz’s anxieties productively founded a second Persian Renaissance within Georgian literature.39 35  The basic reference for this argument is Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Rather than engaging with Pollock’s argument directly in this chapter, I aim to better understand its implications for conceiving the interface of Persian and Persianate literatures. 36  For this version, see A. Gvaxaria, “ ‘Iosebzilixanianis’ aghmosavluri versiebi,” in Dzhami: sbornik k 550-letiuu so dnia rozhdeniia velikogo poeta i myslitelia narodov Vostoka 1414–1492, ed. Davit Kobidze (Tbilisi: Izd. Tbilisskogo universiteta, 1964), 119–41. 37  See Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History (new ed. London: Taylor and Francis, 2000), 99. 38  A sign of the anonymous Iosebzilixiani’s lack of influence is the fact that it was not consulted by Sulxan-Saba Orbeliani (1658–1725) for his thorough dictionary of literary Georgian, Word Bouquet (Sitqvis Kona). I have consulted the recent edition, Lekʻsikoni kʻartʻuli, ed. Ilia Abuladze (Tbilisi: Merani, 1991–1993). 39  The periodization of Georgian-Persian relation in terms of multiple Renaissances dates back to Nikolai Marr (see the discussion in Diliiara Alieva, Nizami i gruzinskaia literatura [Baku: Elm, 1989], 141). While such periodization is open to critique, it usefully captures how Georgian literary history proceeded through ruptures more than steady continuities.

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Persianate Anxieties of Influence

The opening section to Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā is taken up with a tripartite praise of God, love (ʿishq), and poetic discourse (sukhan). Echoing the tripartite structure, Teimuraz’s Iosebzilixiani opens with a prologue of twentyeight stanzas, in which he praises the Trinity (sameba), the word (sitqva), and Georgian poetry.40 Constitutive as it is of secular Georgian literary culture, love (mijnuroba) commands the poet’s admiration, but Teimuraz does not elevate it to the same degree as his Persian predecessor. Teimuraz does not speak of ʿishq as Jāmī does throughout his mathnavī. He speaks instead of mijnuroba, a Georgian variant on the Arabo-Persian conception of love as a form of madness (junūn). For Teimuraz, love is praiseworthy, and even a basis for poetry, but it is not a metaphysical condition. By contrast, for Jāmī, Zulaykhā’s sexual attraction for Yūsuf is a pivotal stage in her journey towards God. Across many versions of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā that were inspired by Jāmī, including those in Bengali, Sanskrit, and Georgian, the prologue consistently serves as an occasion for poet-translators to advance poetic agendas within their respective traditions.41 As with similar appropriations of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā within South Asian literatures, Teimuraz used the beginning of his work to elaborate his poetics and to locate his poem within the Georgian literary tradition. Teimuraz’s prologue does more than simply anticipate the ensuing narrative; much of it is narrated in the past tense, and draws on examples from medieval Georgian literary history. Just as the crucial poetic arguments at the beginning of his Laylimajnuniani are advanced in the grammatical past, so are the key events in Iosebzilixiani’s prologue drawn from the era of Queen Tamar, a period that was marked as Georgia’s Golden Age. Teimuraz begins by offering a justification for poetry, and then elaborates an argument, addressed to the reader, about the relationship between Georgian and Persian literary culture. All Islamic texts, poetic and otherwise, begin with a basmala, a Quranic phrase meaning “In the name of God.” Teimuraz’s opening Christianizes the Islamic basmala. His idiom is simultaneously liturgical in the Christian sense and Persianate in terms of its rhythm. Teimuraz appropriates the rhetoric of

40  Baramidze and Jakobia have inserted the term “shesavali [prologue]” in brackets at the beginning of this poem, but it does not appear to have been used by Teimuraz, who left this section without a heading. 41  See respectively, the contributions of Thibaut D’Hubert, Ayesha Irani, and Luther Obrock in this volume.

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praise that animates both rhetorical traditions, while also merging praise of God with praise of an as-yet unspecified but supremely human patron: unda mciredi mciredta sitqva carmovtkva txrobili vit vitrpiale sibridznesa amad arvisgan xmobili dzoc-margaliti, gisheri ac naxet chemgan mkobili da bolod scnat qovelta-ara var moshaireta dzmobili v. 3 The humble should use humble words in their stories. I am a lover of wisdom, for that which no one names. Whose coral pearl and ebony are always praised by me. Recognized by everyone, I have no brothers in poetry. Teimuraz then turns to the thematic of love (mijnuroba) so as to clear the ground for his discourse on Georgian poetry. As is typical of the Georgian tradition, uses the masculine-inflected mepe (king) to denote the Queen Tamar:42 me tvit vcer vitqvi romelsa meped mixmoben monebi sitqva shevmzado shairta mart vita vardis konebi brzentagan shesatsqnarebi cnobilta mosaconebi da magra ekmnebis mijnurta laxvari gasaconebi v. 4 I write, I say, so that the queen [mepe] who commands her slaves will spread the true words of poetry like rose bouquets with the calm wise men, among the blessed ones. Among the sages of love, insanity should be praised. Whereas Jāmī gives pride of place to ʿishq, Teimuraz eulogizes mijnuroba. Both concepts are broadly Persianate, but, given the work that Rustaveli had already done with mijnuroba, as well as the term’s close association with Laylī and Majnūn, and thus with Niẓāmī, mijnuroba presumably appeared more locally relevant to the Georgian poet, while ʿishq would have had a more exotic genealogy.

42  Queen Tamar is commonly referred to as king (mepe) in Georgian history. For a standard biography of this queen, which underplays the role of gender, see Roin Metreveli, Cminda Mep’e T’amar (Tbilisi: Saojaxo Bibliot’eka, 2011).

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Teimuraz refers to the lovers Ioseb and Zilixia by the phrase ekmnebis mijnurta (“sages of love”). Ekmnebis is the plural genitive form of ekimi, and derives from the Arabo-Persian ḥakīm (sage). In this passage, Teimuraz uses a Persian term that was already part of the Georgian lexicon to idiosyncratically render a category that Jāmī describes in many different ways (for example asīr-i ʿishq and ahl-i ʿishq), but never precisely as “wise men of love.” In this respect and others, Teimuraz’s Persianized Georgian results in an idiosyncratic idiom that, while participating in the Persian tradition, also diverges from the Persianate norm. Given Teimuraz’s efforts to pioneer a Georgian-Persianate register, it is striking that the prologue to his narrative of Ioseb and Zilixa’s love is entirely consumed with the tale of Tariel and Nestan-Darejan, two lovers of putatively Indian extraction whom Rustaveli introduced to Georgian literature. Tariel and Nestan-Darejan were in turn based on Majnūn and Laylī of Niẓāmī’s eponymous narrative. No aspect of the story that unfolds—not the characters’ names nor the fate that awaits them—is hinted at in the opening section. Instead we read of a Georgian romance, and of the place of mijnuroba within that story, alongside the virtues of the Persian tongue. While Teimuraz announces his intention to tell a “love story [mijnurta ambavi, v. 9],” readers encountering the text for the first time have no way of knowing what will ensue, and are indeed led to believe that this tale will simply recapitulate the plot of Rustaveli’s epic. The dominant figure in Teimuraz’s prologue is Rustaveli’s hero Tariel, the fictional Indian prince who, at the behest of his beloved Nestan-Darejan, saves India (indoeti) from invaders, who are named in the text as Khwarazmians. In terms that recall Jāmī’s own intertextual deployments in his prologue (which are discussed below) Tariel is figured in the prologue as a Georgian version of Yūsuf, before the author even mentions Yūsuf’s name: tarieli icnobt qovelni sardanis dzes mxnesa-da mas uebrosa moqmesa tanad alvisa xesa-da vit etrpiala indoets nestan-darejans mzesa-da da dakarga gulsa saxmili kvlav upro daekvesa-da v. 10 Everyone knows Tariel, the son of Saredon, the brave warrior with a body as slender as a cypress. He fell in love with the beautiful Indian Nestan-Darejan. Her heart lost its spark, and again revived.

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The parallel between Tariel and Yūsuf is here as unambiguous as is Teimuraz’s appropriation of Jāmī’s lexicon, for in the Persian text, Yūsuf’s body is repeatedly said to resemble a cypress tree (sarv), particularly when Zulaykhā encounters him in her dreams.43 Although its gender is grammatically ambiguous (typical for a Persian trope), the cypress (alvis xe) is unambiguously associated in Georgian with the female form. From Teimuraz’s perspective, both Tariel and Yūsuf defy gender norms through their exceeding beauty and through their status as maʿshūq, the object of the lover’s gaze, a status Teimuraz deliberately overstates in the case of Tariel. Although Tariel’s relationship to his beloved Nestan-Darejan resembles that of Majnūn with respect to Laylī, Rustaveli’s Tariel is a stereotypically male hero. Teimuraz acknowledges as much by calling Tariel moqme (a brave young man). But with Yūsuf on his mind, Teimuraz revises Rustaveli’s rendering of this male archetype, feminizing him, and shifting the reader’s attention from NestanDarejan, whose beauty is profusely praised in Rustaveli’s epic, to Tariel, who drives the epic’s plot, but is less an object of readerly attention in Rustaveli. After delineating the epic feats of Rustaveli’s characters as a prelude to his own romance, Teimuraz considers the conditions under which Rustaveli composed his poem. By way of crafting a genealogy for himself, Teimuraz cites Rustaveli’s statement that he “found [his] story first recorded among the Persians” (vpoveo ambavi pirveli sparstagan mbobita, v. 17). Teimuraz then makes explicit what was only implicit in Rustaveli’s text: Queen Tamar, the paradigmatic patron of Georgian literature and of Rustaveli in particular, inspired his poem. Following on a recurring theme in Georgian literary history, Teimuraz presents Queen Tamar as the object of Rustaveli’s desire, and argues that it was at her request that he composed his romance. “Was it really possible,” Teimuraz asks, “that [Rustaveli] raved [xelobda] because of her?” (v. 18). The next stanza radically shifts Teimuraz’s authorial placement within his text. Suddenly, we are transported from a golden age of Georgian literary culture that vanished half a millennium prior, to the Safavid present, as Teimuraz’s kingdom crumbles before his eyes, his mother is martyred, and his own position as the nominal sovereign of Kartli and Kaxetia (eastern Georgia) becomes increasingly tenuous. Reflecting on the destruction of Georgia’s past, Teimuraz laments (v. 19): 43  Jāmī, Mathnavī-yi Haft awrang, eds. Aʿlā Khān Afṣaḥzād, Jābilqā Dād ʿAlīshāh, Aṣghar Jānfidā, Ṭāhir Aḥrārī, and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Tarbīyat (Tehran: Daftar-i Nashr-i Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1378/1999), 2:20. Future citations from Yūsuf and Zulaykhā are from this edition, and are abbreviated as YZ.

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scvevda saxmili ushreti pirmzisa tamar mepisa vita poladi maghnitsa tvalni sachvretlad episa magram man mzeman nateli mijnurt ar uiepisa da arad shesconda zaxili vardsa bulbulta qepisa The peerless Queen Tamar was burned in a furnace, as though with a steel iron. Her eyes discern everything. Meanwhile I have no luminous beloved resembling the sun. And the nightingale’s cooing no longer reaches the rose. Teimuraz’s tortured associations with Persian resonate in the graphic, although fictitious, description of Tamar’s body incinerated in a furnace (scvevda saxmili ushreti). Recalling historical accounts of the martyrdom of his mother Queen Ketevan, who had been killed five years prior to the composition of Iosebzilixiani, Teimuraz imagines Tamar, who died of natural causes, as having been burnt to death with a steel iron (poladi maghnitsa).44 The reduction of Tamar’s body to physical remnants (ushreti) further conveys Georgia’s ruined material state in an era of Safavid hegemony. That the poet is projecting his mother’s martyred body onto the image of this fallen Queen is further suggested by the reference to her “discerning eyes” (tvalni sachvretlad), which suggest a son’s tender affection for his departed mother. Finally, Teimuraz turns his personal trauma into a problem for the composition of poetry. Whereas Rustaveli composed his epic at his patron’s behest, and could count on a built-in audience of avid courtiers, Teimuraz had no such audience during his lifetime. In addition to giving voice to the poet’s personal grief, Teimuraz’s prologue functions as a palimpsest of Persian and Georgian culture. Overwhelmed by Safavid hegemony, Teimuraz asserts that Georgian culture has entered a state of decay. This theme was already anticipated when, in v. 4, Teimuraz underscores his loneliness, stating, “Among the poets I am without a brother” (ara var moshaireta dzmobili). Notably, this verse echoes Jāmī’s declaration of singularity in the prologue to his Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, where he states: “In this assembly I see no one experienced or inexperienced/who is capable of drinking this wine.” (na bīnam pukhta-ī z’īn bazm u khām-ī/ki bāshad dar kaf-ash z’ān bāda jām-ī. YZ, 19), which is to say no one who is capable of fully understanding his verse. These professions of singularity resonate across the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā 44   Poladi literally translates as “steel,” not the iron with which Ketevan was killed; the coincidence of terminology and imagery with Ketevan’s martyrdom is nonetheless evident.

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textual tradition, particularly in the Sanskrit version by Śrīvara of Kashmir that preceded Teimuraz’s version by two centuries.45 Just as he lacks a beloved who could inspire him to compose a new poem, so too has the Persianate register, on this account, ceased to stimulate Georgian verse. At the same time, there is much in Teimuraz’s text and oeuvre to suggest a more positive relation to Persian. In light of Teimuraz’s denigration of the traditional symbols of Persian culture, such as the nightingale (bulbuli) and the rose (vardi), it is noteworthy that the fifth poem in his khamsa, Vardbulbuliani (The Rose Nightingale), is constituted through these very tropes. In the prologue, Teimuraz transitions from his catalog of Tariel’s exploits to the conditions under which Rustaveli composed his epic romance. In what may be Iosebzilixiani’s pivotal verse, Teimuraz explores the paradox of his text’s existence. These verses echo the opening of Leylimajnuniani. Mepes eneba sparsuli tkmat kartulisa enita leksad tkma mcads-o ubrdzana laghmad brdznad shukta penita niche aghutkva uzemo moaje var mokenita da mijnuri mijnurt sakebrad dajda glax cremlita denita v. 20 By the Queen’s will, I have put Persian utterances into the Georgian tongue. “Time to recite poetry,” elegantly ordered the luminous light, whose brilliance emanates from above. I am her supplicant and admirer. I am the poor lover of lovers who sat adoring her. My tears flow. Such verses would have sounded sincere during Rustaveli’s era, when the poet was in fact blessed with a patron, Queen Tamar, who looked after his wellbeing. But Teimuraz could only utter such statements ironically. He had no patron, no lover, no daughter, and his mother had been martyred. There was no audience to whom he could address his poem, and the country over which he was nominally king was facing annihilation. In the absence of an actual readership, and even of a muse, Teimuraz addressed posterity. He turned to Persian, less for the sake of the fictional patrons and beloveds he praises so elaborately, but for the sake of a literary future he brought into being by grafting his tale, composed in the inferior Georgian tongue, onto a more durable Persianate ethos. 45  For this version, see Obrock’s contribution to this volume.

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Teimuraz’s efforts to situate himself in the Georgian literary tradition by engaging with Jāmī parallel Jāmī’s engagement with Niẓāmī. Both poets related to their predecessor as rivals in the quest for literary immortality. In contrast to Jāmī’s successes in the Persian romance, a genre he only assayed towards the close of his life and which formed a small portion of his overall oeuvre, Niẓāmī was unrivalled in his reputation as the master of the khamsa, and of the mathnavī form of which the khamsa was comprised. Niẓāmī inspired many imitators, but neither Jāmī nor Amīr Khusraw nor any other subsequent poet is regarded as his peer with respect to the mathnavī form. Each new khamsa contained new discourses of praise and derision towards the genre’s preceding examples, and in each case this divided rhetoric helped to facilitate the emergence of new literary traditions in Chaghatay, Bengali, Dakani, and Georgian. Working in the shadow of Persian literature, these vernacular poets drew on the khamsa’s conflicted rhetoric of authority alongside its systematic displacement of authorial personas into rhetorical tropes.46 And just as Teimuraz could not evade the influence of Jāmī, so too Jāmī could not evade the influence of Niẓāmī, the pioneer of the mathnavī form, when he crafted his romances. Teimuraz’s literary oeuvre parallels that of Jāmī in ways beyond their shared narrative repertoire. The anxiety of influence evidenced in the prologue of Iosebzilixiani is also visible in Jāmī’s opening sequences, particularly in the sections that enumerate the virtues (faḍīlat) of love alongside the virtues of poetic discourse (sukhan). In one section, Jāmī memorably declares his intention to exceed the achievements of Niẓāmī. Without naming his rival, Jāmī instead invokes two works from his khamsa, Laylī and Majnūn and Khusraw and Shīrīn, and implies that Niẓāmī’s verses have grown stale: kuhan shud dawlat-i shīrīn u khusraw ba shīrīn ī nishānam khusraw-i naw (YZ, 39) The pleasure of Shīrīn and Khusraw is old. I’ll create a new Khosrow in a delicate way. According to a nineteenth-century commentary by the Indian scholar Muḥammad Shāh, the dominant purpose of this verse is to draw an analogy between Shīrīn and Zulaykhā on the one hand, and Yūsuf and Khusraw on the other.47 We have already seen this tendency to generate equivalences between 46  I am very grateful to Thibaut D’Hubert for helping me to work through these points. 47  Muḥammad Shāh paraphrases these verses as “with Zulaykhā I will show Yūsuf [bā Zulaykhā Yūsuf rā nishānam]” ([Sharḥ-i Zulaykhā Muḥammad Shāh, Cawnpore: Naval Kishore, 1884], 57).

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characters across a poetic repertoire at work in Teimuraz’s parallels between Tariel and Yūsuf on the one hand and Nestan-Darejan and Zulaykhā on the other. Jāmī clearly had in mind something similar, and that Teimuraz learned from his example. However, the poet’s endeavor to embed his characters within an existing narrative repertoire does not negate his equally obvious intention of claiming a literary reputation for himself through his verse. Jāmī never composed a mathnavī for Shīrīn and Khusraw; this narrative is overwhelmingly associated with Niẓāmī. So Jāmī could not have been referencing himself exclusively with this verse; he was necessarily invoking—and comparing himself to—his unnamed predecessor. Jāmī continues in the following miṣraʿ to contrast his own work in even bolder terms to Niẓāmī’s achievement: sar āmad dawlat-i laylī u majnūn kas-ī dīgar sar-āmad sāzam aknūn (YZ, 39) The pleasure of Laylī and Majnūn has been consumed. Now I will make someone else famous. Muḥammad Shāh underscores how these verses further embed Yūsuf and Zulaykhā within an existing narrative tradition. According to his paraphrase, this verse means that the story (qiṣṣa) of Laylī and Majnūn has reached its end and now the poet will cause a new character to dominate his imagination (ḥālā kas-ī dīgar rā ghālib mīkunam).48 In this verse, Laylī is to Zulaykhā as Majnūn is to Yūsuf. But the parallel is far from complete, since one of the major accomplishments of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā was to invert the heterosexual construction of the women as the object of desire and the male lover as its subject that fully permeates Laylī and Majnūn. While Jāmī’s verse is certainly striving for a kind of intertextuality, the allusion to prior mathnavīs as templates for these new characters only goes so far; the poet’s turn away from Laylī and Majnūn entails more than the replacement of names, or a ground clearing for new characters. Rather, it signifies an inversion of a heteronormative social order that also inverts a prior hierarchy of authorship. Even as Jāmī clears a space for the introduction of his characters into the Persian narrative repertoire, he also reframes the question of influence. Jāmī implies that, at this juncture in the history of Persian literature, the story of Laylī and Majnūn is over and the time for his Yūsuf and Zulaykhā has arrived.49 48  Here I also follow Muḥammad Shāh (Sharḥ-i Zulaykhā Muḥammad Shāh, 57–58). 49  Further adding to the parallelisms between Teimuraz’s and Jāmī’s texts, just as Teimuraz turns to the Persian poetic tradition to make a case for the importance of his Georgian

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Jāmī understands love (ʿishq) as an affective condition that, because it so intimately related to the encounter with the sacred, permeates the desiring subject with what Zulaykhā calls ḥayrāt, astonishment or stupefaction. As a spiritual state, ḥayrāt also features widely in Jāmī’s theological writings, most notably in his mystical treatise Lavāʾiḥ (Flashes), which expounds the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī. When Zulaykhā’s nurse asks why she seems to be suffering, Zulaykhā responds: bi-guftā man zi khwud ḥayrān-am imrūz ba kār-i khwīsh sar gardānam imrūz (YZ, 106) She said: I am bewildered from myself today. I’m bewildered about this situation of mine. In Jāmī’s text, Zulaykhā’s desire for Yūsuf is more frequently associated with ʿishq than with love-madness (junūn). Both at the level of narrative poetics, by giving a new life to a neglected story, and thematically, by elaborating a concept of ʿishq that was unavailable to Niẓāmī, the mathnavī that Jāmī contrasted to Niẓāmī’s narrative corpus signaled a new literary-historical horizon. Further paralleling the placement of Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā with that of Teimuraz’s Iosebzilixiani, Jāmī drew on a Quranic narrative that, notwithstanding earlier brief attempts by Firdawsī and ʿAmīq Bukhārī, had not productively been used in Persian literature prior to his creation.50 Jāmī rewrote the Quranic narrative so successfully that his example was imitated afterwards, so profusely and in so many languages that the status of his text as the source of subsequent vernacular appropriations has been highly mediated, although always present at some level. The Kurdish version is a case in point, as is the Georgian one. In both cases Jāmī is the great unnamed predecessor, whose authority casts a shadow over the entire text, but who is not explicitly invoked. Teimuraz positions his work within a Persianate tradition, but, even while drawing heavily on prior Persian and Georgian narratives, he does not invoke Jāmī. The task of more explicit invocation and affiliation was left for subsequent Georgian Persianizing poets.

work, so does Jāmī invoke the Quranic verse concerning God’s creation of the world (kun fayakūn, Quran 36:82) to elevate his own poetic act (this is my reading of YZ, 39, v. 395). 50  These and other versions are systematically tabulated in Gvaxaria, “‘Iosebzilixanianis’.”

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Translation as Intertextuality

Both the Georgian and Persian text considered here make the case for their newness by invoking contrasting examples from the same narrative traditions. Our understanding of the precise workings of literary influence in these milieus can be refined through the Arabo-Persian concept of sariqa, sometimes translated as literary theft.51 Because sariqa is a highly valued literary technique in Persian and Arabic rhetorical manuals, “literary appropriation” seems like a more appropriate rendering. Premodern rhetoricians meticulously distinguished among the many different varieties of sariqa. For present purposes, it is relevant only to note that the best sariqa was regarded as the one that most thoroughly transforms the original text at the level both of wording (lafẓ) and meaning (maʿnī) and thereby generates a fundamentally new creation.52 While Teimuraz was at work constructing his khamsa through a series or direct and indirect naẓīrs, another Persianate poet indebted to Jāmī, Ālāol of Bengal ( fl. 1651–71), pioneered an understanding of translation “as a hermeneutical practice inspired in its form by Sanskrit commentarial methods.”53 Georgian scholarship similarly refers to Georgian reworkings of Persian mathnavīs as badzvebi (imitations), and the verb used to describe the act of transposition is badzabs (imitates) rather than “translates.” These lineages, which conceive of translation as a variation on commentary, imitation, and appropriation, suggest an alternative to the current understanding of translation as the wholesale reproduction of a syntactical unit. The forms of intertextuality cultivated by these premodern practices of translation reveal the limitations of contemporary understandings of translation for tracking Yūsuf and Zulaykhā’s circulation across the Persianate world.54 51  On the concept of sariqa, see Wolfhart Heinrichs, “An Evaluation of sariqa,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5/6 (1987–1988): 357–68; Gustave von Grunebaum, “The Concept of Plagiarism in Arabic Theory,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 3 (1944): 234–53, and, most recently, Erez Naaman, “Sariqa in Practice: The Case of Al-Ṣāḥib Ibn cAbbād,” Middle Eastern Literatures 14/3 (2011): 271–85. 52  Shams-i Qays Rāzī, Kitāb al-muʿjam fī maʿāyīr ashʿār al-ʿajam, ed. M.M. Qazvīnī and M. Mudarris-i Raḍawīʿ (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1338/1959), 414. 53  Thibaut D’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol ( fl.1651–1671), a Bengali poet between Worlds (In the Shade of the Golden Palace Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For scholarship on the naẓīr, see n. 27. 54  For reflection on premodern ways of conceiving translation, see Rebecca Ruth Gould, “Inimitability versus Translatability: The Structure of Literary Meaning in Arabo-Persian Poetics,” The Translator 19/1 (2013): 81–104. The conception of translation as the wholesale reproduction of meaning has of course been critically engaged in the modern period, most notably by Walter Benjamin in his “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (1923).

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The disjuncture between modern and premodern ways of conceiving translation holds whether these versions are genealogically related to Jāmī’s text, or whether they derive from a folkloric tradition. Rather than classing Teimuraz’s Iosebzilixiani as a translation of Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, I have engaged with this text as a means of better understanding the relation between Persian and Persianate literatures in early modern Georgia under Safavid rule. An intertextual approach is better equipped to track the movement between texts within the naẓīr tradition than is a literalist comparison between a series of genealogically related texts. Embedded as it was within a multilingual world literary culture, particularly during the early modern period, the naẓīr tradition was arguably concerned less with the recreation of specific texts than with their localization within new, only partially Persian, environments. A literalist approach would only work if there were a single, normative model against which Teimuraz’s version could be measured. Jāmī was as normative in the Caucasus as he was across South Asia, but in both geographies the engagement with his Haft awrang was fluid. In much the same way as he related to Niẓāmī, the poet’s name functioned as much if not more as a stimulus to creative revision than as a locus of authority.55 Teimuraz conceived no single Urtext when he rendered the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story into Georgian. Instead, he used Jāmī’s Haft Awrang as he used the romances of Rustaveli and Niẓāmī, as stimuli, not as constraints against which the accuracy of his version was to be measured. Committed as he was to a conception of translation as intertextual recreation, Teimuraz’s literary legacy can move contemporary translation studies beyond the fetishization of literal fidelity to the source text. In terms of Islamic literary theory, both Teimuraz and Jāmī attained to the highest levels of sariqa in their versions of the Yūsuf and Zulaykhā story. Making previous alignments of lafẓ and maʿnī serve new ends, their works went beyond the scope of translations in the modern sense. Jāmī defines ʿishq against its preceding signification in Niẓāmī, and Teimuraz defines mijnuroba against its preceding signification in Rustaveli. Jāmī’s achievement was more comprehensive than that of his Georgian counterpart, but Teimuraz’s readerly as well as poetic gifts were considerable. Instead of celebrating Persian culture as more elevated than his own, Teimuraz could have denigrated the Safavid dynasty that he perceived as hostile to his very existence, for the very good reason that its rulers had executed much of his family. When Teimuraz created a new Georgian variation on a longer-standing Persianate narrative tradition, he 55  Outside Georgia, Jāmī was more influential in the Caucasus—Daghestan in particular— for his Arabic grammatical and philosophical writings.

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advanced the shift from Persian to Persianate literary culture, by deepening the interface between local and global idioms, and by inculcating a creative understanding of translation that prioritized intervention within the target culture over fidelity to the source. Another Georgian poet, Nodar Tsitsishvili, followed Teimuraz’s footsteps when he cast another Persian narrative, dedicated to the life and exploits of the Sasanian king Bahrām Gūr (r. 421–438), into Georgian verse.56 Niẓāmī produced the first major version of Bahrām Gūr’s story in Persian literature under the title Haft paykar (593/1197). Amīr Khusraw produced his version, Hasht bihisht (Eight Paradises) in 701/1302. By the sixteenth century, many versions of Haft paykar were in circulation, including a Chaghatay version by Jāmī’s close friend Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (845–906/1441–1501). In the prologue to his version of the Bahrām Gūr narrative, entitled Seven Morning Stars (Shvidi mtiebi, ca. 1655), Tsitsishvili situates Navāʾī’s version alongside three versions that preceded his own, using the verb “imitates [badzavs]” rather than “translates” to describe the process of the text’s recreation in a new language: es ambavi sparsulebr goneba-miucvdomeli, nizamis utkvams ganjelsa, brdzenta brdzenia romeli; mas badzavs xosro dehlevi. mun ena-daushromeli, mas xosro sjobs tu nizami, vart misi miuxvdomeli. navais ese ambavi chaghaturis enita utkvams, da misebr melekse sxva vinmetsa viazrebnita? Kvla jamis utkvams sparsulad munve chkuita brdzenita, Ilxens qoveli mkitxveli mat otxta leksta smenita.57 This Persian story [ambavi] is the height of profundity. Niẓāmī of Ganja told it once. He was the wisest of the wise. Then Khusraw of Delhi, of the insatiable tongue, imitated it [mas badzavs]. Whether it’s better [in the versions of] Khusraw or Niẓāmī, we cannot say. 56  Donald Rayfield considers Nodar’s version “the greatest [among the] Georgian adaptations” of Persian narratives (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 99). 57  Nodar Tsʻitsʻishvili, Shvidi mtʻiebi: Baram-buri, ed. Korneli Kekelidze (Tbilisi: Kʻartʻuli tsigni, 1930), vv. 12–13. This work is also available in a scholarly Russian translation: Sem’ planet: (Baram-Guriani), ed. and trans. B.T. Rudenko (Moscow: Pamiatniki pis’mennosti vostoka, 1975).

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Then Navāʾī put this story into Chaghatay. Who could imagine a poem more beautiful than his? Then Jāmī again with his wise mind puts it into Persian again. Every reader rejoices at hearing all four poems. Although Nodar attributes versions of the Bahrām Gūr narrative to Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw, and Jāmī, only versions by the first two poets are known.58 Nodar’s account of textual transmission may therefore be read as a statement concerning the plasticity of Persian forms of authorship and the malleability of Persianate narratives, rather than as a reconstruction of a preexisting genealogy. Nodar’s method of writing literary history substantiates the preceding discussion of translation in relation to the Persian-Georgian concept of naẓīr/ naziroba. We can see from this list that the boundaries between texts were perceived as porous rather than constraining. Persianizing Georgian poets such as Teimuraz and Nodar saw themselves less as translators of texts than as translators of traditions, of cultural worlds to which they gave new life in new milieus. Nodar’s catalog is important less for what it tells us about the circulation of the Bahrām Gūr story than for what it reveals concerning the currency of Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw, Jāmī, and Navāʾī on this periphery of the Persianate world. It is apt in this context to compare Nodar’s poetic catalog with one from a century earlier, by the Dakani poet Shaykh Aḥmad Gujrātī (b. 1539). His version of Jāmī’s Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, dated ca. 1580–5, was the first rendering of this work into any South Asian vernacular and a landmark within early Urdu literary culture. In this text, Shaykh Aḥmad generates a list of Persian poets identical to that invoked by Nodar, by way of preparing the groundwork for his vernacular rendering. “If I could find the poems/Made by Khusraw or Niẓāmī,” states Shaykh Aḥmad, “I should quickly put them/Into Hindvī.”59 The context of Shaykh Aḥmad’s statement is important: this is a vernacular text, one of the first of its kind, in a newly emergent literary language that was, like Georgian, lexically indebted to, while gramatically distinct from, Persian. As with Dakani, so with Georgian. The differences between the South Asian and Caucasus literary situations, traceable to a Sanskritic register on the one hand, and a partially Byzantine register on the other, speak for themselves.60 58  For similar misattributions in the Bengali context, which equally attest to the symbolic status of the authorial persona behind the khamsa genre and his fluidity across this literary tradition, see d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace. 59  Cited and translated in Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, 96. 60  The treatment of Georgian as a vernacular language in terms comparable to its betterstudied Indian counterparts requires fuller elucidation elsewhere. For a more extended

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The genesis of vernacular literary culture on these two borderlands of the Persianate world, so distant from each other, merits systematic comparison.61 Their divergences and convergences can crucially advance our understanding of Persian and Persianate early modernity, as well as the early modern interface between vernacular and cosmopolitan literary horizons. Notwithstanding the radically different coordinates informing Indic and Caucasus literary cultures, the Persianate register brought about a confluence of literatures from across West and South Asia that had yet to engage with each other prior to the early modern translations of Persian texts into vernacular languages. I argued earlier for recognizing the contemporaneity of the Persianization of Georgian and South Asian literatures. Niẓāmī, for example, figured heavily into the literary imagination from South Asia to the Caucasus. The early modern moment, however, marked a new and even more linguistically heterogeneous confluence between these opposite coordinates of the Persian world. In contrast to the medieval example, which transpired primarily in Persian (with the important exception of Georgian), this confluence transpired across multiple languages, and entailed parallel, Persianate, yet mutually unintelligible revivals of local vernacular culture. Nodar and Shaykh Aḥmad invoke identical genealogies, leading from Niẓāmī to Amīr Khusraw to Jāmī. They both arrive however at radically different, if parallel, locations in their pursuit of the vernacular. Nodar lays special emphasis on the beauty of Navāʾī’s Chaghatay and thereby displaces the authority of Persian as the supreme language of literary expression. Similarly, Shaykh Aḥmad boldly states that he is not content to play the role of “Jāmī’s slave.” Instead of engaging in blind imitation, Shaykh Aḥmad proposes to “follow [Jāmī]/In some places, and not follow him” in others, and to “extract whatever/Poetry Jāmī had, and add some of my own.” Shaykh Aḥmad’s revisionary literary agenda suggests a new confidence in the vernacular, and a new relationship to Persian, which is still a primary reference point, although its authority is now exercised in a different way. Nodar’s elevation of Navāʾī’s Chaghatay over Jāmī’s Persian can also be read in light of this changed relation between vernacular and cosmopolitan literary languages. In assigning the superior version of the Bahrām Gūr narrative to a language other than Persian, engagement with the “vernacular” rubric in the context of Georgian literature, see Rebecca Ruth Gould, “Aleksandre Qazbegi’s Mountaineer Prosaics: The Anticolonial Vernacular on Georgian-Chechen Borderlands,” Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History in the Post-Soviet Space 15/1 (2014): 361–90. 61  For a preliminary endeavor, see Rebecca Ruth Gould, “The Geographies of ʿAjam: The Circulation of Persian Poetry from South Asia to the Caucasus,” The Medieval History Journal 18/1 (2015) 87–119.

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Nodar helped to secure a place for early modern Georgian within Persianate literary culture. Nodar was not the only early modern Persianate poet to conceive of Jāmī in relation to Amīr Khusraw.62 A century earlier, another South Asian poet, Jamālī Dihlavī (d. 942/1535) had bestowed on Jāmī the title “the second Khusraw.”63 In Nodar’s literary ecology, the status of Georgian with respect to Persian parallels that of Chaghatay.64 He even claims that the most beautiful version of the poem is the Turkic rather than the Persian one. Such equalization of linguistic registers is part of the poet’s endeavor to clear a space for Georgian within Persianate literary culture, and a reflection of the vernacular linguistic ecologies that were coming to characterize the Persianate world.65 In contrast with the Persianate register cultivated by Teimuraz and Nodar, another Georgian king, Archil (1647–1713), pursued an idiom closer to Georgian speech. Archil incorporated into his Archiliani, a composite work consisting of narratives of Georgian history, a dialogue between Teimuraz and Rustaveli (gabaaseba teimurazisa da rustvelisa), in which he reproaches the Safavid vassal for “the artificial mannerisms of his style, as well as for having set himself above the sublime Rustaveli.”66 The sequence leading from Teimuraz to Nodar to Archil traces an arc of Persianization, followed by vernacularization, for a literature dating back to late antiquity.67 While this type of Persianization, which transpired within a literature that was susceptible to many other influences, calls for a rethinking of the Persianization/vernacularization sequence, 62  For other examples, see Sharif Hussain Qasmi, “Amir Khusro in the Court of Herat,” in Amir Khusro Dehalvi: A Seminar Report, eds. Tanvīr Aḥmad ʿAlvī, Pradeep Sharma Khusro, and Irshad Naiyyer (New Delhi: Hazrat Amir Khusro Academy, 2004), 11–13, and Paul Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 114–32. 63  Hamid Algar, Jami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 130. 64  See Marc Toutant’s contribution to this volume. 65  For vernacularization in the early modern Persianate world, see Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch, eds. Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India (Leiden: Brill, 2014), esp. Bruijn and Busch, “Introduction,” 7; Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert L. Canfield, ed., Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. Michel Mazzaoui, “Islamic culture and literature in Iran and Central Asia during the early modern period,” 78–103. 66  Lang, The Last Years of the Georgian Monarchy, 122. For the text, see vol. 2 of Archʻiliani: tʻxzulebatʻa sruli krebuli or tomad (Tbilisi: Sakʻartʻvelos muzeumi, 1936–1937) and Archili, Sruli krebuli (Tbilisi: Merani, 1999), 210–362. 67  For Georgian literary beginnings, which date (in terms of extant texts) to the fifth century, see R. Baramidze, Kartuli mtserlobis sataveebtan (Tbilisi: Ganatleba, 1978). Bengali is another Persianate literature with a tradition that predates its Persianization.

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this paradigm still retains heuristic usefulness, as a way of marking the influence of a transregional Persian idiom within resolutely local literary cultures. Nodar’s elevation of Navāʾī’s Chaghatay over Jāmī’s Persian was one stage in the process of Georgian literature’s vernacularization, which was a consequence of its earlier Persianization. This process reached its acme with Archil’s wholescale displacement of Jāmī’s Persian idiom. And yet even Archil, who tried to stem the tide of Persianization, composed an Alexander romance modeled on the versions of Niẓāmī and Jāmī.68 As Archil’s example attests, even when Georgian poets endeavored to turn Georgian away from Persian idioms, they inevitably pursued their agendas under the shadow of Persian. With regard to its complex relationship to cosmopolitan Persianate idioms, early modern Georgian can productively be thought of as a cosmopolitan vernacular, along lines that have thus far been discussed primarily for South Asian literary history.69 Extending the cosmopolitan vernacular to the scale of world literature, Wai Chee Dimock describes this paradigm as “a local tongue globalized in its emergence and globalized again in its circulation.”70 In using the cosmopolitan vernacular concept to trace the Persianization of Georgian literature, a few modifications need to be made. Although it was heavily inflected by a cosmopolitan language, Georgian was never “globalized in its circulation” as other cosmopolitan vernaculars were. The Persianization of Georgian created a sphere of literary influence within a Persianate geography that remained confined within narrow geographic coordinates and addressed to a small circle of connoisseurs, primarily comprised of poet-kings.71 This inward-looking Persianate sphere existed in a tense and contradictory relation to the broader political context of Safavid hegemony. Persian was the medium of Teimuraz’s subjection to Safavid rule and the register in which he articulated his profoundest grief. The tension between Safavid rule 68  Archili, Alekʻsandriani, ed. Revaz Mirianashvili (Tbilisi: Mecʻniereba, 1980). 69  In addition to Pollock’s The Language of the Gods, two loci classici are Pollock’s articles “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12/3 (2000): 591–625, and “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57/1 (1998): 6–37. For a recent conceptualization of Bengali literature in terms of the cosmopolitan vernacular, see Jessie Ross Knutson, Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), esp. ch. 3. 70  Wai Chee Dimock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” http://amlitintheworld.commons .yale.edu/2014/02/06/the-cosmopolitan-vernacular/. (blog entry dated February 6, 2014). 71  For further on “Persianate spheres” as a paradigm for understanding regional difference within the Persianate world, see James Pickett, The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia, 1747–1917 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015).

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and Timurid literary legacies is well-attested outside Georgia as well. The Safavid Shāh Ismāʿīl (r. 907–930/1501–1524) permitted the soldiers under his command to ignite a fire around Jāmī’s tomb.72 Later Safavid rulers followed suit. Persuaded that he was hostile to Shi’ite beliefs, the Safavid Shāh Ṭahmāsp (r. 930–984/1524–1576) ordered the destruction of Jāmī’s shrine in Herat and issued an order to burn all extant copies of his dīwān.73 Jāmī’s tomb was later rebuilt by the same Shah and revered by subsequent Safavid rulers, but the rifts these acts introduced into literary exchanges between Iran and the broader Persianate world remained as palpable, and as irrevocable, as the iron brandished by Shāh ʿAbbās’ executioner onto the resistant body of the Queen Ketevan, which would irrevocably shape the future course of Georgian literary history and which arguably remains the most potent image of Safavid in the contemporary Georgian imagination. One of the many potential benefits of more sustained exploration of the place of Persian and Persianate idioms within early modern Georgian literary culture is the impetus it can give those of us who seek with our work to displace the nationalisms of the present with more nuanced accounts of the circulation of world literature before modernity. Rejecting the monolithic construction of Safavid tyranny that dominates much Georgian historiography as well as contemporary Georgian cultural memory, I have sought to move beyond persecution as the dominant trope for understanding the Georgian encounter with Persian literature, while also illuminating a literary archive that, as Teimuraz’s encounter with Jāmī attests, richly supports a more cosmopolitan understanding of the genesis and circulation of global literary culture. Bibliography A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. Vol. 1. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1939. Algar, Hamid. Jami. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Alieva, Diliiara. Nizami i gruzinskaia literatura. Baku: Elm, 1989. Anūshah, Ḥasan. Dānishnāma-yi adab-i Fārsī. Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi Farhangī va Intishārātī-yi Dānishnāma, 1375/1996. 72  Algar, Jami, 126. 73  For this event, see Paul Losensky’s contribution to this volume, as well as Martin Dickson, Shah Tahmāsb and the Uzbeks: the Duel for Khurāsān with ʿUbayd Khān, 930–946/1524– 1540 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1958), 190, and Colin P. Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 28 and 233n164.

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Index of Names ʿAbbās II 799 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Farhārvī 237, 240 ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-Mizjājī 190 ʿAbd al-Barr al-Fayyūmī 179 ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī 5, 119, 179, 184, 234n26, 297, 300, 301, 356 ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. Aḥmad Ibn al-ʿImād 178, 191 ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī 150, 152 ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī 116, 357 ʿAbd Allāh al-Shāmī 393 ʿAbd Allāh Ḥātifī 258 ʿAbd Allāh Ilāḥī 400 ʿAbd Allāh Samarqandī 403 ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ʿAbbāsī Gujarātī 162 ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Maqdisī 400, 413 ʿAbd al-Nabī Shaṭṭārī Akbarābādī 165 ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil 510 ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khān-i Khānān 146–48 ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Merzīfonī Rūmī 401 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh al-Jāwī 188 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Sulamī 117 ʿAbd al-Rasūl 414 ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Jāwī 188 ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī 68, 231 ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Hānsavī 167 ʿAbdallāh Ilāhī Simāvī 117 ʿAbdallāh Khwīshgī Qaṣūrī 165 Ābdul Hākim 668–76, 694, 702–3, 714n83, 722, 740, 743 Abdul Mannan, Muhammad 677 Abdul Muqtadir 311 Abdülkadir Karahan 105, 106 ʿAbdülkerīm 106, 107n172 ʿAbdul Qādir Khān 51, 777, 785 Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Tibbāsī 412 Abū al-Fatḥ Gīlānī 150, 151 Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī 95, 148, 149, 169, 170, 509, 511, 513 Abū al-Ghāzī Sulṭān Ḥusayn Khān Bahādur 31 Abū al-Ḥasan Farīdābādī 167 Abū al-Ḥasan ʿUmar Shādhilī 152 Abū al-Muḥsin 243n62, 309, 335 Abū al-Muẓaffar Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan 29, 233, 256, 269, 482, 494

Abū al-Qāsim Bābur 473n30, 484 Abū al-Vafāʾ Khwārazmī 389 Abū Bakr 158, 160, 231, 234, 237, 794 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī 18, 71, 93, 112, 218, 242, 393, 397, 472, 511, 515 Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī 286 Abū Ismāʿīl ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Anṣārī al-Haravī 381 Abū Lahab 569 Abū Manṣūr Māturīdī 410 Abū Naṣr Pārsā 389, 402 Abū Saʿīd Abū al-Khayr 362, 389, 537 Abū Saʿīd Kharrāz 388 Abū Saʿīd Kūzakunānī 116 Abū Saʿīd 27, 233, 489, 518, 537, 646 Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī 393 Abūʾl-Muḥsin Muḥammad Bāqir 309, 335 Ādam 214, 375, 616, 697, 710 ʿAdlī 74 ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī 230, 244, 285, 286n10, 297, 301, 469n18 Afẓal Khān 780 ʿAhdī 83 Aḥmad al-Bannāʾ al-Dimyāṭī 188, 191, 192 Aḥmad al-Shinnāwī 186 Aḥmad b. Maḥmūd Muʿīn al-fuqarāʾ 331 Aḥmad Ghazālī 380 Aḥmad Gujarātī 50, 166, 804, 820 Aḥmad Shāh Durrānī 791 Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ʿIrāqī 317n15, 321 Aḥmad Yasavī 384, 406 Aḥmad-i Jām 389, 514n181 Aḥmed Bukhārī 63, 89, 391, 400 Aḥmed Pāşā 66, 87, 88, 94 ʿĀʾisha 238 Aitken, Molly 55 Akbar 46, 143–47, 149, 150, 471, 482, 509, 513, 585 Ākhund Darweza 779 ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṭūsī 71 Ālāol 673, 674, 706, 817 “Alaca” Baṣīrī 83, 84n65, 88n80 Algar, Hamid 344 ʿAlī ʿAdīlshāh 50 ʿAlī Akbar Siyāsī 320

830 ʿAlī Aṣghar Ḥikmat 236, 473 ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 98, 107, 108n176 ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-ʿIṣāmī 181 ʿAlī b. Maymūn al-Maghribī 412 ʿAlī b. Yūsuf al-Darwīsh al-Tūnusī 177 ʿAlī Dāmād 331 ʿAlī Qushji 291n25, 296–98, 301 ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī 6–7, 10, 14, 28–29, 38, 64, 67, 778n2, 83–87, 88n80, 92, 105, 108, 110, 117n219, 153, 232, 236, 297, 356, 378, 380–82, 384–95, 397, 399, 402–16, 471–73, 479–90, 493, 496, 499, 500–3, 512–23, 528–29, 535, 537–40, 548, 549n298, 552–54, 556–59, 602–20, 622–25, 627–30, 632–39, 819–21, 823 ʿAmīq Bukhārī 816 Amīr ʿĀlim Dālvālichī 411 Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī 139, 168 Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī 12, 14, 42–44, 56, 86, 96–98, 138, 139, 151, 168, 170, 236, 362, 380, 466n10, 467n11, 468, 470, 471, 474, 476, 479, 481, 484–87, 488n88, 491–97, 500–2, 509, 511, 519, 520, 522, 528n216, 539–41, 546–51, 553–57, 566, 585, 586, 604, 605, 607, 609n30, 611, 623, 628n90, 664, 671, 736, 814, 815, 819–22 Amīr Kulal 357 Ānand Rām Mukhliṣ 150, 151 Anṣārī 117, 248, 254, 310, 342, 383, 389, 392, 508, 564, 779 Anvarī 80, 97, 127, 170, 380, 470, 471, 474, 476, 486, 497, 500, 504–11, 518, 520, 527, 536, 540, 542–45, 551, 555, 556 Āqşemseddīn / Aq Şems al-Dīn 98, 403 ʿAqīl b. Abī Ṭālib 237 Archil 822, 823 ʿĀrif Dīggarānī 328, 331 ʿĀrif Nawshāhī 138, 147, 167, 175, 380 Aristotle 609, 610, 613–16, 620, 624, 644, 645 Ashraf Khān 107, 780 Ashūftaʾī Naṭanzī 573 ʿĀşıq Çelebī 83, 111 al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib 198n7, 198n9, 205n36, 209, 370n12 Avicenna 233 Awḥadī Balyānī 583 ʿAydarūs 204 ʿAyn al-Dīn 138

Index of Names ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī 364, 541 ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī 432 ʿAzīz of Misr 36, 45, 431, 658, 715 Azra, Azyumardi 191, 218 Bābā ʿAlī Mast Nisāʾī 411 Bābā ʿAlī Pāy Ḥiṣārī 398 Bābā Bahlūl 411 Bābā Ḥasan Qandahārī 409 Bābā Ḥaṣan Turk 398 Bābā Ibrāhīm 398 Bābā Jān Bābā 398 Bābā Khākī 409 Bābā Khūsh Kīldī 411 Bābā Kūkī 407 Bābā Pīrī 399 Bābā Sangū 397, 398 Bābā Sārīgh Pūlād 399 Bābā Shihāb 399 Bābā Ṭāhir 362 Bābā Tīlānchī 407 Bābur, Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad 17, 18, 46, 141, 142, 171, 585 Badāʾūnī, ʿAbd al-Qādir 143, 144, 148–50, 153, 154 Badīʿ al-Zamān Mīrzā 28, 29 Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband 309, 315, 318, 323, 324, 326–28, 330, 357, 389 Bahlūl Lodī 4, 662 Bahrām Gūr 262, 608, 647, 819–21 Bahrām Khān 780 Bahrām Mīrzā 44 Bāqī 93, 94 Baṛa Khān Gājī 679, 683, 686 Barthes, Roland 395 Basāvan 46 Bāyazīd Anṣārī 779 Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī 379, 389, 396 Bāyezīd I 78 Bāyezīd II 27, 66, 68n20, 72, 73, 76n42, 78, 79, 83n60, 86, 233, 259, 390 Bayrām Khān 142, 143 Bāzigha 658n31, 660, 661, 674, 684, 696, 714n82, 717, 751, 758n15 Behl, Aditya 707, 709, 712, 777 Behzād 44 Belqis 573 Bībīcha Munajjima 399

Index of Names Bihiştī Ramaḍān Efendī 122 Bihiştī 79n50, 84, 97–99, 122, 123 Blumhardt, James Fuller 791, 792 Burhān al-Dīn Sāgharchī 406 al-Busīrī 142 Caesar 12, 13 Çākirī Sinān Bey 101 Cāmī-i Rūmī 85, 94, 116 Celīlī 98 Cem 28 Chakrukadze, Grigol 801 Chang Zhimei 426n8, 428, 429, 433 Chīpāl 12 Clinton, Jerome 261, 262 Dārā Shikoh 53 Darvīsh Bashīr 406 Darvīsh Muḥammad Gāzargāhī 397 Darvīsh Sayyid Ḥasan 397 Darwīsh Muḥammad al-Ṭālawī al-Artuqī 178 David 112, 262, 263, 269, 276 de La Haye-Ventelet, Denys 34 de Voragine, Jacques 404 Dede ʿÖmer Rūşenī 403 Defterdār ʿĀṭıf Efendī 107 Delī Birāder 93 Dervīş 92, 93 Dhākir Ḥusayn, Muḥammad 311, 312, 328 Dhū al-Qarnayn 608 Dhū-l-Fiqār 98 Dickson, Martin 571, 824 Digby, Simon 757 Dimock, Wai Chee 823 Dīvāne Ḥüsām Çelebī 122 Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Rūmī 406 Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf 109, 123, 299, 356, 529 du Cambout de Coislin, Charles 33 Duda, Dorothea 37, 38 Ece Efendī Ḥamīdī 113 Emīr Ahmed Bukhārī 63, 89, 391 Emīr Sulṭān 63 Enamul Haq, Muhammad 668 Erzurumlu Ibrāhīm Ḥaqqı 118 Eşref ʿAbd al-Raḥmān of Merzifon 123 es-Seyyid Rıḍā 74, 94

831 Faḍlī Iṣfahānī 570 Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī Ṣafī 14, 69, 119, 248, 417 Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī 91n96, 243 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī 287, 387 Fakhr al-Dīn Gurgānī 801 Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī 140, 211, 362, 380, 431, 445, 480, 486–87, 497, 661 Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī 324, 516 Falakī 801 al-Fārābī 286 Farazdaq 240 Farghānī 27, 343 Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār 16, 86, 90n91, 100, 110, 162, 378, 384, 385, 415, 468, 486, 500, 504, 505, 508, 509, 514n181, 528, 539, 559, 594, 656, 661 Farīd al-Dīn Shakar Ganj 384, 395, 410 Fātiḥ Sultan Meḥmed 66, 68, 69, 73, 79, 85–87, 98, 120 Fayyāḍ Lāhījī 594 Feng Bo’an 430, 460 Feng Si 428 Ferīdūn Bey 74 Fevzī Mostārī 114, 115 Fidvī Lāhūrī 167 Fighānī 168, 467n11, 473, 474, 480, 540, 554, 584 Firdawsī 16, 43, 44, 56, 79n50, 97n121, 99, 100, 101, 149, 170, 201n21, 262, 505, 506, 508–11, 520, 525, 527n213, 535, 536, 539, 540, 543–45, 550, 551, 556n311, 816 Firdevsī-i Rūmī 79 Flemming, Barbara 412 Fuḍūlī 92, 93, 105–7 Furqat 6 Gaṇeśa 753, 754 Gaurkiśor Sen 665n61, 681 Gawhar Sulṭān Khānum 46 Gawharī 444 Geyiklī Bābā 117 Ghaḍanfar al-Nahrawālī 186 Ghazālī-yi Mashhadī 471, 513 Ghiyāth al-Dīn Aʿẓam Shāh 668, 669 Ghiyāth al-Islām 4 Gibb, E.J.W. 76n41, 87n77, 92n99, 98, 125, 479

832 Gloton, Maurice 658 Gommans, Jos 780 Gövde Aḥmed Bey 84 Gulkhanī 6 Gvaxaria, Alexsandre 806 Hācī ʿAlī Efendī 416, 417 Ḥācı Bāyrām 117 Ḥācı Bektāş 118 Ḥaḍrat Mīyan Mīr 164 Ḥāfiz Barkhurdār 51n26, 734, 785 Ḥāfiẓ 12, 16, 86, 87, 110, 136, 138, 151, 170, 467–69, 473, 475–78, 481, 483n73, 484–87, 493, 496, 497, 500–3, 509, 513, 519–22, 528, 540, 546, 551–55, 558, 585, 594 Ḥājī Karīm al-Dīn Nīmgūr 409 Ḥājī Khalīfe Qasṭamonī 402 Ḥakīm Atā 395 Ḥakīm Humām 150, 151 Ḥalebīzāde Dervīs Çelebī 113 Ḥamdullāh Ḥamdī 98 Ḥāmidī Iṣfahānī 65 Ḥamza Fanṣūrī 4, 13, 196, 198, 199n13, 201, 205, 212, 218–20, 367–76 Ḥaqīrī Tebrīzī 98 Ḥaṣan Jūrī 398 Ḥassān ibn Thābit 543 Hātifī Haravī 142 Ḥayāt Khān 784 Heer, Nicholas 72n33, 184, 185, 209n48 Ḥıḍr Bālī 403 Hu Dengzhou 426, 429, 430, 433, 460 Ḥubbī Khwāja 406 Ḥulvī 417 Humāyūn 32, 142, 143 al-Ḥusayn al-Daghīnī 182 Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī 14, 37, 248, 661, 662 Ḥusaynābādī 180, 186 Ibin Āmin 697–98, 734–35, 751 Ibn ʿArabī 13–14, 20, 119–21, 124, 137, 154–56, 161, 164–5, 179n13, 196–97, 202–6, 216–20, 233, 235, 244, 249, 283, 343–47, 350–54, 361, 363–64, 380, 388, 393, 446, 452, 455, 516n184, 528n216, 649, 650–55, 658, 661, 666, 668, 674, 736–37, 740n182, 816

Index of Names Ibn al-Fāriḍ 27, 71, 120, 362, 363, 528n216 Ibn al-Ḥājib 123, 136, 140, 182, 183, 283, 284n2, 299n60, 529 Ibn Hamza 181 Ibn al-Karbalāʾī 250 Ibn al-Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī 243 Ibn Muʿṭī 283, 284 Ibn Sīnā 83, 515, 517 Ibrāhīm b. Ḥasan al-Kūrānī 181–86, 190, 216, 219 Ibrāhīm b. Ḥaydar 180 Ibrāhīm b. Ḥaydar b. Aḥmad al-Ḥusaynābādī 184 Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Maʾmūnī 181 Ibrāhīm b. Ṣarāf Ḥüseyn 403 Ibrāhīm Tennūrī 403 Īlhām Efendī 391 Ilyās Shaykh 396 Ilyās 393 ʿImād-i Faqīh 486, 497, 501–3, 547, 555, 558 Imām ʿAlī 97n121, 185, 188, 234, 239, 240, 571 Imām al-Mustaghfirī 387 Imām Kāẓim 239 Imām Rāfiʿī Ghaznavī 398 Ioseb 810. See also Yūsuf Iqbāl, Muḥammad 172, 510 ʿIṣām al-Dīn al-Isfarāʾīnī 180–81, 301 Ismāʿīl Anqaravī 119, 121 Ismāʿīl Müfīd 120 Jaʿfar Āṣaf Khān Qazvīnī 585 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq 229, 234, 238 Jagannātha Paṇḍita 727, 728 Jahān-Ārā Begam 163 Jahāngīr 146, 147, 170, 230, 513, 585 Jahānshāh 259 Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī 82, 186, 249 Jalāl al-Dīn Khālidī Kishī 311 Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī 12n28, 16, 121, 122, 162, 172, 362, 400, 468, 486, 494, 495, 500, 528n216, 534, 539, 545, 559, 585, 586, 594, 650n5, 661 Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī 186 Jalikhā 697, 698, 700, 705, 711–26, 728–43, 751. See also Zulaykhā Jamāl Nūqānī 409

Index of Names Jamālī Dihlavī 140, 822 Jandī 343 Jayadeva 693, 701, 708 Jielian 434 Jolekhā 683, 701n43, 753, 758, 772. See also Zulaykhā Junayd Allāh Khādhiq / Junaydollo Hoziq 7 Kalīm Hamadānī 594 Kāma 676, 702n45, 711, 712, 715, 725n125 Kamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī 233, 318, 343 Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzargāhī 49 Kamāl Khujandī 37, 86 Kāmī Meḥmed of Karaman 100 Kāmrān 46 Kangxi 427, 430 Karīma 98 Karst, Joseph 802 Kemālpāşāzāde 64, 100, 101, 113–15 Khalīl Ibrāhīm Sārī-ūghlī 321, 332, 340 Khalīl Ṣıdqı 121 Khıḍır b. Muṣṭafā Erzincānī 110 Khiḍr 393 Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidīn 97, 98 Khūsh Kipek Bīk 415 Khushḥāl Khān Khaṭṭak 51, 777, 779 Khusraw Anūshīrvān 262 Khusraw Parvīz 263, 608, 644 Khwāja ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jāmī 396 Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī 117 Khwāja ʿAlā al-Ḥaqq waʾl-Dīn ʿAṭṭār 314, 315, 322 Khwāja ʿAlī 138 Khwāja ʿAṭāʾullāh Kirmānī 68 Khwāja Awḥad Mustawfī 407 Khwāja Bahāʾ al-Dīn 408 Khwāja Bakhshāyish 413 Khwāja Bāqī-billāh 154, 162 Khwāja Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn Yūsuf 356 Khwāja Ghulām Farīd Chishtī 165 Khwāja ʿImād Khalaj 409 Khwāja Kalān 235 Khwāja Khwurd 162 Khwāja Maḥmūd Mūydūz 405 Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā 314, 319, 320, 344, 356, 392, 409

833 Khwāja ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār 71n29, 73, 117–18, 142, 153–54, 156, 235, 259, 330, 344, 356, 397, 403n73, 413, 491 Khwāja Yaḥyā 413 Khwājagā 413 Kia, Chad 44, 53 Kök Shaykh 411 Köstendillī Süleymān Şeykhī 418, 419 Kr̥ṣṇa Caitanya 700, 738 Kr̥ṣṇa 663, 681, 693, 694, 700, 701, 702n45, 707, 708n59, 712, 713n75, 718, 719, 721–24, 726, 729, 732, 737, 738, 742–44 Kr̥ṣṇadāsa Kavirāja 733n152 Laʿl 46 Lāmiʿī Çelebī 15n31, 88, 112n197, 117, 390–92, 404 Lāmiʿīzāde ʿAbdullāh Çelebī 91 Lang, David M. 802 Laṭīfī 66, 76n41, 83, 84, 86n74, 88, 95, 97n122 100, 111, 391 Le Goff, Jacques 404 Leach, Linda York 53, 54 Leʾālī 66, 67n15 Li Yongshou 428, 429 Li Zuolin 444 Līlāśuka Bilvamaṅgala 693 Liu Sanjie 434 Liu Zhi 13, 424–26, 431, 432, 434, 435–43, 450–56, 460 Loménie de Brienne, Henri-Auguste 34 Luṭf Allāh Ḍīyā al-Dīn b. Abūʾl-Maʿālī al-Sanūjirdī 312 Ma Hengfu 435, 460 Ma Yong’an 428, 460 Ma Zhu 432, 434 Maas, Paul 317 Maʿdan 6 Mahdī 232, 249 Maḥmūd b. ʿAlī al-Kāshānī 318 Maḥmūd b. ʿUthmān b. Naqqāş ʿAlī b. Īlyās 390 Maḥmūd Gāvān 69n25, 136–38, 168 Maḥmūd Maṭharadūz 406 Maḥmūd of Ghazna 149, 506n153, 513, 517, 536–38 Maḥmūd Shabistarī 202, 287n17, 452

834 Majnūn 35, 36, 55, 96, 98, 446, 530, 646, 651, 654, 657, 671, 736, 804, 810, 811, 815 Mālādhara Basu 693 Manṣūr Ḥallāj [d. 309/922] 379 Manūchihr 243 Manūchihrī 506–8, 551, 555, 559 Maqṣūḍ Bēg 245 Masad, Mohammad 228 Mason, Isaac 429n25, 441, 442n75 Masʿūd Samarqandī 415 Mawla Dād Khān 791 Mawlānā Abū al-Khayr 407 Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kermānī 405 Mawlānā ʿAlā al-Dīn Lārī 144 Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn 116, 396 Mawlānā Dāʾūd 664, 707 Mawlānā Ḥājī 396 Mawlānā Humām al-Dīn Kulbārī 407 Mawlānā Ḥusām al-Dīn Ghalbek 406 Mawlānā Kalān Ziyāratgāhī 396 Mawlānā Kamāl al-Dīn Zāhid 395 Mawlānā Karīm al-Dīn Mawʿidī 405 Mawlānā Mīrzayn 407 Mawlānā Muḥammad Khurāsānī 397 Mawlānā Muḥammad Tabādakānī 389, 397 Mawlānā Muḥtasham Kāshī 573 Mawlānā Muḥyī 398 Mawlānā Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad 235, 396 Mawlānā Niẓām al-Dīn Kalāmī 405 Mawlānā Saʾd al-Dīn Taftāzānī 153 Mawlānā Saʿd al-Dīn 407 Mawlānā Sarrāj Ḥāfiẓ 409 Mawlānā Shāhidī Qumī 356 Mawlānā Shams al-Dīn Maʿdābādī 398 Mawlānā Taj al-Dīn Aḥmad Shījānī 397 Mawlavī Muḥammad Multānī 665 Mawlavī Muḥammad Yūsuf 681 Māyil-Haravī, Najīb 2n3, 235, 472, 509, 594 McAulay, Denis 363 Mecdī Meḥmed Efendī 72n33, 73n35 Meḥmed II 179, 259 Mehmed IV 303 Medḥī of Ladik 93 Meḥmed Efendī 115 Meḥmed Fevzī 110 Meḥmed ʿIzzet Pāşā 124 Meḥmed Maʿrūf Efendī 119 Meḥmed Şevket Efendī 115

Index of Names Meḥmed Tevfīq 123 Meḥmed Vesīm 114 Meḥmet II Fatih 184, 233, 246 Mehmet 33, 38 Meisami, Julie Scott 261, 262 Melīḥī 65, 66 Mevlānā Ḥabīb Khalvetī 401 Mevlānā Ṭūsī 400 Minissale, Gregory 46 Mīr ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Bilgrāmī 663 Mīr ʿAlī Riḍā Ḥaqīqat 166 Mīr ʿAlī Tabrīzī 29 Mīr ʿAlī 46, 147 Mīr Buzurg 405 Mīr Ḥusayn Maybudī 248 Mīr Khūrd al-Maʿrūf 405 Mīr Nūrallāh Aḥrārī Dihlavī 167 Mīr Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar of Tabriz 245 Mīrzā ʿAlī 3 Mirzā ʿAlī Āṣif Khān 143 Mīrzā Asadullāh Ghālib 815 Mīrzā Makhdūm Sharīfī 230 Miskīn 46 Moḥammad Shāh 755, 757, 773, 774 Molé, Marijan 309 Mollā ʿAbdallāh Ilāhī 116 Mollā ʿAlī Fenārī 72 Mollā ʿAlī Quşçī 67 Mollā Fakhreddīn ʿAjamī 63 Molla Malīhī 298, 299 Mollā Muḥyiddīn Fenārī 72 Mollā Muṣṭafā b. Aḥmed 93 Mollāzāda al-Kurdī 301 Mollāzāde Ḥasan 418 Mollāzāde Otrārī 402 Müfīd 106, 107n172 Muhamet Kyçuku 805 Muḥammad (Prophet) 214, 404n75, 410, 430, 470, 543n279, 573n11, 655, 669, 682, 711, 743 Muḥammad Afḍal 167 Muḥammad Aʿẓam 51 Muḥammad Aʿẓam Khān Barakzai 792 Muḥammad b. Aḥmad ʿĀjiz 166 Muḥammad b. Faḍlallāh 165 Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā Ibn Kannān 181 Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓī al-Bukhārī 322, 329

835

Index of Names Muḥammad b. Mūsā Ghulāmak 177 Muḥammad Badakhshī 77, 402 Muḥammad Bakhtāvar Khān 151 Muḥammad Bāqī al-Bukhārī 177 Muḥammad Dhākir 681 Muḥammad Ḥusayn 46 Muḥammad Khāksār 6 Muḥammad Maʿṣūm al-Samarqandī 184 Muḥammad Muʿīn 320 Muḥammad Muʿizzī Nīshābūrī 334 Muḥammad Nādir 54 Muḥammad Nasīm 793 Muḥammad Nazīr Rānjhā 321 Muḥammad Nūr al-Dīn Tarkhān 150 Muḥammad Pārsā al-Bukhārī 310, 313 Muḥammad Qāsim 403 Muḥammad Raḥīm Khān II 415, 416 Muhammad Sagīr / Chagīr 7, 667, 668, 672–75, 684, 692–744 Muḥammad Saʿīd b. Ḥusayn al-Qurashī al-Kawkanī al-Naqshbandī 188 Muhammad Sājid of Jhanjhāna 167 Muḥammad Shāh 152n47, 167, 693, 752, 753n3, 757n12, 814, 815 Muḥammad Shaybānī 413 Muḥammad Shaykh 395 Muhammad Zainiy Uthman 206 Muḥammad Zamān Mīrzā 28 Muḥtasham Kāshānī 571, 573, 599 Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAlī Chishtī 395 Muḥyi Gülşenī 119 Mujīb-Allāh 167 Mullā ʿAbd al-Nabī 143 Mullāh Walī Muḥammad 791 Münīrī Belghrādī 417 Muqrī Maḥmūd 407 Murād IV 114, 117 Muṣṭafā al-Bakrī 181 Muṣṭafā b. Meḥmed Şemʿī of Prizren 103n153 Muṣṭafā b. Yūsuf Hocazāde Burūsavī 71 Muṣṭafā Münīf Efendī 107 Mustafa Paşa 417 Muṣṭafā 34, 35 Muʿtabar Khān ʿUmar 167 Nābī 106 Nādir Shāh 107, 152

Najāt al-rashīd 153 Najīb Khān 791 Najm al-Dīn Kubrā 324, 360, 393, 408 Najm al-Dīn Muḥammad Kāhī 483, 484 Najm al-Dīn Rāzī 393, 430 Nand Kishor 167 Nāqiṣ 6 Nāṣir Khusraw 408, 475n35, 541, 558 Naṣrettīn Hoca 102 Navāb Najīb al-Dawla 783n15, 791 Necīb ʿĀṣım 104, 107 Nergisī 114, 115 Neşʾet, Süleymān 122 Nesīmī 408 Nevʿī 102 Nevʿīzāde ʿAṭāʾī 96, 101, 102 Niʿmat Ḥaydarī 245 Nimrod 568 Niẓām al-Mulk 112, 335 Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī 198, 204, 207, 213, 220 Nūshīrvān 78–80, 112, 113, 262, 276 Ogilvie, Charles L. 424 Oljeitu 287 ʿÖrfī 98 Orsini, Francesca 793 ʿOthmānzāde Seyyid Ibrāhīm 108 Parī Khān Khānum 573, 578, 582 Pāyinda Khān 792 Pickens, Claude L. Jr. 444 Pīr Badr 679, 680, 683, 686 Pīr Ilyās Amāsyevī 401 Plato 620, 624n82, 636, 644 Ponachi 428 Prophet Muḥammad see Muḥammad (Prophet) Prophet Yūsuf see Yūsuf (Prophet) Pseudo-Callisthenes 35, 622n76, 632n97 Qabūlī 65, 74 Qāḍī Aḥmad Ghaffārī 568 Qāḍī ʿĪsā 258, 259, 263, 265, 267–69 Qāḍī Jahān Qazvīnī 570, 571 Qāḍī Raʾīs 411 Qāḍī Ṣafī al-Dīn ʿĪsā Sāvajī 257 Qāḍī Shahāb al-Dīn Dawlatābādī 140, 141 Qādir ʿAlī Figār ʿAzīmābādī 167

836 Qāḍīzāde Rūmī 63, 67 Qānūnī Süleymān 90n91, 93, 101, 104, 114, 133 al-Qaraḥiṣārī 182 Qāsim-i Kāhī 149 Qasṭamonī 402 Qayṣarī 343 Qianlong 441, 450 Qīlich Atā 395 Qınalızāde 83, 85, 99 Queen Tamar 801, 808, 809, 811–13 Qūnawī 203n31, 204n33, 343, 352 Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtyār Kākī 395 Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar 406 Quṭban Suhravardī 697 Rābiʿa 736 Rādhā 55, 693, 694, 700, 701, 707, 712, 713n75, 714, 720–22, 724, 729, 733, 738–40, 742, 743 Raḍī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Ḥanbalī 178 Raḥmān Bābā 794 Raḥmān Qulī al-Qārī 415 Raḥmī Çelebī of Bursa 86 Ranjit Singh 792 Rashn Awliyāʾ 409 Rāşid Efendī 107 Rāsikh ʿAzīmābādī 166 Rasūl Jaʿfarīyān 228 Raverty, Henry George 780, 791 al-Riḍā 239, 240 Riḥletī 106 Ristelhueber, René 425 Riyāḍī 120 Rohilla Yusufzai Pashtun 791 Rūdakī 110, 362, 474, 486, 500, 507, 508, 517, 525, 528, 532–35, 537, 538, 541, 543, 554–56 Rukn al-Dīn Khwāfī 27 Rūpa Gosvāmī 693n9, 694n10, 701, 707, 708n59, 712n75, 713, 722 Rustam Khān Achakzai 783n15, 791 Rustaveli 801, 803n25, 804, 806, 807, 809, 810–13, 818, 822 Rüstem Khalīfe Bursevī 413 Rūzbihān 18 Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī 116, 118, 235, 356, 396, 397

Index of Names Sādek Ālī 665n61, 668–70, 672, 676, 678, 679, 681–86 Saʿdī 12, 43, 44, 86, 97, 109, 110, 113, 115, 125, 136, 139, 167, 168, 170, 470, 471, 472, 475–78, 481, 484, 486, 487, 496, 497, 500, 501–3, 509, 518, 519, 520, 522, 529, 530, 540, 545, 546, 554–58, 779, 780, 781 Sadozai 792 Ṣadr al-Dīn 29, 30, 401 Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī 343, 349n18, 352 Ṣadr Khān Khaṭṭak 784 Ṣadr-ı Aʿẓam Ibrāhīm Pāşā 113 Ṣafī al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Qushāshī 186, 190, 191, 192, 215n70, 219 Śāh Garībullāh 666n62, 669, 672, 676, 678, 679 Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī 585, 599 Saiẏad Sultān 698n34, 702, 743 al-Sakkākī 286, 515 Ṣalāḥ b. Mubārak al-Bukhārī 309, 320, 333, 335, 340 Salīma 118 Sām Mīrzā 472, 572 Śambhu 758 Şāmīzāde Musṭafā 418 Sanāʾī 486, 491, 493–95, 504, 505, 509, 521, 539, 542, 543, 559, 585, 586, 594 Sardār Mihr Dil Khān Mashriqī 792 Saredon 810 Sargis Tmogveli 801 Sayyid ʿAbdallāh Ḥusaynī 138 Sayyid Abū-l-Ḥasan Karbalāʾī 237 Sayyid Aḥmad Lālāʾī Darbandī 249 Sayyid Aḥmad Ṭayyib 167 Sayyid Aḥmed Bukhārī 117 Sayyid ʿAlī Aḥmad Shāh Sahsawānī 165 Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī 27, 249 Sayyid ʿAlī Vāḥid al-ʿAyn 238 Sayyid Aṣīl al-Dīn ʿAbd Allāh Vāʿiẓ 379, 389n22, 408, 412n125 Sayyid Ḥāfız al-Sirozī 298 Sayyid Jamāl Surkh 410 Sayyid Mīrān Hāshimī 166 Sayyid Muḥammad Madanī 411 Sayyid Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh 232, 249, 250n91 Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī 230–32, 246n73, 248, 249 Sayyid Sharaf al-Dīn Naqīb 246

Index of Names Sayyid Vazīr ʿAlī ʿIbratī 167 Sayyidzāda Balyānī 398 Sehī 66, 67n15, 83, 88n84, 110, 111, 114, Selīm I 28, 38, 74n38, 125, 178, 259, 402, 523n202 Selīm II 34, 104 Sevdāʾī 98 Sevgi, Ahmed 105 Shackle, Christopher 56 Shāh ʿAbbās I 46, 181, 513, 798–800, 802, 824 Shāh Abū al-Ghayth 407 Shāh ʿĀlam II 46 Shāh Dilrubā 163 Shāh Ismāʿīl 116, 523n202, 568, 824 Shāh Jahān 54, 779 Shāh Niʿmat Allāh Valī 379 Shāh Qāsim Fayḍbakhsh 231 Shāh Ṣafī I 799, 800 Shāh Tahmāsp 44, 230n8, 471, 569, 570–73, 572, 824 Shāh Ziyāratgāhī 396, 397 Shahbāz Khān 779 Shāhī Sabzavārī 38, 473, 474, 482, 484, 497, 501, 502, 529, 540, 548, 555, 559 Shahīdī Qummī 232, 258, 356, 467n10 Shāhrukh Mīrzā 398, 473 Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatrāʾī 196, 197, 200, 203, 204, 212 Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish 405 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Lāhījī 249 Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūjī 235 Shāpūr 263, 267, 276 al-Shaʿrānī 390, 417 Sharīf ʿAlī al-Jurjānī 230, 286n10, 297, 301, 469n18 al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā 243 Shawqī Ḥasan 513 Shaykh ʿAbd Samad al-Palembanī 218 Shaykh Adharī 408, 502, 503 Shaykh Aḥmad al-Fatanī 218 Shaykh Aḥmad Qushashī 219 Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī 154, 237 Shaykh Aḥmad Zhanda-Pīl Nāmiqī 89 Shaykh Aḥmed Ṣāfī Efendī 123 Shaykh Amānallāh 164 Shaykh Arshad al-Banjarī 218 Shaykh Daud al-Fatanī 217, 218 Shaykh Ghālib 122

837 Shaykh Khūb Muḥammad Chishtī 165 Shaykh Muḥammad Nafīs b. Idrīs al-Banjarī 217 Shaykh Najm al-Dīn Masʿūd Sāvajī 257–59, 265, 267–69 Shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyā 139, 394 Shaykh Saʿīd Gülşenī 122 Shaykh Sayf al-Rijāl 205 Shaykh Shādī 406 Shaykh Shāh Ziyāratgāhī 396, 397 Shaykh Tāj al-Dīn 162, 192 Shaykh Yūsuf Makassarī 217 Shaykh Yūsuf Tāj al-Khalwatī Hidāyat Allāh 215, 216 Shaykh Zayn al-Fatanī 218 Shaykhzāda Abū al-Ḥasan 396 She Qiling 13, 425, 426–36, 443–47, 450, 452–56 She Yingju 427 Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī 179 Shīrīn 30, 103, 263, 276, 551, 644, 657, 671, 692, 800, 814, 815 Sībawayh 79, 284n2 Sikandar Shāh 757 Simpson, Marianna Shreve 42–45, 47 Śiva 725n125, 738, 756, 758, 759, 762–66, 772 Soudavar, Abolala 37 Sprenger, Aloys 167 Śrīvara 7, 693, 752–74, 813 Stchoukine, Ivan 37, 38 Stewart, Tony K. 742, 744, 759 Storey, Charles A. 42 Şücāʿ Gūrānī 114, 115 Ṣūfīzāde ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 412 Sulayma 403 Suleiman I 392 Suleiman the Magnificent 33, 37 Süleymān Neşʾet 122 Süleymān 93, 133 Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā 27, 29, 31, 35–38, 44, 232, 235, 259, 409, 473, 480, 482, 484, 489–91, 498, 517, 522, 523, 529, 541 602, 621, 638, 648 Sulṭān Ibrāhīm Mīrzā 44, 572 Sultan Iskandar Muda 200, 204 Sultan Iskandar Thānī 204, 205, 213, 218 Sulṭān Khalīl 257, 261n19 Sultan Murād III 119

838 Sultan Murād IV 117 Sultan Sanjar 80, 517, 534 Sulṭāna Safiyat al-Dīn 205, 214–15 Sultana, Raziya 668, 669n77, 672, 695, 698, 699 Ṣunʿallāh Kūzakunānī 116 Sünbülzāde Vehbī 95 Sūrdās 737 Surūrī 123 Tāc al-Dīn Ibrāhīm Qaramānī 413 Tagirdzhanov, Abdurahman T. 312, 315 Taimuch 700 Tāj al-Dīn al-ʿUthmānī 190–92 Tāj-al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. Ḥasan Khwārazmī 343n1 Tamerlane 398, 401, 409 Tashköprüzade Aḥmed efendi’s 177 Ṭayyibzāde Meḥmed Zühdī 108, 124 Teimuraz I 8, 799, 800, 801–20, 822–24 Thenāʾī Meḥmed Efendī 90n91 Tīmūrchī Atā 395 Tinatin 800 Titley, Norah 38, 41 Tsitsishvili, Nodar 806, 819 ʿUbayd Allāh Khān 569, 571 Ulug Beg 67, 68 ʿUmar Atā 408 ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-ʿUrḍī 179, 180 ʿUmar bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 240 ʿUmar 81, 160, 237 ʿUrfī 95, 467n10, 479 ʿUthmān 794 ʿUways al-Qaranī 199, 393, 398n50 Ūzūn Ḥasan 68, 69, 245, 257, 261n19, 245, 267 Vāʿiẓ Qazvīnī 594 Valī Dakanī 167 Vecchietti, brothers 32 Vefā Qonevī 400 Vidhuprabhā 697, 698, 735, 751 Vidyāpati 694n10, 701, 702, 708, 711, 720 Voorhoeve, P. 209, 212n54

Index of Names Walī Muḥammad 783n15, 791, 792 Wei Yuandu 427 Wu Zunqi 431 Yaḥyā Bey 101 Yaḥyā Şirvānī 401 Yākūb 716n94, 743 Yamīn al-Dīn Abū al-ʿIzz Yūṣuf 264 Yan Yuan 455 Yaʿqūb Āq Qoyunlū 29, 30 Yaʿqūb Charkhī 320, 329 Yāzıcızāde Meḥmed Efendī 118 Yizhai 434 Yosobha 753, 758, 772 Yuan Ruqi 435 Yuandu 427 Yunshan 427, 428 Yūnus Emre 118 Yūsuf Nābī 95 Yūsuf (Prophet) 52, 666, 753 Ẓafar Khān 53 Zakariyā al-Anṣārī 187 Zangī Atā 406 al-Zarzāʾī 182 Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (Imam) 240, 241 Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (sultan) 662, 757, 761 Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Muʾtaman 478 Zayn al-Dīn Khwāfī 397, 400, 401 Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Kamāngar Bahdānī 142 Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Vāṣifī 467, 468n13, 568, 568, 571, 639 Zhang Wenxing 430 Zhao Can 426, 429, 430, 432, 433, 435, 436n56, 437n56, 447 Zilixia 810 Zuhhād Khān 408 Zulaykhā 20, 36, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 52–56, 98–101, 491, 651, 654, 658–61, 671, 672, 674, 685, 693, 696n24, 697, 698, 701n43, 702n45, 706, 708, 711, 718, 719, 721–23, 729, 731, 732, 734n154, 735–37, 743, 750, 756, 758, 772, 777, 806, 808, 811, 814, 815, 816, 818

Index of Places Aceh 196, 201, 204, 205, 209n47 212, 215n70, 218, 220, 369, 370 Agra 514n180, 779 Aksaray 412 Aleppo 68, 69, 177–80, 193, 236, 243, 244, 402 Amasya 65, 74, 75, 401, 412, 416 Anatolia 6, 28, 64, 65, 71n29, 73, 84n65, 89, 98, 116, 124, 179, 378, 391, 392, 399–401, 403n73, 412, 414, 417 Andijan 413 Andkhūd / Andkhoy 397, 398 Ankara 71n28, 401, 412 Antakya 107 Antalya 400 Astarābād 249 Awrangabad 383 Aya Sofya 70 Ayutthaya 370 Azerbaijan 3, 28, 38, 79, 116, 229n4, 518 Badakhshan 408, 512 Baghdad 73n35, 83, 178, 180, 181, 190, 235, 243–45, 247, 362, 370, 408n107, 497, 571 Bahrabad 407 Bākharz 397 Baku 3 Balıkesri 412 Barus 212n54, 370 Bastam 243, 396, 408n107 Baṭḥā 93, 95 Bayt al-Raḥmān mosque 205 Beijing 406n90, 425, 436, 442, 444, 450 Belgrade 91, 182, 392 Bengal 7, 15, 558, 649, 662, 664–69, 672, 673, 674, 677–82, 686, 692, 693, 694n10, 700–702, 708, 711, 718, 728, 729n139, 742, 744, 817 Berlin 167, 185 Bhuluya 668 Bīdar 137 Bijapur 50, 166, 780, 800n9 Bilād al-ʿAjam 63–65, 71, 72n32, 125

Bilād al-Rūm 63–65, 67, 75, 92n99, 125 Bitlis 116 Bozhou 436 British Library 37, 38, 47, 50n24, 778 Bucaş / Buchach 417 Bukhara 43, 45, 63, 71n29, 312, 325, 329, 330, 408, 474, 482, 484, 506n152, 507, 509, 512n174, 513, 534, 537, 542, 555 Bulgaria 121, 418 Bursa 15n31, 32, 63, 67, 86, 88, 94, 106, 107n172, 390, 391, 400, 403, 412, 413 Cairo 2, 44, 104, 182, 185, 186, 190, 191, 296n48 Caucasus 3, 8, 412, 798, 799, 802n18, 818, 820, 821 Central Asia 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 45, 197, 234, 235, 284n2, 299, 301, 304n74, 331, 361, 378, 383, 390, 406, 408, 414, 424, 425, 442, 443, 602, 757, 758, 778n2, 780 Chengdu 442 Chīchektū 408 China 13, 14, 114, 375, 406n90, 408, 424–30, 436, 442–45, 505, 625, 630, 647, 785, 792 Chinese Turkestan 6 Damascus 68, 69, 78, 92, 178, 180–82, 186, 190, 193, 196, 216, 234n27, 236, 243, 246, 402, 412, 486, 651, 652 Dāmghān 243 Dār al-Islām 26, 753 Dār al-Kutub 104, 185, 186 Darvīshābād 250 Dastjird-i Khūsh-angūr 409 Deccan 11, 51, 69n25, 136, 137, 162, 383, 511, 513 Delhi 31, 70n26, 140, 150, 152, 171, 405, 406, 409, 411, 468, 484, 509–12, 514, 520, 551n302, 553, 662, 779–81, 791, 819 Diyarbekir 117 Diyār-i ʿAjam 88, 94 Doab 792 Dushanbe 2, 5, 7, 8

840 Edirne 63, 417 Egypt 36, 45, 55, 99, 101, 177, 181, 182, 185, 299n60, 304, 416, 685, 697, 698, 701n43, 715, 716, 734, 751, 758, 773, 803 Erzurum 124 Eurasia 1, 376 Europe 72n32, 182, 474n32, 785 Fansur 370 Fez 412 Filibe 120 Fitzwilliam Museum 46, 54 Galata 66 Ganja 474, 491, 492, 494, 520, 544, 800, 801, 819 Gauṛa 699 Gelibolu 123 Giannitsa 412 Gowa 216 Göynük 98, 99 Guangzhou 442 Hamadan 73, 243, 408n107 Haramayn 93, 95, 184, 190–93, 397 Harvard-Yenching Library 444 Hasht Bihisht 266 Hawḍ-i Shamsī 406 Henan province 427, 435n52, 436 Herat 2n1, 4, 10, 11, 16, 27–32, 34–44, 46, 63–67, 69–77, 79, 81n56, 82–85, 87, 89, 97, 116, 117, 123, 136, 137n4, 140, 142, 148, 153, 161, 171, 172, 229, 231, 234, 235, 243, 244, 250, 257, 258, 270, 356, 378, 379, 381, 385, 396–99, 406–08, 414, 473, 479, 489, 500, 503, 507, 508, 511–13, 517, 535, 538, 539, 541–43, 552, 553, 555, 568, 570, 584, 589, 590, 592, 602–04, 638, 639, 662, 718, 755, 774, 780, 824 Hijaz 93, 177, 181, 184, 219, 243, 245, 246, 471 Hindustan 662, 663, 677, 780, 785, 790 India 8, 11, 14, 30–32, 35, 46, 47, 55, 85, 136–41, 148, 149, 151n44, 152–54, 166–72, 188, 201n21, 205, 219, 230, 311, 361, 378, 395, 405, 406, 408, 409, 416, 471, 473, 477, 482, 484, 500, 509–11, 513, 514, 521, 537, 547n292, 553, 571, 645, 646, 662,

Index of Places 665, 666, 677, 700, 702n46, 780, 791, 793, 800n9, 803n25, 810 Iran 2n3, 4, 9, 14, 19, 29, 45, 52, 53, 64, 79, 107, 113, 115, 116, 150, 151, 180, 227, 229, 231n10, 232, 235, 248, 262, 269, 321, 383, 394n31, 403, 473, 475, 510n169, 553, 571, 584, 780, 798, 800, 803, 804, 822n65, 824 Iraq 4, 85n72, 193n59, 227, 235, 240, 243, 247, 250, 408 Isfara 408 Istanbul 27, 28, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 63–65, 68, 69, 70n26, 71n29, 72–74, 77, 81n56, 82–88, 90n90, 91n97, 94, 98, 101, 104, 107, 108n180, 109, 110, 116, 120, 123, 124, 125n254, 180, 188, 189, 236, 237n43, 296, 378, 379, 400, 401, 412, 416, 418, 523n202 Jākardīza 406 Jām 27, 88, 89n85, 113, 148, 171, 235 Jerusalem 370, 400 Jhang 785 John Rylands Library 51, 778n3 Kaʿba 35, 93, 240, 244, 471 Kabul 2, 7, 171, 409, 779, 780, 792 Kamaniçe / Kamyanets-Podilskii 417 Kandahar 780, 781, 791, 792 Karbala 235, 240, 243, 244, 248, 679 Kartli 811 Kashgar 415 Kashmir 15n31, 47, 51, 53, 54, 89n86, 162, 408, 646, 662, 752, 753, 756n11, 757, 761, 770n41, 774, 778, 783, 791, 792, 794, 813 Kastamonu 65, 85 Kaxetia 799, 811 Kayseri 124, 401, 412 Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts 798, 807 Kerman / Kirman 71n29, 399, 486, 503, 505, 547 Kharjard 235 Khiva 415 Khiyābān 407 Khorasan / Khurasan 10, 28, 44, 63, 64, 69, 73, 79n50, 83, 85, 87, 88, 154, 240, 245,

841

Index of Places 257, 344, 362, 378, 383, 395, 397, 398, 400, 401, 406–08, 411, 412, 486, 503, 507, 512n173, 513, 521, 536, 538, 547, 553, 646, 757 Khudā Bakhsh Oriental Public Library  311 Khwarezm 6, 406–08, 416 Kītū mountain 409 Konya 28, 104n160, 122, 400, 412 Köstendil / Kyustendil 418 Kulaura 681 Kurdistan 180, 190, 192 Lahore 3, 141, 171, 405, 406, 510, 785 Larende 412 Levant 181 Lintong 446 Lucknow 406 Macedonia 412, 418 Madrasa-yi Ghiyāthīya 235 Madrasa-yi sabz 397 Maghreb 192, 412, 647, 652 Makassar 212, 215 Mashhad 3, 44, 52, 143, 240, 407, 409, 471, 512n173, 513 Mawarannahr 378, 406, 407 Maymana 409 Mazanderan 398 Mazār-i Sharīf 234, 240 Mecca 10, 27, 93, 95, 101, 152, 178, 179n13, 181, 191n58, 200, 243, 257, 318, 369, 370, 396, 399–401, 408, 412, 547n292, 571, 651, 662 Medina 93, 95, 152, 185, 187–91, 215, 216, 243, 246, 316, 411, 569 Melaka 368 Merv / Marv 37, 235, 407, 408n107, 506n152, 507 Mesopotamia 177, 180, 181, 475 Mokha 152 Mughal province of Bengal 668 Najaf 234, 236, 243, 246 Nanjing 434, 435n50 Nevrekop 121 New York Public Library 46, 47, 53 Niğde 401

Nishapur 243, 408n107, 508, 518 Northern Greece 418 Nowshera 780, 781 Nūqān 409 Nusantara 208, 218, 219 Ortaköy 401 Paris 27, 31, 32 Pasai 200, 201n22, 368 Patna 46, 310–12, 315 Peshawar 778n3, 779, 791–93 Prizren 103n153, 110 Punjab University 3 Putuoyuan 446 Qāʾin 238 Qaṣr-i ʿārifān 324, 325, 332 Qayṣār 408 Qazvīn 178, 243 Qılıçbaba Tekkesi 66 Rander 204 Ranthambore 779 Rayy 244, 408n107, 507, 508n162, 536n247 Raza Library in Rampur 55 Rhodes Island 401 Rohilkhand 792 Romania 418 Rūm 12, 13, 63, 65, 68, 69, 77, 78, 81, 83, 85, 87–89, 91n96, 96, 111, 116, 395, 399, 404, 408 Rumelia 101 Russia 312 Russian Turkestan 6 Sabzavār 243, 248, 407, 512n174, 555 Samarkand / Samarqand 65, 67, 71n29, 73n36, 89, 116, 235, 299, 301, 390, 395, 397, 398, 406, 408, 413, 508, 509, 538, 539, 555 Sangūla 406 Serbia 418 Shahjahanabad 778, 783n15, 791 Shahrazūr 190 Shahrisabz 408 Shenyang 446 Shibīn al-Kawm 182

842 Shiraz 28–32, 43, 45, 82, 83n60, 233, 249, 407, 467n10, 486, 503, 508, 513, 514, 521, 552, 553, 554, 584 Shirvān 401, 486, 801 Shouzhou 436 Sialkot 785 Simav 71n29, 116, 412 Simnān 243 Sinop 65 Sivas 108n180, 412 St. Petersburg 3, 28, 29, 34, 312, 315, 317, 312n22, 333 Sughd 507 Süleymaniye Library 28, 76n44, 118, 188, 189, 296n48, 307 Sultaniyya 287 Sumatra 215n70, 370 Syria 13, 68, 78, 177–79, 181, 182, 185, 192, 193, 236, 241, 243, 246, 299n60, 412 Syrian National Library 182 Tabriz 28, 29, 32, 34, 37–39, 43, 68, 69, 84, 85n72, 116, 181, 229, 232, 244–46, 249, 257, 266, 267, 378, 486, 503, 506n154, 508, 510n169, 512, 518n188, 521, 555, 588, 662 Taft 407 Tahtakale 66 Tajikistan 2, 408 Takht Hazra 785 Ṭanṭā 182 Tashkent 27, 31, 77n45, 108, 296n48, 304n74 Tehran 29, 30, 53, 320 Tibet 792

Index of Places Tigris 243, 245 Timişoara 416, 417 Tirhut 700 Tokat 65, 66, 412 Torbat-e Jam 32 Transoxania 177, 542, 547 Transylvania 417 Tunis 177 Turkistan 406, 408, 512 Uchh 138 Urmiya 116 Utmanzai 793 Varad 417 Victoria & Albert Museum in London 55 Vr̥ndāvana 693, 718, 721–23, 743 Walters Art Museum 42 Xiangcheng 427, 430 Xinjiang 415n135, 416 Yarkand 415 Yathrib 93, 95 Yazd 407 Yedikule 66 Yemen 152, 177, 183, 184, 191–93, 403, 416, 417 Yūqārı Sekleme 412 Zabid 190 Ẓāhiriyya collections 182 Zeyrek mosque 400 Zhuxianzhen 436, 440

Index of Works Adam Khān o Durxanei 784 Adat Atjeh 200 Āʾina-yi iskandarī 605, 607, 609, 628n90 al-Alfiyya 283, 284n2, 299n60 Alexander romance 7, 606, 622n76, 632n97, 638–39, 823 Amam fī īqāẓ al-himam 191 Analects 433n44, 455 Anīs al-ṭālibīn dar sharḥ-i Maqāmāt-i Sulṭān al-ʿārifīn Khwāja-yi Bahāʾ al-Ḥaqq 312 Anīs al-ṭālibīn wa ʿuddat al-sālikīn 5, 309, 311 Arbaʿīn 103–109, 124 Archiliani 822 Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt 13, 140, 209, 211, 344, 362, 380, 425–26, 431–32, 444–56, 650, 654 Asrār al-insān fī maʿrifa al-rūḥ wa-l-Raḥmān 213–15 Bāburnāma 17, 142 Badāʾiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār 13n28, 661 Bahāristān 3, 12n27, 43n4, 46, 78n49, 91, 109–16, 123, 124, 136, 168, 237, 362, 477, 502, 522, 523, 529–59 Bahāristān-i Shāhī 757 Baḥrüʾl-velāye ve şemsüʾl-ḥidāye 418 Bayāḍ-i Ṣāʾib 585, 599 Bayān-i vāqiʿ 152 Bhāgavata Purāṇa 693, 694, 701 Bulbulistān 114–15 al-Bunyān al-marṣūṣ 165 Būstān 44, 115, 125, 167, 168, 509, 545, 665n59 Bustān al-salāṭīn 200 Caiji jingshumu 424, 438, 439n62 Cām-ı Muẓaffer 123 Candāyan / Cāndāyan 664, 701, 707 Chamanistān 151, 152 Chihil Ḥadīth 103. See also Arbaʿīn Daoxing tuiyuan jing 431, 438 al-Dhakhīra 71 Dhikr-i Quṭb al-aqṭāb 315, 318–20, 329 Dili Sahai 784

Dīvān of Ahlī 513n177 Dīvān of Amīr Khusraw 522 Dīvān of Anvarī 542 Dīvān of ʿAsjadī 538 Dīvān of Bāqī 94 Dīvān of Bāyqarā 36, 38 Dīvān of Bāyezīd 74n38 Dīvān of Chāhī 511 Dīvān of Farrukhī 538 Dīvān of Faryābī 471, 543 Dīvān of Fighānī 540, 584 Dīvān of Fuḍūlī 92n98 Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ 522, 552 Dīvān of Iṣfahānī 544 Dīvān(s) of Jāmī 7, 27–34, 46, 76n44, 80, 87, 92n99, 93, 120, 137n7, 139n12, 151n44, 169n89, 232n17, 233n19, 236, 239, 240, 244, 245, 248, 258–69, 272n54, 278n61, 361, 468–71, 489–90, 493, 496, 499, 500, 502, 515, 517, 522, 529, 532, 538, 551, 554, 570, 573, 597, 599, 649n4 Dīvān of Kisāʾī 522 Dīvān of Khujandī 546 Dīvān of Lāmiʿī 89 Dīvān of Leʾālī 67 Dīvān of Manūchihrī 506–508 Dīvān of Münīf 107, 108 Dīvān of Murtaḍā 248 Dīvān of Nābī 95n112 Dīvān of Nāṣir Khusraw 541 Dīvān(s) of Navāʾī 480–90, 501–503, 519, 529, 540, 551, 554, 556 Dīvān of Pāşā 87n79 Dīvān of Qabūlī 65n10 and 11 Dīvān of Saʿdī 781 Dīvān of Ṣāʾib 588 Dīvān of Shāhī 38 al-Durr al-nafīs 217, 218 al-Durra al-fākhira 72, 184, 187, 191, 209, 212, 233, 259, 343 Eshen erting 444 Evrād-ı zeyniyye 393 Faḍl-ı Rūm 417 Fanli 440

844 Faṣl al-khiṭāb 392 Fatāwā al-ṣūfiyya 393 Fatḥ al-mubīn ʿalā al-mulḥidīn 205n37, 212–13, 220, 223 Fātiḥat al-shabāb 29, 236, 239, 468, 489, 532, 544 al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya 3, 5, 11, 123, 124, 136, 168, 177, 180, 181, 283–85, 298–305 al-Fawāʾid al-ghiyāthiyya 298 Fawātiḥ al-anwār fī sharḥ Lawāʾiḥ al-asrār 165 Feiyin jing 431, 438–39 Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam 119, 120, 137, 164, 165, 179n13, 206, 209, 210, 223, 235, 244, 250, 343, 446 Futūḥāt al-makkiyya 343n1, 393, 396, 446, 652, 655, 658 Futūḥāt al-rabbāniyya 217, 223 Fütūḥuʾl-mücāhidīn li tervīḥ qulūbiʾlmüșāhidīn 391–94, 399–404, 412, 414, 417, 419 Gharāʾib al-ṣighar 38, 488 Guizhen biyao 431, 432 Guizhen yaodao 431–32 Gulistān 43, 109–15, 168, 509, 518, 522, 529, 530, 545, 546, 779–81, 785 Ḥadāʾiqüʾl-Ḥaqāʾiq fī Tekmiletiʾş-şaqāʾiq 103 Ḥadāʾiqüʾş-şaqāʾiq 66n12, 72n33, 73n35 Haft awrang 3, 14, 31, 42–44, 47, 76n44, 120, 240, 256, 494, 500, 572, 602, 604, 653, 664, 666, 692, 798–800, 818 Haft dīvān 573, 597 Haft manẓar 142 Haft paykar 142, 548, 602, 606n17, 819 Hālatun nabī 669, 682 Ḥaqāʾiq-i hindī 663 Ḥaqq al-yaqīn fī ʿaqīdat al-muḥaqqiqīn 200–204 Ḥasanāt al-ʿārifīn 163 Ḥāshiya ʿalā l-Jāmī 123 Ḥāshiyat al-Jāmī 182 Hasht bihisht 266, 494, 548n296, 605n16, 819 Ḥayrat al-abrār 548n296, 602, 604, 606 Hediyyetüʾl-ʿIrfān 110 Hikajat Atjeh 200

Index of Works Ibdāʿ al-niʿma 189 Ichuph-Jalikhā 692, 695–700, 702, 704, 705, 712–14, 717, 719–21, 725, 726, 729–33, 743, 751 Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn 218, 393 Iʿjaz-i muḥabbat 167 Iosebzilixiani 803–18 Iqbālnāma 607, 615, 616, 621, 624n81 and 82 Iskandarnāma 142, 548n296, 602n4, 605, 607, 612n45, 625n83 Iusuph Jolekhā 668, 679, 680 Jawāhir al-ʿulūm fī kashf al-maʿlūm 205, 208, 209n47, 223 Jingxue xichuanpu 426–37 Jueshi xingmilu / Xingmi lu 429, 430 al-Kāfiya 5, 123, 136, 140, 141, 182–84, 283, 284n2, 299, 300 Kashf al-Ḥaqāʾiq fī Ḥall al-Daqāʾiq 120 Kashf al-maḥjūb 386 Kathākautuka 7, 693, 752–74 Khamriyya 71, 120 Khamsa of Bihiştī 84 Khamsa of Dihlavī 42, 44, 56, 479, 492, 494, 495, 539, 546, 549, 553 Khamsa of Jāmī 42, 43, 492, 494, 604 Khamsa of Navāʾī 14, 603, 604, 638, 639 Khamsa of Niẓāmī 42, 44, 56, 479, 492, 494, 509, 520, 539, 548, 549, 553, 602, 800, 814 Khamsa of Teimuraz 800, 806, 813, 817 Khamsa of Yaḥyā Bey 101 Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn 92n99, 297, 380, 603 Khātimat al-ḥayāt 29, 80, 233, 236, 260, 469, 489, 490 Khayr al-Bayān 779 Khiradnāma-yi iskandarī 7, 259, 43n4, 139, 602–38, 644 Khūb-tarang 165 Khulāṣa-yi Anīs al-ṭālibīn 311, 336 Khusraw va Shīrīn 51, 103, 263, 692 Kīmiyā-yi saʿādat 397 Kiraṇatantra 764 Kitāb al-anwār 138 Kitāb dalāʾīl al-nubuwwa 387 Kitāb Nuṣūṣ 206, 210

Index of Works Lailimajnuniani 778, 804–5 Laṭāʾif al-asrār 206–8 Lavāʾiḥ 3, 4, 13, 71, 120, 143, 144, 164, 165, 168, 170, 199, 206, 209–10, 223, 259, 344, 362, 367, 370–75, 426, 439, 440, 449–55, 650, 816 Lavāmiʿ 71, 120, 344, 362 Laylī u Majnūn 43n4, 50–51, 56, 96, 97n121, 99, 142, 166, 259, 491, 492, 548n296, 602n4, 5 and 6, 605n16, 606, 653–54, 671, 815 Lemezāt 417 Leṭāʾif-Nāme 91 Leylā ve Mecnūn 97, 98 Liyan 437, 439 Maʿādin al-dhahab 179 Mahābhārata 681 Majālis al-muʾminīn 232, 246n73, 248 Majālis al-ʿushshāq 49, 264, 472 Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn 163, 372 Makhzan al-asrār 102, 491, 548, 602, 604, 606 Makhzan al-Islām 779 Maktaba Markaziyya li-l-Awqāf 182 Malfūẓāt-i Naqshbandiyya 383 Manāzil al-ḥāʾirīn 393 Manāzil al-sāʾirīn 392 Manāẓir al-inshāʾ 138 Manḥal al-ṣūf 217 Manṭiq al-ṭayr 415, 509, 548n296 Maqāmāt of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband 309, 326–27, 332–35 Maqāmāt-i Jāmī 10, 13, 68, 69, 73, 83, 231–35, 237, 238, 243, 244–46, 250, 297 Maqṣad al-iqbāl 389n22, 409, 412n125 Maqṣad-i aqṣā 431 Maʿrifetnāme 118 Maṣāʾib al-nawāṣib 230 Mashraʿ al-wurūd 189 Mathnavī(s) of ʿAṭāʾī 103n153 Mathnavī(s) of Bihiştī 97 Mathnavī of Celīlī 98n129 Mathnavī of Davānī 82 Mathnavī(s) of Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī 14, 96, 97, 491, 492, 605, 546, 553, 626, 628n90 Mathnavī of Firdevsī 79n50

845 Mathnavī of Ḥaqīqat 166 Mathnavī(s) of Hātifī 96, 142 Mathnavī(s) of Jāmī 19, 42–44, 47, 51, 69, 78, 90, 96, 111n193, 139n13, 163, 166, 231, 256, 258, 259, 357, 475, 490–94, 554, 572, 583, 584, 586, 603n6, 605, 612, 617, 620, 623, 624, 626, 637, 649–53, 659, 671, 673, 692, 693, 702, 737, 752, 757, 777, 784, 800, 804, 808, 816 Mathnavī(s) of Niẓāmī 14, 55, 96, 97, 263, 491, 492, 605, 626, 804 Mathnavī(s) of Navāʾī 604, 605, 624n82, 629, 630, 632, 634, 638, 639 Mathnavī(s) of Sāvajī 545 Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī 121, 122, 162, 362, 400, 494, 495, 500n133, 539, 545n288, 650n5 al-Mawāqif 286, 301, 515 Mektūbāt 418 Menāqib of Belghrādī 417 Meşāʿirüʾş-Şuʿarā 111 Mihr u Māh 662 Mihr u Mushtarī 545 Mirʾāt al-ʿālam 151 Mirʾāt al-maʿānī 662 Mirigāvatī 697 Mirṣād al-ʿibād min al-mabdāʾ ilāʾ al-maʿād 393, 430–32 Misbāḥ al-hidāya wa miftāḥ al-kifāya 318 Mokṣopāya 761, 770 Molla Jāmī 302 Monanbihatai 429, 430 Muḥākamat al-lughatayn 64, 488, 606, 778n2 Münşeʾātüʾs-Selāṭīn 74 al-Muntahī 14, 370 Muntakhab al-tawārīkh 149 Nabīvaṃśa 698n34, 702, 743 Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds 4, 6, 14, 91, 115, 117, 118, 124, 138, 139, 151, 152, 161–65, 168, 170, 191, 192, 217, 232, 233, 249, 316, 356, 378–85, 391, 399, 406, 414–18, 507n160, 523, 528, 559, 736 al-Nāhiya ʿan ṭaʿn amīr al-muʾminīn Muʿāwiya 237 Naqāvat al-āthār 573 Naqd ʿalá al-Fuṣūṣ 165

846 Naqd al-nuṣūṣ fī sharḥ naqsh al-fuṣūṣ 119, 170, 206, 209, 210, 343, 345 Nāsadīya 763 Nasāʾim al-maḥabba 297, 385, 388, 390, 393–97, 399, 404, 409, 412, 416, 523 Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk 112, 267n43 al-Nawāqiḍ li-bunyān al-rawāfiḍ 230 Naynāma / Risāla-yi Nāʾiyya 121, 122, 650n5 Nefeḥātüʾl-Üns Tercemesī 91 Nigāristān 113–15 Nihālistān 114 Nuql-i ʿushshāq 578, 582n21 Nūr al-anẓār 166 Nūr al-hidāya 249 Padyāvalī 701 Phorkān 683, 684. See also Quran Qaṣīda-yi burda 142 Qaṣīda-yi Khamriyya 120 Qianziwen 442 Qingzhen zhinan 434 Qırq Ḥadīth 105 Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā 49 Quran 70, 74n38, 75, 76, 82n58, 111n193, 162, 202, 204n33, 207, 263, 269, 275, 347, 387, 398, 400, 402, 405, 409n109, 410, 427n14, 432n41, 445, 452n88, 516, 545n288, 608n29, 658n30, 659, 670, 682, 684, 693, 704, 706, 722, 782, 790, 807, 816 Qūt al-qulūb 393 Quṭb-Nāme 79 Radde kuphur 681, 682 Radd-i rawāfiḍ 237 Rāmāyaṇa 681, 754n6 Rasagaṅgādhara 728 Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt 119, 192, 243, 244, 316, 318, 330, 334, 417, 418 Rashḥ-i bāl bi-sharḥ-i ḥāl 11, 18, 69, 256, 500, 521 Ravāʾih 165 Risāla dar ḥaqāʾiq-i dīn 138 Risāla-yi ʿArūḍ 6, 123 al-Risāla fī l-wujūd 185 Risāla-yi Jalāliya 578 Risāla-yi mazārāt 409

Index of Works Risāla-yi nāʾiyya 121, 362 Risāla-yi Naqshbandiyya 118 Risāla-yi qudsiyya 317, 318, 320–24, 327, 328, 330, 333, 334 Risāla-yi Ṣaghīr 123 Risāla-yi sharāyiṭ-i dhikr 361 Risāla-yi unsiyya 320, 321, 329 Romance of Alexander the Great 368 Romance of Amīr Ḥamza 368 Safīnat al-awliyāʾ 162 Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ 164 Salāmān u Absāl 90, 166, 257–60, 494, 495, 550, 603n6, 653 Ṣalāt-i masʿūdī 415 al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya 68n20, 72n33, 178, 298, 417, 418 Sar-rishta-yi ṭarīqa-yi khwājagān 118, 236 Sawāniḥ al-ʿushshāq 380 Sayf al-Mulūk 674 Şerḥ-i Manẓūme-i Muʿammā 123 Shāhnāma 44, 56, 79n50, 149, 201n21, 262, 520, 522 Sharafnāma 607 Sharḥ al-hind 141 Sharḥ al-Jāmī ʿalā al-Waḍʿiyya 182, 284, 296, 299, 302, 303, 305 Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam 209, 223, 343 Sharḥ Manāzil al-sāyirīn 318 Sharḥ-i bayt-i Amīr Khusraw 362, 650n5 Sharḥ-i Jāmī 136, 168 Sharḥ-i qasīda-yi tāʾiyya 362 Sharḥ-i Rubāʿiyyāt 71, 120, 209, 211, 223, 343, 344, 345, 364, 650n5 Shawāhid al-nubūwa 234, 236 Shenglü qimeng 442 Shibatiao 434 Shifāʾ 83 Shvidi mtiebi 819 Siku quanshu 438 Silsilat al-dhahab 3, 43, 78, 121, 168, 178, 231, 234, 236, 240, 244, 245, 259, 357, 490, 491, 493–96, 517, 532, 537, 572, 603n6, 651–55, 659n33, 736 Silsilat al-meşāyikh 417 Siyar al-ʿārifīn 140 Siyar al-mulūk / Siyāsat-nāma 267n43, 334 Ṣoḥbetüʾl-Ebkār 102–103

847

Index of Works Subḥat al-abrār 3, 101–102, 103n153, 110, 111n193, 121, 142, 151, 166, 168, 236, 240, 259, 491, 520, 551, 736 Sukhan-i ʿālī 514n180 Sukhanān-i Khwāja Pārsā 357 al-Ṣulḥ bayn al-ikhwān fī ḥukm ibāḥat al-dukhān 186 Sunbulistān 114, 115 Syarab al-Asyiqin 370 Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya 117, 381, 383, 528 Ṭabaqāt al-ṣughrā 390, 417 Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ 162, 378, 383–85, 415 Tafsīr al-kabīr 387 al-Tahāfut 71 Tahāfut al-Falāsifa 71 Takmila-yi Nafaḥāt al-Uns 119 Tales of the Parrot 368 Tamhīdāt 541 Tanbīh al-masyī 218 Tāntrikābhidhānakośa 764 Tariel and Nestan-Darejan 810–11 Tārīkh-i ʿĀlam-ārā-yi amīnī 258, 267 Tārīkh-i Mullāzāda 331 Tārīkh-i Nigāristān 568 Tarjumān al-ashwāq 344, 363, 650 Tarjumān al-balāgha 525 Tarjumat al-ʿawārif 386 Telkhīṣ-i berqüʾl-Yemānī 417 Terceme-i Hadīth-i Erbaʿīn 108 The Arabian Prophet 441 Tianfang dianli zeyaojie 424n4, 436–40, 442, 451 Tianfang sanzijing 442, 450–51 Tianfang xingli 424n4, 431–32, 435–40, 451 Tianfang Zhisheng shilu 435, 437n56, 440–41 Tianfang zimu jieyi 442 Tianjing qingxing 439 Ṭilism al-ḥayrat 166 Tīmūr-nāma 142 Tuḥfat al-abrār 168, 233 Tuḥfat al-aḥrār 43, 103n53, 110, 150, 491, 515, 516n184, 548n296, 554, 604–606 Tuḥfat al-ʿāshiqīn 415

Tuhfat al-ʿirāqayn 509, 543 Tuḥfat al-mursala 203, 215n70 Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī 297n53, 472, 572 Tuhfetüʾl-mücāhidīn ve behcetüʾl-dhākirīn 416–17 Tuiyuan zhengda 430 Ṭūr-i maʿrifat 166 Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī 146 ʿUddat al-sālikīn 325 Uṣūl-i Naqshbandiyya 320–21 Vāmiq u ʿAdhrā 89, 537 Vāsiṭat al-ʿiqd 29, 236, 266, 469, 489, 496, 532 Vepxistqaosani 806 Vīs u Rāmin 51, 558, 801 Wugong shiyi 442 Wujingyue 442, 451 Xusroshiriani 804 Yanzhenjing 432, 438 Yūsuf u Zulaykhā 3, 6–8, 20, 42–47, 49–54, 56, 98–101, 125, 136, 142, 147, 148n36, 161, 163, 166–68, 256n2, 283, 491, 553, 649, 651, 653–56, 659–61, 663–70, 672–73, 692, 695–98, 703, 710, 711, 714, 715, 718, 731, 737, 741, 744, 750, 752–55, 757–59, 761, 765–66, 769–71, 773–74, 777–79, 781–88, 790–94, 800, 803, 804, 807, 808, 812, 814–16, 818, 820 Yūsuf ve Zelīkhā 100–101 Zhaowei jing 438–40, 450 Zhaoyuan mijue 426, 431, 433, 443–50, 452, 454, 456 Zhenjing zhaowei 426, 440, 443, 450–56 Zhenjing zhu 439 Zhunmo 440 Zhushushu 435–36, 441n64 Zizhi tongjian gangmu 440, 441 Zübde-i nefaḥāt 418 Zubdetüʾl-Fuḥūṣ fī Naqşiʾl-Fuṣūṣ 119