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Romantic, Persian Poetry Offers View Into Medieval Islamic Culture

"Allegory of Worldly and Otherworldly Drunkenness" page from the Divan of Hâfiz (Collected Poems of Hâfiz.) Tabriz, Iran, ca. 1526–27 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art"/>

A love-struck young man in the fabled Persian city of Herat (present-day Afghanistan) awakes suddenly in the middle of the night. He feels compelled, to the point of desperation, to visit his beloved spiritual master. On reaching his eminence, the young Sufi describes the sensation of a fist ripping his chest open. The tale, written in the late fifteenth century, culminates with a verse in which the master reminds the disciple that as master he has complete possession of his life and emotions. The disciple must see himself as a lover captured by the will and person of the beloved.

“The disciple described the feeling of his heart being squeezed between the master’s fingers like dough being kneaded in one’s hand,” described Shahzad Bashir, an associate professor of religious studies. “The idea is that if you are in love, no one else should matter.”

In medieval Persianate societies poems were highly valued and poetic talents could define the worth of an aspiring writer. Every writer worth his salt would lyricize about beauty and truth, and most importantly, love. “Love was a central driving motor,” said Bashir, director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. “It was the mechanism of relationships between human beings over time and in any given moment.”

Bashir, who teaches courses about religion and society, says that he is always impressed by how easy it is for students to relate to medieval poetry with romantic themes, even those with no prior background in Islamic studies. He noted that students connect with the poems in a way that enables them to engage with more complex issues, like gender roles and religious imagination. “Everyone is able to relate to poetry,” Bashir noted. “Because in twelve to sixteen verses there is a whole vision, a world that is produced and displayed.”

Professor Bashir has recently begun a research project investigating the idea of the past in medieval Persian poetry. This endeavor includes exploring the immense troves of poetry and prose produced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in regions that span current-day Iran and Central and South Asia. Bashir said he has found that love is one of the most pervasive themes, used by poets to reflect societal values.

Bashir argues that authors chose to write in a poetic style not just to embellish their texts. The poetic form, he explained, allows poets to convey more nuanced themes. Through being expressed in poetry he said, “the past becomes imbued with morality, emotion and sentiment.” The use of poetry allows authors to intermix ordinary historical events with truths they regarded as eternal.

Challenging Research Materials

Bashir suggests that in the societies he studies, discussion of love, as expressed through poetry, acted as a kind of universal language that transcended geographical and socio-economic differences. The diverse societies across vast geographical distances were united by a cultural appreciation of poetry in the Persian language. Most of the surviving material remains in its original manuscript form, and very little has been translated.

“The poetic culture was the common language of this whole cultural region,” Bashir explained. Only a minor proportion was written down; poetry was spread from town to town through oral recounts. In the smallest rural communities, poets would be recognized for their talents, and their works would be read aloud to the people. ”Large numbers knew immense amounts of poetry by heart,” he said. This is a tradition that still persists in places such as Iran and Afghanistan.

Finding Meaning and History in Poems

“Shah Jahan Album; Recto: Dancing Dervishes” Mughal period (1526-1858.) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art"/>

Medieval Persian poets romanticized the past, joining it with and current events to make sense of the world. Bashir explained, “It was partly through poetry that people ascribed meaning to events occurring around them.”

Poetry was not a straightforward representation of the gritty realities of daily life. It was the cultural cement that tied communities together and allowed ideals to be replicated over time.

Many students with a background in Islamic studies are familiar with the great poets of the era, like Hafez and Rumi, who were lauded in their time and rose through the ranks of society, acquiring both wealth and patronage in exchange for their talents. Translations of Rumi into English have sold so well in recent years that some have described him as the bestselling poet in the United States today.

But Bashir has been analyzing the works of lesser known writers, who were famous among their contemporaries but have been forgotten. “My interest isn’t the famous poets, although I have read them for my own aesthetic purposes,” he said. “But to figure out how poetry conditions the vision of life in this historical setting.”

Love Is a Fickle Thing

As most modern people would agree, love is a fickle thing, and things haven’t changed much in five hundred years. In medieval Persian society, poets yearned to feel loved by the object of their affection, whether it was an alluring woman, the king, or a great spiritual leader.

One famous author from the sixteenth century, Abdi Beg Shirazi could use love poetry to describe in great detail the properties of different types of melons. Others touch on politics, and use the theme of the lover and the beloved to prescribe the ideal relationship between a ruler and his subjects. Love poetry was also central to Sufism where it was used to describe mystical experiences, relationships between masters and disciples, and the importance of reflecting on love and beauty.

A favorite story of Bashir’s describes the relationship between a Sufi master, who was considered to be a great spiritual leader, and his avid follower. The author describes how the most beautiful smell he ever smelt was what came from the master’s feet when he took off his socks in winter. “It’s a deliberate jarring juxtaposition,” Bashir said with a smile, “that is meant to highlight the fact that when someone is perceived as an object of love, all that relates to her or him becomes beautiful.”

Poetry, Sufis, and Gender

“Anthology of Poetry, Music and Chess for Baysunghur; lovers at an outdoor banquet” Herat, Afghanistan, 1426. ARTstor Islamic Art and Architecture Collection"/>

Thinking about gender with respect to Persian poetry presents a number of challenges. First of all, Persian language has no grammatical gender. There is no “he” or “she”. Moreover, the ideal of beauty was the same for men and women Bashir explained, “what marks beauty in a body is androgynous.” We nevertheless know from context that, like other literature from the period, poetry was a highly masculine cultural form. The poets were men, as were most of the protagonists.

Among Sufis, who were major producers of poetry, women would sometimes be acknowledged for their spiritual capacity and treated as great saints. Such is the case for a woman referred to as Kalan Khatun (great lady), who died around 1425. Bashir has written about Kalan Khatun, who was the elusive daughter of a famous saint. At one time, she was known as the greatest living master from her lineage. As was typical of any literature involving women in the medieval era, nothing has survived but stories told by male family-members, in this case her son.

The gender divide is a common theme in Sufi narratives. In one story, Kalan Khatun can only be approached for guidance through a male intermediary, like a messenger or servant. In the story, Khutan asks her servant to prepare a quantity of cotton cloth for a male Sufi’s pilgrimage to Mecca but never comes face to face with him. On receiving the gift, he goes into a trance and loses consciousness.  It later transpires that he was forewarned of his death, and is buried in the cotton that she had provided.

In short, while women might be great spiritual leaders, any relationship with a female Sufi master was far “more cumbersome [than a male] because of societal constraints.” As a result, fewer women than men find mention in Sufi literature produced in the period, making it harder for scholars to reconstruct women’s lives.

Tales that Stand the Test of Time

Many depictions of love in medieval Persian poetry would be considered tragic and romantic in today’s culture. The theme of “love at first sight” frequently arose in Sufi poetry. The Sufi master makes himself so beautiful that the disciple cannot resist, and immediately falls head over heels. There was the belief that love could potentially consume personal identity. In the final throes of the relationship, the bodies of the master and disciple become indistinguishable. In one story, for example, a disciple looks into the mirror and sees his master’s face rather than his own.

This pervasive theme of love, and the way that poetry provides insight into the hopes and ideals of people alive in a very different time, fascinates Bashir. A part of his work on these themes is included in his book Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam that is about to be released by Columbia University Press. He will be on sabbatical leave during the academic year 2011-12 to work on a new project entitled “Persianate Pasts: Memory, Narration, and Ideology in the Islamic East, 1400-1600”. He has recently received the Guggenheim fellowship and the Stanford Humanities Center fellowship to pursue this project. Bashir hopes that his work will expose more people to aspects of Islamic cultures and societies that find little mention in popular media. “Unfortunately there is very little discussion of anything but politics, which impoverishes how we understand the world,” he said.

Bashir’s publications are intended to appeal to anyone with an interest in understanding Islamic societies. Bashir said he has made a conscious effort to explain these ideas in a meaningful and accessible way. The material deserves a broad audience,” he said. “So we can appreciate how lively the imagination of the world is.”

By Chrissy Farr