Persian poetic mysticism

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Persian poetic mysticism is the body of mystical verse composed in the Persian language from roughly the eleventh century onward, in which the conventions of ordinary love poetry — the unattainable beloved, the cup of wine, the tavern, the moth drawn to the flame — are turned to a second purpose: the description of the soul’s longing for God. It is the literary face of Sufism in the eastern Islamic world, and for many readers outside that world it has been the most accessible door into Islamic mysticism at all. The verse does not argue its theology; it stages it, as a scene of wanting that never quite closes. A lover stands at a door that does not open, drinks in a ruin outside the law, burns toward a flame that will end him — and the burning is the doctrine.

The form took shape in the centuries after Persian re-emerged as a literary language. Under the courts of the Iranian east — Samanid, then Ghaznavid — a new Persian written in the Arabic script and freighted with Arabic vocabulary became the medium of an immense lyric and narrative output. Its prosody was adapted from Arabic; its meters, its rhyme, and its two governing forms, the ghazal (the short monorhymed love lyric) and the masnavi (the long narrative in rhyming couplets), were already in place when the first poets bent them toward the interior life. What the mystics inherited was a fully worked courtly idiom of praise and desire. What they did with it was to point it at a different object.

The canon, in order

Sanāʾī of Ghazna, in the first half of the twelfth century, is usually credited with the decisive turn. A court poet by training, he abandoned the panegyric trade for a religious vocation and composed the Ḥadīqat al-Ḥaqīqa — the Garden of Truth — the earliest of the long line of Persian didactic masnavis, finished around 1131 and dedicated to the Ghaznavid sultan Bahrām Shāh. Into the narrative poem and the ode alike Sanāʾī folded sermon, parable, and direct spiritual instruction, so that the courtly forms now carried the weight of a teaching. The ones who came after worked in the space he had opened.

Farīd al-Dīn ʿAttār of Nishapur followed with allegories of the seeking soul. His Manṭiq al-Ṭayr — the Conference, or Parliament, of the Birds, composed around 1177 in some four and a half thousand lines — gathers the birds of the world to seek their king, the Sīmurgh, under the leadership of the hoopoe. The journey crosses seven valleys — quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, bewilderment, and at last poverty and annihilation — and most of the birds fall away, by excuse or by death, until only thirty arrive. There, before the throne, they understand: sī murgh, the Persian for thirty birds, is the Sīmurgh; the king they crossed the world to find is the assembly of seekers itself, the divine glimpsed as their own annihilated face. The pun is the doctrine, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one word. ʿAttār’s other long poems — the Ilāhī-nāma, the Muṣībat-nāma — work the same vein, and his prose lives of the saints, the Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ, preserved the sayings of the early masters for everyone who came later.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, in thirteenth-century Anatolia — in Konya, in the lands the Islamic world still called Rūm for their Roman past — composed the vast Masnavī and a torrent of lyric verse out of his bond with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabrīz. The meeting around 1244 undid the settled jurist and made the poet; Shams’s disappearance a few years later, most likely his murder, turned the loss into song. Rūmī named the lyric collection not for himself but for the vanished friend — the Dīvān-i Shams-i Tabrīzī — as if the verse were Shams speaking through him. The Masnavī, some twenty-five thousand couplets across six books, became for his order the Persian Qurʾān, a book to be lived rather than admired. Its opening, the lament of the reed cut from the reed-bed and crying to be returned, is the most quoted passage in the whole tradition: the soul severed from its source, and the music its severance makes. The order that formed around his memory, the Mevlevi, carried the verse into ritual; the literary current and the institutional one are distinct, and the Anatolian and Ottoman orders that grew from the same soil are their own subject.

Later the lyric reached a celebrated polish in Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz, whose Dīvān of ghazals holds the sacred and the worldly in a deliberate, unresolved shimmer. His recurring mask is the rind — the rake, the unrepentant tavern-haunter who scorns the pious hypocrite and finds God in the wine-house rather than the mosque — a figure whose blasphemy is a higher devotion and whose devotion never stops looking like blasphemy. No reader fully resolves whether a given couplet means the cup or the Cup, and the Persian tradition long ago decided that the impossibility is the art. With ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī of Herat in the fifteenth century — Naqshbandī Sufi, poet, and scholar — the classical line is usually said to close; later Persian critics called him the seal of the poets. His seven-part Haft Awrang (the Seven Thrones) gathers his narrative masnavis, including the love-allegories Salāmān and Absāl and Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, and his prose treatise the Lawāʾiḥ sets out in plain terms the metaphysics the poems carry by suggestion.

The reading-code

The reading that makes the verse mystical is itself a tradition. Within Sufism, the wine the poems praise is the intoxication of divine love; the beloved, with the cruel indifference and the unbearable face, is God; the tavern is the gathering of the initiated, set pointedly outside the city walls and the reach of the law, in the ruins — the kharābāt — where the sober order does not run; the cupbearer who pours is the master or the divine grace that gives the draught; drunkenness names a state past the reach of sober reason, the dissolution of the self that discursive thought can neither reach nor describe. The moth that flies into the candle is the lover who attains union only by being consumed. This is not casual metaphor but a worked lexicon, dense enough that later commentators compiled glossaries — iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya, dictionaries of the symbolic terms — to fix what each image was to mean.

Whether a given poem intends that reading, intends the plain erotic or convivial sense, or means both at once is frequently impossible to fix, and on the usual account the ambiguity is not a flaw to be resolved but the point — the poems are built to be read on more than one level at the same time. Here the scholarship divides, and the division is old. One line, the systematizing one, treats the imagery as a stable cipher with a determinate key, so that wine always decodes to divine love and the work of the reader is decryption. Another insists that the power of Ḥāfiẓ in particular lies precisely in his refusal to settle, that the oscillation between the sacred and the profane is structural and deliberate, and that to lock each image to a single referent is to kill the verse. A third position, historical, points out that the symbolic dictionaries were themselves composed after much of the great poetry, partly to defend it against the charge of impiety, so that the fixed code is in some measure a retrospective imposition on a body of verse that was more open than the glossarists wished. The genres bear on the question: a frankly devotional poem inhabits the code differently from a wine-song (khamriyya) in the Arabic line that Persian poets inherited and turned. The tradition that produced the verse holds all three readings at once without strain, which is itself a clue to what the poetry is for.

The metaphysics behind the images

The conceptual scaffolding is broadly Neoplatonic in cast, reaching Persian thought through the Arabic philosophical inheritance — through the falsafa of Avicenna and the Islamic Neoplatonism that recast the late-antique Greek schema in Qurʾanic terms. From the One flows all that is, in a descending order of being, by emanation; the creature’s deepest motion is the return, the ascent of longing back toward the source it fell from. Suhrawardī’s philosophy of light, in which reality is graded by luminosity and the soul is an exile from the world of pure radiance, gave the poets one of their most durable images — homesickness for a light remembered and lost. Above all the metaphysics was sharpened by the school of Ibn ʿArabī and the doctrine of the unity of being: a single divine reality, the Real, of which everything that exists is the self-disclosure, so that the longing creature and the longed-for God are not, at the last, two. Jāmī, who wrote commentaries on the Akbarian corpus, is the clearest bridge between the poetry and that metaphysics; the Lawāʾiḥ is essentially the unity of being set to music.

The kinship to the Greek model is real and was partly a matter of transmission — the Baghdad translation movement carried Plotinus into Arabic, where an abridged Enneads circulated under Aristotle’s name as the Theology, and from Arabic the schema passed eastward. But the poets clothe it in a sensuous, particular language the philosophers never used, and at its highest reaches the verse turns apophatic: the beloved cannot be described, the station of union cannot be reported, and the truest word about the divine is silence — khāmūshī, a pen-name Rūmī signs some of his lyrics with. What the philosopher proves by negation, the poet enacts by a lover struck dumb. The verse is also the doctrine in performance: chanted, set to music, made the matter of the audition (samāʿ) in which the meaning is not parsed but undergone.

Reception, scholarship, and texts

When this verse reached Europe it became, almost at once, evidence for a thesis its authors had not advanced — that beneath all the faiths lies a single wisdom. Rūmī and ʿAttār arrived in nineteenth-century translation, and ʿOmar Khayyām arrived through Edward FitzGerald, whose Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (first edition 1859, printed anonymously in 250 copies and at first all but unsold) became, after the Pre-Raphaelites took it up, one of the most reprinted poems in English. FitzGerald called his method a transmogrification rather than a translation, and the quatrains he made are in large part his own work on the Persian’s nominal frame — which did not stop them from being read as the distilled skepticism, or the distilled mysticism, of the East. The reception is its own history, traced in detail in comparative studies of Sufism and the Western mystics.

The scholarly study of the tradition rests on a body of critical editions and translations, many now in the public domain. The standard survey of the religious content is Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), with its chapters on the Persian poets; Leonard Lewisohn’s edited The Heritage of Sufism (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999) gathers the modern reassessment of the classical Persian tradition. The earliest extended English account remains R. A. Nicholson’s The Mystics of Islam (London: G. Bell, 1914), hosted in full at sacred-texts, whose chapter “The Gnosis” sets out the symbolic reading-code with care.

The primary texts are well served. Of Rūmī’s Masnavī, Nicholson’s eight-volume critical edition and prose translation (Gibb Memorial Series, 1925–1940) is the scholarly standard; the public-domain pre-Nicholson access runs through E. H. Whinfield’s abridged Masnavi i Maʿnavi (Trübner, 1898) and James Redhouse’s verse Mesnevī, Book the First (Trübner, 1881), both held in the Library here. ʿAttār’s Manṭiq al-Ṭayr reached Europe first in Garcin de Tassy’s French Mantic Uttaïr (Paris, 1857/1863) and in FitzGerald’s free English “Bird-Parliament” (printed 1889), also in the Library. Ḥāfiẓ entered English through H. Wilberforce Clarke’s heavily annotated prose Dīvān-i Hāfiz (Calcutta, 1891) and Gertrude Bell’s verse Poems from the Divan of Hafiz (Heinemann, 1897); Jāmī’s metaphysics is set out in the Lawāʾiḥ edited and translated by E. H. Whinfield and Mīrzā Muḥammad Qazwīnī (Royal Asiatic Society, 1906). For the literary history, E. G. Browne’s four-volume A Literary History of Persia (1902–1924) remains a starting point, and the standard reference articles — T. J. de Bruijn on Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqat al-Ḥaqīqa, and the Encyclopædia Iranica entries on the ghazal and on the figure of the rind — anchor the modern discussion of the symbolic conventions.

A separate strand of scholarship, gathered above all in Franklin Lewis’s Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), tracks what happened to this verse in popular Western reception — the gap between the trained preacher and jurist who wrote the Masnavī and the unchurched, de-Islamicized sage the twentieth-century English versions made of him. The poems were composed inside one tradition, in its meters, on its scripture, toward its God, and meant something exact within it.

What survives translation is the longing itself, which the poems treat as the truest thing about the one who feels it.

→ In the library: ʿAttār — Bird-Parliament (FitzGerald, 1889) · Rūmī — The Mesnevī, Book the First (Redhouse, 1881) · Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi, abridged (Whinfield, 1898)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Emanation · Sufism · Islamic Sufism · Rumi · Omar Khayyam · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Islamic Neoplatonism · Apophatic Theology · Suhrawardi · Avicenna · Anatolian Ottoman Sufism · Qawwali Sufi Sama · Sufism Comparative