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ASCETICISM, ASCENSION and POETRY in the MAKHZAN AL-ASRAR of NIZAMI GANJAVI (D. 1209) Matthew R. Hoth

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ASCETICISM, ASCENSION and POETRY in the MAKHZAN AL-ASRAR of NIZAMI GANJAVI (D. 1209) Matthew R. Hoth SEEING GOD WITH BOTH EYES: ASCETICISM, ASCENSION AND POETRY IN THE MAKHZAN AL-ASRAR OF NIZAMI GANJAVI (D. 1209) Matthew R. Hotham A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies (Islamic Studies) Chapel Hill 2016 Approved By: Carl Ernst Emma Flatt Juliane Hammer Paul Losensky Omid Safi © 2016 Matthew R. Hotham ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Matthew R. Hotham: Seeing God with Both Eyes: Asceticism, Ascension and Poetry in the Makhzan al-asrar of Nizami Ganjavi (D. 1209) (Under the direction of Carl Ernst) This dissertation investigates the role of the body in medieval Sufism through an analysis of the portrayals of human, animal and prophetic bodies in the first of Nizami Ganjavi’s Masnavi poems, the Makhzan al-asrar. Though the nature of Nizami as poet, mystic, ethicist, and scientist has been a topic of debate for several decades, barely discussed in this ongoing conversation is the first poem in his Quintet, the Treasury of Mysteries. A mystico-ethical text, it was emulated in both meter and structure by a vast number of Persian poets after him. In spite of its immense popularity and importance, this poem, especially its long introductory sections, are often overlooked in contemporary scholarship. This is in part because they challenge long-held but problematic definitions of Sufism as an antinomian tendency within Islam that is primarily interested in human love as a metaphor for divine proximity. This dissertation argues that these texts can, as Scott Kugle and Shahzad Bashir have pointed out, become sources for learning about medieval Sufi habitus—as sedimented sources of religious mores, bodily comportments, social relations, history, science, and meaning. As such, this dissertation will challenge previous characterizations of medieval Sufism by investigating the importance of bodily practice in a significant medieval poem. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION…………………………………………………………………………………………………….v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 2: THE PROBLEM OF THE BODY……………………………………………………………………………..……48 CHAPTER 3: DISCIPLINING THE BODY…………………………………………………………………………………………88 CHAPTER 4: ASCENSION AS A MYSTICAL PARADIGM……………………………………………………………….155 CHAPTER 5: THE PROBLEM OF POETRY—IMAGINATION, PROPHECY AND POETRY………………..241 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………………….301 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..311 iv A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION Transliteration is a complex phenomenon. Often those who can best make use of diacritics are also conversant in the languages in question, and so do not need them. For those who do not know the languages in question, diacritics are of little use and may hinder readability. For this reason I have opted for a simplified version of the IJMES transliteration convention, marking only the ‘ayn and ’hamza. v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In 2004, Martin Lings published a brief collection of translations titled Sufi Poems. The volume includes a small sampling of verse from thirteen poets, all written in Arabic, living from the ninth through thirteenth centuries. Lings provides a brief preface and conclusion, discussing the origins of the translations and the contours of mystical union in Islam, but nowhere does he define what makes something a “Sufi poem.” This is not meant as a critique of Lings. Lings had no intention of presenting an exhaustive definition or treatment of Sufi poetry. The exclusion of Persian poets in and of itself precludes that. Rather, I use his book to draw attention to the broader issues at stake in this dissertation. For Lings, the publisher, and the potential audience of his book, there was no need to define a Sufi poem. The definition seems self-evident. As with other apparently self-evident categories (say, for example, “Islam” or “religion”), the term begins to wobble when looked at too closely. Perhaps this is why Carl Ernst notes that “defining Sufi poetry is not easy to do…and despite the massive presence of 1 poetry in Sufi circles, there is surprisingly little discussion of this question in modern studies of Sufism.”1 Though Lings is not explicit in the preface of Sufi Poems, the book nevertheless implicitly outlines the characteristics of a Sufi poem. We can discern these implicit assumptions based on Lings’ selection of poems, his choice of poets, and what he feels is most critical to recount in each poet’s brief biography. For Lings, certain poetic forms and topoi mark a poem as “Sufi,” alongside the poet’s own religious background. A few examples should suffice to highlight this implicit definition. For Lings, the mystical poem is first and foremost a “spontaneous…means of relief” from the agony of “the sense of separation from God and the return to the intrusive imperfections of this lower world.”2 Since they are spontaneous outbursts in the face of the loss of contact with the divine, mystical poems necessarily must occur in short bursts. Lings prefers to present brief poems, the longest by far is Ibn al-Farid’s “Wine Song,” at 39 lines. This is an extreme outlier, since the average poem length in the volume is about 4 lines. The poems are generally in the qita or rubiyat form. The brevity and formal simplicity of the poems selected 1 Carl W. Ernst, “What Is Early Arabic Sufi Poetry? Prolegomenon to a Translation of the Poetry of Al-Hallaj” (Duke Arabic Halqa, Duke University, 2014), http://www.unc.edu/~cernst/pdf/sufipoetry.pdf. 2 Martin Lings, Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval Anthology (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2005), viii. 2 supports Lings’ notion that these poems were spontaneous outbursts in response to attaining and then returning from a direct encounter with God.3 In terms of topic, Lings' highlights the plaintive nature of the poems, which are all in the first-person. Most are odes, declaring the poet’s love for God, often addressed directly to God, such as in this quatrain from Rabi’a al-Adawiya: Through me my spirit through and through Hast penetrated: even so A thorough friend must thorough be. So, when I speak, I speak of Thee; When silent, then I long for Thee.4 As should be expected from this early selection of poems, most lack the technical vocabulary and layer upon layer of metaphor that becomes the hallmark of Persian poetry. Nevertheless, we do see references to romantic human love as a metaphor for divine/human love, with several references to the Layla and Majnun, the quintessential star-crossed lovers. A key trope in many of the poems is that love allows one to rend or pierce the veils between lover and beloved, or God and creation, such as when Dhun Nun says: The Beloved’s welcome is the abode wherein they dwell 3 Elsewhere, Lings argues that the Sufi is one who is “conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner in the world of forms, but unlike them is also conscious of being free.” This consciousness of this past experience of freedom is what produces the longing expressed in the poems, which is distinct from ecstatic outbursts, which occur because the Sufi has “two centers of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from the other.” Ibid., 14. 4 Ibid., 5. 3 Most penetrant their resolve; by it they have travelled By it their thoughts pierce to what is hidden by Veils.5 Love is metaphorized as a fire which consumes the lover with longing for consummation. This longing is often framed as a thirst, though only in Ibn al-Farid’s poems do we see this thirst explicitly framed as thirst for wine, and passionate love compared with drunkenness. In some of the poems, the author frames him or herself as one who longs, but who shows patience or restraint in waiting for (re)union with God. Separation from the world is a key, if understated aspect of most of these poems, such as in this verse by Abu al-Abbad Al-Sayari: Patiently pleasures I shunned till they shunned me I made my soul forsake them; steadfast she stood. The soul’s for man to make her as he would: If fed, she seeks more; else, resigned she’ll be.6 There is a tendency in the selection of poems to, as Homerin noted, frame “this poetry as verse accounts of Sufi doctrine reflecting a mystic's endeavors to describe an experience of great profundity and overwhelming emotion. Yet, too often, such explanations are based on romantic notions of poetry that focus on an individual's lonely self struggle.”7 Homerin warns that such a view of mystical poetry threatens to “isolate this poetry from its larger social, 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Ibid., 48. 7 Emil Homerin, Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn Al-Farid and the Poetry of Recollection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), vii., as quoted in Ernst, “Sufi Poetry.” 4 religious, and literary context.”8 One way Lings attempts to attend to the poet’s social and religious context is via biography, specifically through attending to each poet’s spiritual lineage. For each of the thirteen poets in the collection, Lings provides a brief 1-2 paragraph introduction. Each biography contains information about the poet’s locations and dates, their key spiritual teachings, and, often, information on their institutional Sufi credentials.9 For early figures, such as Rabia al-Adawiya, the poet’s interactions with other important early mystics is sufficient. For later poets, detailing their investiture is a key aspect of the biography, such as in the case of Ibn al-Farid.10 In the case where a historical connection to institutional Sufism cannot be affirmatively made, Lings uses the poem’s content to argue for such a connection, such as with Abd al-Aziz Al-Tunisi: “it gives us the certitude that it could only have been written by a man who had found a Sufi Shaykh and had been initiated into one of the orders of Sufism.”11 8 Ibid.
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