Iran: Empire of the Mind (19 page)

Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament
About the heartache being apart has meant:
‘Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me
My song’s expressed each human’s agony,
A breast which separation’s split in two
Is what I seek, to share this pain with you:
When kept from their origin, all yearn
For union on the day they can return

…
The reed consoles those forced to be apart,
Its notes will lift the veil upon your heart,
Where’s antidote or poison like its song
Or confidant, or one who’s pined so long?

This reed relates a tortuous path ahead,
Recalls the love with which Majnoun’s heart bled:
The few who hear the truths the reed has sung
Have lost their wits so they can speak this tongue…
⁴²

And this is the simple idea at the core of Rumi’s thought—the unity of God, the unity of the human spirit with God, and the yearning for reunion with God (Plato puts a similar idea into the mouth of Aristophanes in the
Symposium
). Rumi expresses the same idea is in a different way in the following ruba’i (the Beloved was a common Sufi term signifying God):

Ma’shuq chu aftab taban gardad
‘Asheq bemesal-e zarre gardan gardad
Chun bad-e bahar-e eshq jonban gardad
Har shakh ke khoshk nist raqsan gardad

The Beloved starts shining like the sun,
And the lover begins to whirl like a dust-mote.
When the spring wind of love begins to move,
Any branch that is not withered starts to dance
⁴³

Many of Rumi’s poems contain overt or concealed references to Shams-e Tabrizi:
shams
in Arabic means sun, and the reference is obvious. But this does not mean that the Beloved is simply Shams; the Beloved is God too, and the sun, and in a sense Rumi himself as well.

Fakhroddin al-Iraqi, despite his name, was an Iranian born near Hamadan in 1211 (At that time and later that western province was known as Iraq-e Ajam — the Iraq of the
Ajam
, the non-Arabs, ie the Persians— hence the name al-Iraqi—and what is now Iraq was known then as Iraq-e Arabi). Unlike some of the poets, the stories about Iraqi’s life give us a vivid idea of his personality—which was unashamedly eccentric—adding to and fitting with the sense of his personality conveyed by his poems. Iraqi showed an early facility for learning and scholarship, but his head was turned in his teens by the arrival in Hamadan of some Sufi
qalandar
, wild men. Iraqi joined them without hesitation:

We’ve moved our bedrolls from the mosque to the tavern of ruin [kharabat]
We’ve scribbled all over the page of asceticism and erased all miracles of piety.

Now we sit with the lovers in the lane of the Magians
And drink a cup from the hands of the dissolute people of the tavern.
If the heart should tweak the ear of respectability now, why not?
⁴⁴
…

In another poem he says:

All fear of God, all self-denial I deny; bring wine, nothing but wine
For in all sincerity I repent my worship which is but hypocrisy.
Yes, bring me wine, for I have renounced all renunciation
And all my vaunted self-righteousness seems to me but swagger and self-display.
⁴⁵

Iraqi went travelling with the other mendicants. He wrote many poems about the beauty of young men and boys, and the homoerotic strain in Persian poetry is especially plain in his work, but his contemporary defenders claimed that he only admired the boys longingly from afar. Eventually he came under the influence of a follower of the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, perhaps the greatest thinker of Islamic mysticism, who had died in 1240.

Ibn Arabi’s thought, steeped primarily in the Qor’an and the traditions of the hadith, but influenced also by neoPlatonism and the thinking of earlier Sufis, elaborated what appears very like a version of Plato’s theory of forms—that phenomena in the material world are manifestations of original, essential truths in a higher sphere (itself an idea possibly derived from Iranian Mazdaism, as we saw earlier). Therefore true reality, paradoxically, lay in the spiritual, metaphysical world beyond, of which the physical, perceptible world was a mere shadow. Central also to his thinking were ideas of the oneness of God’s creation (
wahdat al-wujud
), and of the imagination (
khiyal
). But another very significant concept that Ibn Arabi developed from the formulae of earlier thinkers was the idea of the Perfect Man (
al-insan al-kamil
). According to this notion the sphere of existence that is not God is divided between the macrocosm (the world beyond Man) and the microcosm, the inner world of Man. These two worlds reflect each other, and through religious contemplation and self-development, Man can ‘polish his soul’ until the two worlds are congruent. Man can improve and perfect himself until he takes on the form of the divine—he then becomes the Perfect Man.
⁴⁶
The Perfect Man is a copy of
God, achieved by religious discipline and mystical devotion, who can then become a conduit for the will of God in the world. This idea was to have great significance in later Islamic thinking. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was fascinated by these ideas and wrote one of his earliest books about a later commentary on the
Fusus al-Hikam
(Seals of Wisdom) of Ibn Arabi.

Consider also the following extract, about the possibility of a mystic being able to visit the alternative Earth of True Reality:

Then he meets those Forms who stand and keep watch at the entrances to the ways of approach, God having especially assigned them this task. One of them hastens towards the newcomer, clothes him in a robe suitable to his rank, takes him by the hand, and walks with him over that Earth and they do in it as they will. He lingers to look at the divine works of art; every stone, every tree, every village, every single thing he comes across, he may speak with, if he wishes, as a man converses with a companion… When he has attained his object and thinks of returning to his dwelling place, his companion goes with him and takes him back to the place at which he entered. There she says goodbye to him; she takes off the robe in which she had clothed him and departs from him…
⁴⁷

The idea that the world of experience was a mere shadow of the real world of forms beyond had great potential for metaphor in spiritual poetry, and traces of this idea can be seen in many of the Persian poets (they reached their apotheosis with Shabestari, who in his
Gulshan-e raz
put forward a fully-fledged aesthetic according to which eyebrows, curls or the down on the beloved’s upper lip might represent heavenly or metaphysical concepts).

Iraqi was devoted to the ideas of Ibn Arabi for the rest of his life, wrote his
Divine Flashes
in exposition of them, and was buried next to Ibn Arabi in Damascus when he died in 1289. But he never settled down to a conventional life. One story says that when he arrived in Cairo on his travels the sultan honoured him by setting him on his own horse and gave him some splendid clothes; but as he rode through the streets accompanied by many other scholars and dignitaries on foot, Iraqi suddenly snatched off his turban and put it on the saddle in front of him. Seeing him going in such splendour, but bareheaded, the people watching laughed, and when he heard about it the Sultan was displeased because he had made himself look ridiculous. Iraqi explained that he had done it to avoid sin; as he rode
along it occurred to him that no one had been so honoured before, and he felt his ego rise up, so he had deliberately humbled himself.
⁴⁸

Some commentators feel that Iraqi’s poetry was better and livelier before his encounter with the thought of Ibn Arabi, and that it became metaphysically overburdened afterwards. But there is something especially touching about Iraqi and his poetry, especially his early works, and it shows perhaps more clearly than any other Sufi poetry the urge to dispense with the self-regarding piety and the holier-than-thou observance of mere rules pursued by the orthodox; and to shock and provoke the orthodox by blatant flouting of their rules. In this, the impulse driving the Sufis is very close to that behind the teachings of Jesus against the Pharisees (
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
); and Jesus is revered by many Iranian Muslims (not just Sufis) for just this trait: for speaking from the heart of spirituality and avoiding getting caught up in its trappings.

With Sa’di and Hafez we begin to run out of superlatives. Both have been a huge influence on the thinking of ordinary Iranians, and phrases from their poems are common sayings. It used to be that teachers of the Persian language used Sa’di’s
Golestan
(
Garden of Roses
) to teach their pupils, getting them to memorise excerpts in order to help them absorb vocabulary, and to remember grammar and patterns of usage. His works were some of the first to be translated into European languages in the eighteenth century. One passage from the
Golestan
appears above the entrance to the United Nations in New York:

Bani-Adam a’za-ye yek-digarand
Ke dar afarinesh ze yek gawharand
Chu ‘ozvi be dard avarad ruzegar
Digar ozvha ra numanat qarar

All men are fellow-members of one body
For they were created from one essence
When fate afflicts one limb with pain
The other limbs may not stay unmoved

and continues:

Tu kaz mehnat-e digaran dighami
Nashayad ke namat nahand adami

You who are without sorrow for the suffering of others
You do not deserve to be called human

Sa’di was born in Shiraz (a city saved from Mongol destruction by the wise decision of its ruler to submit early to them), probably some time between 1213 and 1219. There are numerous references in his poems to his travels, but some of these stories are dubious. He was back in Shiraz by around 1256, and died there in 1292. He was familiar with Sufism but not openly a devotee of Sufism. His
Bustan (The Orchard)
is an extended poem of moral tales, encouraging wisdom and virtue, humility and kindness, but also common sense and pragmatism. Some of these features emerge in the following story of Omar and the beggar (Omar was the second caliph, after Abu Bakr; one of the four Righteous Caliphs of Sunni Islam):

I’ve heard there was a beggar in a narrow place,
On whose foot Omar placed his own;
The hapless pauper, knowing not who he was
(For in anger one knows not enemy from friend),
Flew at him, saying ‘Are you blind, then?’
At which the just commander, Omar, said to him:
Blind I am not, but I did slip
Unwittingly; pray, remit my sin.’
How even-handed were the great ones of the Faith
To deal thus with subordinates.
Much will be made tomorrow of those who cultivate humility,
While the heads of mighty men hang low for embarrassment;
If you’re afraid of the Day of Judgement,
Remit the slips of those afraid of you;
Oppress not your subordinates with impunity,
For over your hand lies a hand likewise.
⁴⁹

Some have thought that Sa’di’s pragmatism strayed too far in the direction of relativism and amorality, citing for example the well-known dictum from the first story in the
Golestan
that
an expedient falsehood is preferable to a mischievous truth
.
⁵⁰
But Sa’di is not the only literary figure to have made
such a suggestion—one could draw a similar moral from Ibsen’s
Wild Duck
without concluding that Ibsen was an amoral relativist. Sa’di’s views are diverse and sometimes appear contradictory, but that is a reflection of the complexities he addressed. It is right that Sa’di became known for his epigrams, because he had a gift for communicating pithy thoughts in vivid language (whether or not a less rugged age might approve of them):

Ananke pari-ruy o shekar goftarand
Hayfast ke ru-ye khub penhan darand
Fi’l-jomle neqab niz bifayede nist
Ta zesht bepushand o niku bogzarand

Those nymph-faced, sugar-speaking ones,
What a pity they should hide their fair faces.
But the veil is not worthless either;
The ugly should put it on, and the beautiful, off.
⁵¹

And:

Ya ru-ye bekonj-e khalvat avar shab o ruz
Ya atash-e ‘eshq bar kon o khaneh besuz
Masturi o ‘asheqi beham nayad rast
Gar pardeh nakhahi ke darad dideh beduz

Either choose a corner of seclusion day and night
Or light love’s fire and let the house burn.
Concealment and love do not get on well.
If you do not want the veil torn, seal up your eyes
⁵²

Hafez too was born in Shiraz, but a hundred years later, in about 1315. ‘Hafez’ is a pen-name, signifying that he had learned the Qor’an by heart; his real name was Shams al-Din Mohammad Shirazi. But little is known for sure of his life. He died around 1390, when the impact of Timur (Tamerlane) was beginning to be felt: another round of invasions, warfare and mass killings to rival that of the Mongols in ferocity and misery. Arberry believed that one of his last ghazals was prompted by these new disasters: