The University of Chicago Poetry
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO POETRY AND PEDAGOGY: THE HOMILETIC VERSE OF FARID AL-DIN ʿAṬṬÂR A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS BY AUSTIN O’MALLEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2017 © Austin O’Malley 2017 All Rights Reserved For Nazafarin and Almas Table of Contents List of Tables .......................................................................................................................................vi Note on Transliteration ...................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................viii Introduction..........................................................................................................................................1 I. ʿAṭṭâr, Preacher and Poet.................................................................................................................10 ʿAṭṭâr’s Oeuvre and the Problem of Spurious Atributions..............................................12 Te Shiʿi ʿAṭṭâr.......................................................................................................................15 Te Case of the Wandering Titles.......................................................................................22 Biography and Social Milieu....................................................................................................30 Towards a Chronology of Atar’s Life and Poetic Activity ............................................32 Did ʿAṭṭâr Have a Sufi Master?...........................................................................................36 But Was He Really a Sufi? ...................................................................................................43 ʿAṭṭâr’s Reception in the Persianate World.......................................................................53 II. Talk Terapy: Audience, Homiletics, Persona ............................................................................57 Textual Community and the “Request from Friends” ........................................................58 Of Drugs and Discourse............................................................................................................68 ʿAṭṭâr’s Terapeutic Verse ....................................................................................................69 Saints’ Words and the Human Heart.................................................................................79 Speaker and Authority ..............................................................................................................88 Miraculous Feats and Saintly Speech.................................................................................89 Homiletic Sincerity and Poetic Persona.............................................................................95 Inspiration and Authenticity.............................................................................................109 III. Preaching Trough Text ................................................................................................................118 Homiletic Masnavi̱ s and the Frame-Tale Structure ..........................................................120 Te Performance of Preaching...........................................................................................128 Narrating the Hoopoe’s Homilies.........................................................................................140 Te Feather of the Simorgh................................................................................................140 Te Hoopoe on the Pulpit ...................................................................................................148 Te Seven Valleys and Effacement in the Simorgh .......................................................160 Framing the Anecdotes ...........................................................................................................171 Framing the Textual Encounter ............................................................................................177 Reading and Listening........................................................................................................178 Slippage of Speaker and Address......................................................................................185 Te Readers in the Text.......................................................................................................194 IV. Sermons, Stories, and the Sufi Ethos ..........................................................................................204 Rhythm of a Masnavi̱ ...............................................................................................................207 iv King Parables and the Divine-Human Relationship ........................................................211 Death and Mortality.................................................................................................................226 Spiritual Manliness...................................................................................................................242 V. Reading Allegory as Symbolic Ascent........................................................................................260 Te Adept’s Ascent ..................................................................................................................262 Saintly Ascent and the Inward Turn................................................................................270 Te Reader’s Ascent.................................................................................................................274 ʿAṭṭâr’s Apologia: Vision, Symbol, and Language .......................................................276 Textual Encounter as Ritual Retreat ................................................................................282 Walking the Path.................................................................................................................288 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................295 Bibliography .....................................................................................................................................299 v List of Tables Table 1: Significant Works Atributed to ʿAṭṭâr...................................................................................28 Table 2: Te Birds’ Objections...............................................................................................................151 Table 3: Te Birds’ Qestions ................................................................................................................159 Table 4: Te Adept’s Itinerary and the Guide’s Discourses..............................................................266 vi Note on Transliteration In order to allow for the accurate, accessible, and consistent rendering of Persian and Arabic into Latin script, I have developed a system of transliteration based in large part on that of Encyclopaedia Iranica. My major concern, afer accuracy, has been readability and accessibil- ity for non-Persophone readers, so I default to Anglicized versions of Perso-Arabic names and technical terms when they are sufficiently well known. In the name of accessibility, I also use digraphs from American English (e.g. “ch,” “sh”) instead more esoteric diacritics to signify Per- sian consonants whenever possible, and I employ a vowel system that approximates the sounds of spoken Persian and distinguishes between long and short vowels using only a single circum- flex: a/â, o/u, e/i. For the most part, I employ this Persian-style transliteration scheme through- out the dissertation, even when rendering Arabic titles of Persian books into Latin script. When transliterating directly from a quoted Arabic source, however, or referring to major au- thors who wrote primarily or exclusively in Arabic (e.g. Ibn al-Jawzī), I rely on a version of the Arabic transliteration system used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies; the difference between the two systems lies mainly in the vowels. For the sake of clarity, I general- ly drop the definite article “al-” before a nisba that is used as a stand-alone proper name (e.g. Qshayrī). Te details of these two systems (including their handling of the construct state, compounds, diphthongs, etc.) should be readily recognizable to those who are familiar with Persian and Arabic. vii Acknowledgments Tis project would not have come to fruition without the support, encouragement, and guidance of many people. Te dissertation commitee—consisting of Franklin Lewis, Tibaut d’Hubert, and Michael Sells—went well beyond the call of duty with their invaluable guidance and mentorship. I also owe an immense debt to Saeed Yousef, who patiently taught me Persian language and metrics over the past decade. In 2015-16, while several critical sections of the dis- sertation were percolating, I was a fellow at the Martin Marty Center; I benefited not only from the Marty Center’s material support, but also the atmosphere of intellectual exchange, and in particular the incisive comments of Alexandra Zirkle and Madeleine Elfenbein. Te dissertation bears the traces of many of my colleagues who generously engaged my work, including Ed-