Iran: Empire of the Mind (17 page)

Niki o badi ke dar nahad-e bashar ast,
Shadi o ghami ke dar qaza o qadar ast
Ba charkh makon havale k’andar rah-e aql
Charkh az tu hezar bar bicharetar ast

Good and evil, which are in the nature of mankind,
Joy and sadness, which are in chance and fate;
Do not attribute them to the machinery of the heavens, because in reason
That machine is a thousand times more helpless than you
²⁸

There are dozens of quatrains that one could bring forward to illustrate the subtlety and intellectual power of this great man, but this cannot be a book about just Omar Khayyam. The following poem belongs to a collection from an early manuscript attributed to Omar Khayyam by Arberry, which since Arberry’s time has been considered doubtful. But it is known from other manuscripts too, and many scholars still include this poem with his best. If it is not by him, it nonetheless presents a defiant personal manifesto close to the spirit he expressed elsewhere:

Gar man ze mey-e moghaneh mastam, hastam
Var asheq o rend o botparastam, hastam
Har kas be khiyal-e khod gamane darad Man khod danam, har anche hastam, hastam.

If I am drunk on forbidden wine, I am.
And if a lover and a rogue and a worshipper of false gods, then I am.
Everyone has doubts to their own mind.
I know myself; whatever I am, I am.
²⁹

In this poem, as elsewhere, Omar Khayyam uses terms that were commonplace in Sufi poetry and were used as key concepts, often metaphorically.
Mey-e moghaneh
for example—Magian wine: forbidden wine bought from the Zoroastrians; also
rend
, meaning a wild young man, a rogue or wastrel. There were others too, notably the
kharabat
, the house of ruin, the
tavern; and the
saqi,
the young boy who serves the wine and is the object of homoerotic longing. But although some commentators have claimed Omar Khayyam as a Sufi, and notwithstanding he may have had some sympathy for the Sufis, his voice is too much his own, too unique to be set in any religious category; and his scepticism too strong.

The eleventh century saw the first great upsurge in the unique mystical movement that is Sufism.
³⁰
Sufism is a huge and complex phenomenon, with very different aspects at different times and in different places, from eleventh century Asia Minor to North Africa to modern Pakistan and beyond. Its origins are unclear, but Islam sustained a mystical element from the very beginning, as some would say is shown by the revelation of the Qor’an to Mohammad himself, in the wilderness outside Mecca. The essence of Sufism was a seeking after precisely this kind of personal spiritual encounter, and an abandonment of self and all kinds of worldly egotism in the presence of the divine. But in practices and imagery it also partook of the religious turbulence of the centuries after the Islamic conquest, reflecting popular pre-Islamic ideas and influences, including the mystically-inclined movements of neoplatonism and gnosticiscm. These influences, along with a deliberate anarchic and antinomian tendency, set it up from the start in tension with the text-based, scholarly, urban tradition of the ulema and the urban preachers; who solemnly read and re-read the Qor’an and hadith to assert anew the correct definition of Islamic law. There was tension and conflict, and a number of Sufis or mystically-inclined thinkers, like al-Hallaj and Sohravardi for example, were condemned as heretics by the ulema and executed (in 922 and 1191 respectively). It may be that the renewed rise of Sufism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had something to do with a reaction to the increasing concentration of Islamic practice and Islamic study in the madresehs, directly under the eye of the ulema, that was taking place at this time.

The significance of Sufism within the Islamic lands at this time has sometimes been neglected, but in reality it was all-pervasive. Its cultural influence in Persia is indicated by its effect on Persian poetry, but everywhere there were Sufi
khanaqas
—lodging-houses for wandering Sufis that also served local people for religious gatherings. In the larger towns there
might be many khanaqas (of different Sufi orders), and bazaar guilds and other associations often had Sufi connections. But even small villages might have khanaqas too. There are parallels with the friaries set up for the mendicant orders in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like the friars, the Sufis were intimately involved in the religious lives of ordinary people, and were responsible for missionary activity in the countryside and beyond Persia. Given the low level of literacy at the time and the fact that the population lived overwhelmingly in the countryside, it becomes plain that the Sufis were central to the diffusion of Islam outside the towns and cities. The centre of their activity was in Persia, and especially in Khorasan, but they probably were the prime means by which Persianate culture spread and consolidated its popular influence from the Bosphorus to Delhi and beyond.
³¹

Many Sufis and in particular many of the Sufi poets, openly scorned what they saw as the self-important egotism of the ulema, provoking and attacking them for their obsession with rules and their vain pride in the observance of them, which forgot the selflessness necessary for true spirituality. It is not difficult to see why some orthodox Muslims, especially Wahhabis and their sympathisers since the eighteenth century, have anathematised and persecuted Sufism. But in the period we are dealing with here, the missionary activity of travelling Sufis, (known also as dervishes) was important, probably crucial, in the conversion of new Muslims, both in the remoter rural parts like Tabarestan, where orthodox Islam had been slow to penetrate, but especially in newly-conquered territories like Anatolia, and among the Turks in their Central Asian homelands in the far north-east.

The first great theorist of Sufism was Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), another native of Tus in Khorasan (though there were many major Sufi figures much earlier, Junayd for example, who died around 910). The relationship between orthodox Sunnism and Sufism was not one of simple opposition, and Al-Ghazali was primarily an orthodox Sunni of the Shafi’i mazhhab, who wrote works attacking the Mu’tazilis, Avicenna and the introduction of ideas from Greek philosophy. But he also wrote an influential Sufi work called
Kimiya-ye sa’adat
–
The Alchemy of Happiness
, and in general he tried to
remove the obstacles between orthodoxy and Sufism, presenting the latter as a legitimate aspect of the former. In the early centuries of Sufism, Shi‘a Muslims tended to be more hostile to the Sufi dervishes than the Sunnis.
³²

Sana’i was the first great poet with a clear Sufi allegiance, and some have compared his literary style with that of Al-Ghazali. His long poem
Hadiqat al-haqiqa
(
The Garden of Truth
—completed in 1131) is a classic of Sufi poetry, but he wrote a large body of poems beyond that, and in them it is easy to see the fusion of the traditions of love-poetry with the impulses of mysticism:

Since my heart was caught in the snare of love,
Since my soul became wine in the cup of love,
Ah, the pains I have known through loverhood
Since like a hawk I fell in the snare of love!
Trapped in time, I am turned to a drunken sot
By the exciting, dreg-draining cup of love.
Dreading the fierce affliction of loverhood,
I dare not utter the very name of love;
And the more amazing is this, since I see
Every creature on earth is at peace with love.
³³

Here too, wine has become a metaphor for love, taking the imagery into another dimension of complexity. Where a conventional, orthodox Muslim might favour abstinence (
zohd
), in accordance with religious law, Sana’i says that in going beyond law into infidelity (
kofr
), leaving behind his venal, carnal soul (
nafs
), the Sufi can find another way to God. The point is that both love and wine can be ways in which a man may forget himself; they are familiar experiences in which the sense of self is changed or obliterated. Such an experience can give a taste of (and therefore provide a metaphor for) the loss of self experienced by the mystic in the face of God—the loss of self that is necessary for genuine religious experience, that is yearned for as the lover longs for the beloved.

The Seljuk period produced a profusion of poets, and it is not possible to do justice to them all, but Nizami Ganjavi, who composed his
Khosraw va Shirin
in 1180 and
Layla va Majnoun
in 1188, is too important to be overlooked. Both these long poems (he wrote many others) retold much older stories; the former a tale from the Sassanid court and the latter of
Arab origin. Both are love stories that became hugely popular, but they have deeper resonances, reflecting Nizami’s religious beliefs. Layla and Majnoun fall in love, but then are separated, and Majnoun goes mad (‘Majnoun’ means ‘mad’) and wanders in the wilderness. He becomes a poet, and writes to Layla through a third party:

Oh my love, with your breasts like jasmine! Loving you, my life fades, my lips wither, my eyes are full of tears. You cannot imagine how much I am ‘Majnoun’. For you, I have lost myself. But that path can only be taken by those who forget themselves. In love, the faithful have to pay with the blood of their hearts; otherwise their love is not worth a grain of rye. So you are leading me, revealing the true faith of love, even if your faith should remain hidden forever.
³⁴

Without hope in his love (Layla’s father will not let them marry) Majnoun spiritualises it. In going into the desert, losing his selfhood in madness, stepping outside all ordinary conventions and writing poetry, he has effectively become a Sufi.
³⁵
So even this overtly profane story has a spiritual dimension that is not immediately apparent. But to have psychological force, the metaphor and the spiritual message first require our sympathy with the lovers’ predicament. The poem is not simply about the Sufi’s approach to God. It is both that and a love story—and therein lies its human appeal. It has been translated into almost every language in the Islamic world, as well as many others beyond it.

Farid Al-Din Attar, who lived from around 1158 to around 1221 or 1229 in Nishapur, wrote more than 45,000 lines of verse over his lifetime. He established the elements of a theory of a ‘religion of love,’ which strongly influenced all subsequent Sufi poets, and developed the idea of the
qalandar
, the wild man, outcast, whose only guide is the ethic of that religion:

Har ke ra dar ‘eshq mohkam shod qadam
Dar-gozasht az kofr va az islam ham

Whoever sets foot firmly forward in love
Will go beyond both Islam and unbelief
³⁶

The classic of Attar’s poetry is the
Mantiq al-tayr
,
The Conference of the Birds
, one of the best-known Persian poems of all. Embedded within the charming and wonderfully-told story of the birds questing for the mysterious
phoenix, the
simorgh
, is the story of Shaykh San‘an, which brings out the full meaning of Sufism in its logical extreme, and is deliberately provocative and shocking in the Islamic context. The story was important and influential in the later development of Sufism.

Shaykh San‘an is a learned, well-respected, holy man, who has always done the right thing. He has made the pilgrimage to Mecca fifty times, has fasted and prayed, and has taught four hundred pupils. He argues fine points of religious law and is admired by everyone. But he has a recurring dream, in which he lives in
Rum
(by which was probably meant the Christian part of Anatolia, or possibly Constantinople, rather than Rome itself), and worships in a Christian church there. This is disturbing, and he concludes that to resolve the problem, he must go to the Christian territory. He sets off, but just short of his goal, he sees a Christian girl—
In beauty’s mansion she was like a sun…

Her eyes spoke promises to those in love,
Their fine brows arched coquettishly above -
Those brows sent glancing messages that seemed
To offer everything her lovers dreamed.

and, as sometimes happens, the old man falls in love

‘I have no faith’ he cried. ‘The heart I gave
Is useless now; I am the Christian’s slave.’

His companions try to get Shaykh San‘an to see reason, but he answers them in terms even more shocking and subversive. They tell him to pray—he agrees, but (instead of toward Mecca, as a Muslim should) asks to know where her face is, that he may pray in her direction. Another asks him whether he does not regret turning away from Islam, and he answers that he only regrets his previous folly, and that he had not fallen in love before. Another says he has lost his wits, and he says he has, and also his fame, but fraud and fear too along with them. Another urges him to confess his shame before God, and he replies
God Himself has lit this flame
.

The Shaykh lives with the dogs in the dust of the street in front of his beloved’s house for a month, until he falls ill. He begs her to show him some pity, some affection, and she laughs, mocks him and says he is
old—he should be looking for a shroud, not for love. He begs again, and she says he must do four things to win her trust—burn the Qor’an, drink wine,
seal up faith’s eye
, and bow down to images. The shaykh hesitates, but agrees, and is invited in, takes wine and gets drunk: