Sanai

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The road from the city ran out to the army’s camp, and a court poet was walking it with a panegyric in his mouth. Sultan Mahmud’s heirs still held Ghazna, the Afghan citadel from which a Turkic dynasty had ruled an empire stretching into India, and the ruler of the hour wanted verses to carry him into a winter campaign across the mountains. The poet had the trade of such verses down cold: the qasida, the long formal ode that opened on a remembered garden or a beloved’s absence and turned, by its closing third, into measured flattery of whoever paid. He was good at it, good enough to be summoned. That walk to the camp is where the life of Abu al-Majd Majdud ibn Adam Sanai of Ghazna divides, in the story the tradition tells of him, into the poet of praise he had been and the poet of the way he became.

“Hakim Sanai addressing the Sultan of Ghazna,” opening folio of a 1579 Safavid manuscript of the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa, Leiden University Library (MS Or. 1651) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The poet of Ghazna

Sanai was born around 1080 in Ghazna — Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan — and he died there, most likely in 525 of the Islamic calendar, which falls in 1130 or 1131; the dates given by later biographers wander as far as 1141, and the early record is thin enough that none can be fixed with certainty. The city he was born into was no provincial outpost. Under Mahmud of Ghazna and his successors it had become one of the great centers of Persian letters, a court that drew poets the way a magnet draws filings, where a gifted versifier could rise on the strength of an ode and fall on the strength of a rival’s. His very pen-name carries the court’s mark: Sanai appears to derive from Sana al-Milla, “the Splendor of the Community,” one of the honorifics of the sultan Mas’ud III, who ruled from 1099 to 1115 — as though the poet had taken his name from the throne he served.

The fortress and citadel of Ghazni with the two Ghaznavid minarets of Mas’ud III and Bahram Shah, tinted lithograph after James Atkinson, c. 1842 — Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What he made in those years was the standing currency of the Persian court: the qasida of praise, the ghazal of love and longing, the quatrain turned to wit or complaint. He was, by every account, a master of the panegyric machine, and his early divan — the collected shorter poems, which in the fuller manuscripts runs to some thirty thousand verses — is thick with it. But it is also thick with something the pure flatterer does not produce. Alongside the odes sits a body of satire and complaint with a sharp, unsparing eye on the society around him: the venal judge, the hypocrite preacher, the grasping courtier, the false ascetic, the fraud in every robe. The man who would become the founder of mystical didactic verse in Persian served his apprenticeship as a moralist with a grudge against the world, and the grudge never entirely left the saint. The contempt for the marketplace of flattery that ends his court career was already audible in the verses he wrote while he was still inside it; the convert did not so much acquire a new vision as turn an old one all the way around.

The turn

The conversion-story is the most repeated thing about him, and the part of his life the scholarship most distrusts. As the tradition has it, Sanai was on his way to the palace with a poem in praise of the sultan’s planned invasion of India when he passed a walled garden and heard, from inside it, the voice of a notorious drunkard the people called Lai Khur — “the dregs-drinker.” The drunk was calling for a cup, and dedicating it, in mockery, to the blindness of the sultan, who would leave a country he could not govern to go seize one he had no business in. Then he called for a second cup, and dedicated it to the blindness of Sanai — who would waste God’s gift of speech on praising such a man. The rebuke is said to have struck the poet so hard that he abandoned the court on the spot, refused the wealth and the sultan’s daughter he was offered to stay, and set out on the path of the Sufis.

It is a perfect story, and that is the problem with it. The scholar who has studied Sanai’s life most closely, J. T. P. de Bruijn, in his 1983 monograph Of Piety and Poetry, shows that the anecdotes of the conversion are very likely back-formed from images in Sanai’s own verse — the wine-house, the contemptuous drunk who sees more clearly than the sober, the worthless beggar who is secretly a friend of God — read by later biographers as autobiography when they were never meant as such. What can be said without legend is plainer and slower: at some point Sanai’s poetry turns. The praise of patrons gives way to praise of God; the trade of the qasida is bent, deliberately and for the first time at this scale, to the ends of the spirit. He is said to have studied under the Sufi master Yusuf Hamadani; he made the pilgrimage to Mecca; he returned to Ghazna and lived in a withdrawal from which the sultan Bahram Shah could not coax him back to court. The break may not have come in a single night by a garden wall. But it came.

The city of Ghazni, where Sanai was born and to which he returned, in a lithograph from James Rattray’s Afghan views of 1839-42 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Walled Garden

The work that founds his reputation, and founds a tradition, is the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa wa Shariat al-Tariqa — “The Walled Garden of Truth and the Law of the Path,” often given in English as the Enclosed Garden of Truth. He composed it near the end of his life, in the long meter the prosodists call khafif, and dedicated it to Bahram Shah, the Ghaznavid sultan who ruled from 1117 to 1152. It is the first long Persian poem to take the masnavi — the form of rhyming couplets that Persian had long used for romance and epic — and turn it wholly to the teaching of the mystical and ethical life. Sanai did to the masnavi what he had already done to the qasida: he took an instrument tuned for the world and retuned it for God.

The poem moves by accretion rather than plot. An opening in praise of God and the Prophet gives way to chapter on chapter — on reason and its limits, on knowledge, on love, on the soul, on the conduct of life — each built from short bursts of doctrine studded with parable, fable, and the homely anecdote that makes a hard saying stick. The most famous of these anecdotes Sanai sets down almost in passing: a band of blind men are led to an elephant, and each lays hands on a different part — the ear, the leg, the trunk — and each reports, in perfect honesty, an utterly different beast, and each is right about his part and wrong about the whole. It is among the oldest tellings of the parable in Persian, and it carries the book’s governing conviction: that the reasoning intellect, working by the parts it can grasp, can never close its hand around the One, and that the failure is not a defect in this seeker or that but the structure of the case. For close to nine centuries the Hadiqa has been read as a textbook of the path, copied, glossed, and memorized across the Persian-speaking world.

Its text is famously unstable, and the instability is part of its history. According to the early account, a man named Muhammad ibn Ali Raffa assembled an edition of some five thousand couplets on the order of Bahram Shah himself, from materials the poet left behind; an earlier and longer recension, of around ten thousand couplets, Sanai is said to have put together himself and dispatched to a religious scholar in Baghdad — sending the poem out, in effect, to be vetted by the orthodox learning of the age. The two streams, court recension and authorial recension, never fully reconciled, which is why no two manuscripts of the Hadiqa are quite the same poem and why establishing its text has occupied editors into the modern period.

The Hadiqa did not stand alone. Sanai left a clutch of shorter masnavis whose shapes prefigure the longer ones his successors would write. The Sayr al-ibad ila’l-maad — “The Journey of the Servants to the Place of Return” — is an allegory of the soul’s passage through the realms of creation toward its origin, a compact ancestor of the journey-poems that would crowd the tradition. A Kar-nama-ye Balkh (“Book of Deeds of Balkh”) survives from the early, lighter end of his career. And a masnavi called the Tariq al-tahqiq, the “Path of Verification,” long passed under his name, carries a date placing it after his death — one of several works whose ascription to Sanai the scholarship now questions, a tangle of attribution of the same kind that clouds the corpus of Attar a century later. The poet who founded a school became, as founders do, a name to which the school’s later anonymous work could be credited.

What the verse holds

Sanai writes from inside the broad current of Sufism, and inside its specifically Islamic discipline of the soul, at the exact moment that current was finding its settled vocabulary. His near-contemporary al-Ghazali — who had walked away from his own chair of theology in Baghdad a generation before, and who reasoned his way to the conclusion that the heart’s certainty outruns the schoolmen’s proofs — was the great doctrinal voice of the same world, arguing in prose what Sanai would carry in verse: that the law and the path are not rivals but the outer and inner faces of one obedience. The full title of the Hadiqa makes the same claim in four words, binding haqiqa, the inner Truth, to shari’a, the revealed Law.

What Sanai teaches is severe and tender at once. He is a poet of asceticism — of the renunciation of the world’s rewards, the same rewards he had once been paid to praise — but the renunciation is in service of an end that is not denial but love. The self, with its appetites and its self-regard, is the veil between the soul and God; the work of the path is to wear that veil thin. This is the territory of mysticism in its strict sense, the discipline of approach to a Reality that the discursive mind cannot reach, and Sanai’s distinctive contribution is to have found, for it, a vehicle that could carry doctrine and feeling together — that could argue and weep in the same couplet. He did not invent the ideas. He invented the form that the ideas would travel in.

The line he opened

It is as a beginning that Sanai matters most, and the tradition that grew from him knew it. Within a century the didactic-mystical masnavi he founded had become the central instrument of Persian Sufi poetry. Attar of Nishapur, in the generation after him, took the form Sanai had cut and built from it the Conference of the Birds, threading a single allegory — the birds’ journey toward the king they are seeking and at last become — through the loose chain of parables Sanai had used. And Rumi, a century later again, brought the form to its summit in the Masnavi, the six-book poem his followers came to call the Persian Qur’an. Rumi named both of his predecessors his masters, and put the debt in a single famous line that the tradition has never let go: that Attar was the spirit and Sanai its two eyes, and that he himself came only after the two of them. The order of inheritance runs straight from the poet of Ghazna: he made the channel; the others filled it.

The text and the scholarship

The modern recovery of Sanai rests on a handful of monuments. The standard critical labor on the corpus is the edition of his masnavis by the Iranian scholar Mohammad-Taqi Modarres Razavi, whose Tehran text of the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa (first issued in 1950 and reworked thereafter) and whose 1969 University of Tehran edition of the masnavis remain the base from which serious study proceeds — though, as the field acknowledges, even Modarres Razavi could not fully untangle the poem’s double recension. The first sustained carrying of the poem into English came earlier, in John Stephenson’s bilingual edition of the first book — The First Book of the Hadiqatu’l-Haqiqat; or, the Enclosed Garden of the Truth (Calcutta, 1911) — which set the Persian beside a literal English rendering and remains the point of entry for readers without the original. The fullest modern critical biography is J. T. P. de Bruijn’s Of Piety and Poetry: The Interaction of Religion and Literature in the Life and Works of Hakim Sanai of Ghazna (Leiden: Brill, 1983), the book that disentangled the legend of the conversion from the documentable life and reset the terms of every later study. The compact authoritative reference is the Encyclopaedia Iranica treatment of the poet and its companion article on the Hadiqa, which supply the dates, the textual history, and the cautions that frame the account above. Behind all of it stand the manuscripts themselves — illuminated copies of the Hadiqa scattered through the libraries of Europe and the East, several of which open, as the poem does, on the image of the poet addressing his sultan, the courtier and the convert held in one frame.

The figure who reaches us through nine centuries of copying is therefore double, and was double in his own lifetime — the courtier who could turn a flawless ode for a sultan’s vanity, and the moralist who despised the vanity even as he served it, until the second man swallowed the first. The wine-house in his verse, the contemptuous drunk, the beggar wiser than the king: these were the images that the biographers later read back into his life as the night his conversion came, and they were right at least in this, that the poems are where the change actually happened. Sanai did not leave a brotherhood or a shrine-cult to carry his name; he left a form. The walled garden of his title is the enclosure of the disciplined soul, and the gate he cut into its wall — the masnavi turned from the road of the world to the road of the Truth — every Persian mystic poet after him walked through.

→ Related: Sufism · Islamic Sufism · Asceticism · Mysticism · Persian Poetic Mysticism · Rumi · Attar Of Nishapur · Al Ghazali · Islamic Golden Age