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Mawlānā Rūmī, the Early Mevlevis and the Gendered Gaze: Prolegomenon to an Analysis of Rūmī’s View of Women Franklin Lewis  A work of fiction took the Iranian reading public by storm in 2005. Though not the first novel to become wildly popular in Iran, this was historical, or purportedly historical fiction – not a particularly common or popular genre in Persian literature or Iranian cinema. This work, Lady Kīmiyā: A Tale from the Seraglio of Rūmī (Kīmiyā Khātūn: Dāstānī az shabistān-i Mawlānā),1 was written by Saideh Ghods (Sa‘īda Quds, b. 1951), a first-time author at the age of 53. She claims the book to be based upon extensive research, though given the paper-thin and flimsy nature of the historical record, this seems more than a trifle hyperbolic, indicative perhaps of an urge to market the book or make it seem more urgent with its supposed verisimilitude. Indeed, the author’s somewhat imperfectly Englished website confesses the truth: ‘Even though excruciating effort has been put into telling the story exactly as it happened, scarcity of resources has made this work [the] truest imaginary image of Kimya Khatoon’s life.’2 Indeed, the documentary evidence contemporaneous with Kīmiyā’s lifetime can fit on a single page, in about six sentences, most of which do not contribute to a coherent narrative, and allude to her only glancingly. There does seem to be a story there, but the contours of any plot cannot be clearly outlined, other than to say that it involves Kīmiyā (d. 1246 or 1248), the famous Shams al-Dīn Tabrīzī (d. after 1248),ʽ Alā al-Dīn (d.c. 1262), and the latter’s renowned father, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273). Two other sources, written down perhaps three generations later, do provide sketchy memes

1 Saideh Ghods, Lady Kīmiyā: A Tale from the Seraglio of Rūmī (Kīmiyā Khātūn: Dāstānī az shabistān-i Mawlānā), Tehran: Nashr-i Chashma 1383 A.Hsh./2004; this 283-page novel had been reprinted thirteen times by 1386 A.Hsh./2007 and by 2015 was in its 29th printing. 2 See Saideh Ghods, ‘Kimya Khatun – A Story from Rumi’s Hiram’ (available at http:// www.saidehghods.com/kimya-khatun), accessed 13 May 2010. The website was somewhat more oriented to the book as of November 2012, but still focused largely on Ghods as ‘author and humanitarian’. See: http://www.saidehghods.com.

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or data points but give tantalizingly little information about her, much of it hagiographical in intent, with all the typological and symbolic features and polemics in which this genre engages. In the sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Kīmiyā is mentioned only in passing, as an inci- dental, one-dimensional character of interest solely because she figures in some anecdotal stories about the disappearance of Shams-i Tabrīzī from Rūmī’s life, and plays a quasi-explanatory role in the mythology surround- ing it. But the ‘truest’ story Ghods’ novel purports to tell about Kīmiyā does not even conform to these few premodern reports with respect to several of its major premises. Although Annemarie Schimmel took an interest in the women in Rūmī’s life, and made the first attempts at cataloguing theMathnawī ’s concept of Woman and women,3 this is not a topic that has been often, or systematically, engaged. In the scholarly literature about Rūmī, there are only scattered references to Kīmiyā (Furūzānfar, Gölpınarlı, Schimmel, Zarrīnkūb, Şefik Can, and my ownRūmī: Past and Present), though individual women in Rūmī’s life are briefly discussed in this biographical and exegetical literature. However, there is no sustained or comprehensive analytical discussion of the general role and status of women in the circle of Rūmī and his immediate disciples; such a study would help to contextualize the symbolic, semiotic, and narratological functions that Kīmiyā fulfils in the early sources that mention her: namely, her husband’s quasi-diary, and two somewhat later hagiographies.4 The few works that devote any attention to describing the women of Mawlānā Rūmī’s household do so mostly without analysis: there is a non-scholarly work written by a female devotee of a Mevlevi circle in Cali fornia, which lists the names and a biodatum or two about the women in the proto-Mevlevi circle;5 and a 2006 monograph written in Persian by an Iranian scholar, Woman as Revealed in the Works of Mawlawī Rūmī, which focuses rather on pertinent passages in Rūmī’s poems and in the hagio graphical literature about him to illustrate his literary orientation toward 3 See Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalāloddin Rumi (London: Fine Books 1978; rev. ed., Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1991), p. 32. Schimmel’s My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam, trans. (from German) Susan Ray (New York: Continuum 1997) touches upon many passages in the Mathnawī that are relevant to Rūmī’s view of women. 4 The information about women in our sources is far too sparse, and does not provide the kind of basis for conclusions as does the anthropological fieldwork found in studies such as Kelly Pemberton, Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India (South Carolina Press 2010), or Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Glob- al Sufi Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2003). 5 Shakina Reinhertz, Women Called to the Path of Rūmī: The Way of the Whirling Der- vish (Phoenix: Hohm Press 2001), pp. 15–24.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 45 women.6 One 2008 paper in English in an academic journal tries to remedy this situation somewhat, but in summarizing what is known about the women in Mawlānā Rūmī’s family it becomes indiscriminately mired in the pre-critical views of the hagiographical tradition.7 There is also one study of the bawdy tales of the Mathnawī through a Lacanian lens that attempts to establish a theoretical hermeneutics of eroticism and sexual symbols, which also touches glancingly on the notion of women as a conceptual category, and briefly mentions the historical women in Rūmī’s life, but not in a particularly clarifying manner for the point at hand.8 Finally, a 2013 article in the Mawlana Rumi Review provides a historical sketch of women and their involvement in the Mevlevi lineage up through the eighteenth century.9 Hence, a space existed, and a need was felt, for an imaginative cast- ing (or recasting) of the relationships between Rūmī, Shams, and the women in their circle through a fictional female gaze.10 This is the historical

6 Zulaykhā Thaqafī, Tajallī-yi zan dar āthār-i Mawlawī (Tehran: Tarfand 1385 A.Hsh./2006). An earlier book, Maḥmūd Rūḥ al-Amīnī, Farhang va zabān-i guftugū bi-rivāyat-i tamthīlhā-yi Mathnawī-yi Mawlawī-yi Balkhī (Tehran: Āgah 1381 A.Hsh./2002), pp. 149–63, briefly describes the depiction of marital relations, but again without much analysis. 7 Ashk Dahlén, ‘Female Sufi Saints and Disciples: Women in the Life of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’, Orientalia Suecana 57 (2008), pp. 46–62. Other recent scholarly works on the Mevlevi tradition do not treat, except in passing, the question of women, e.g. Alberto Fabio Ambrosio, Vie d’un derviche tourner: doctrine et rituels du soufisme au XVIIe siècle (Paris: CNRS Editions 2010) and Alberto Fabio Ambrosio, Ève Feuillebois, and Thierry Zarcone, Les derviches tourneurs: doctrine, histoire et pratiques (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf 2006). 8 Mahdi Tourage, Rūmī and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism (Boston and Leiden: E. J. Brill 2007). 9 Hülya Küçük traces the history of women in the Mevlevi lineage in her ‘Female Sub- stitutes and Shaykhs in the History of Sufism: The Case of the Mawlawiyya Sufi Order from its Early Phase to the Eighteenth Century’, Mawlana Rumi Review IV (2013), pp. 106–31. 10 Other fiction writers, all women, who have tried their hand at historical fiction based on Rūmī include Nahal Tajadod, who tells the saintly version of his life story from the perspective of Shams al-Dīn, Husām al-Dīn, and Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn in her Roumi le brûlé (Paris: Lattès 2004); translated into English as Rumi: The Fire of Love, trans. R. Bononno (New York and London: Overlook Duckworth 2011). Curiously, at about the same time as Tajadod in French, and Ghods in Persian, Muriel Maufroy wrote a novel in English also focused like Ghods’ book on Kīmiyā, called Rumi’s Daughter (London: Rider 2004), in which Kīmiyā is imagined to be from an Orthodox Chris- tian family. Maufroy’s book was translated into Spanish (by Antoni Cutandi in 2006) and then into Persian (by Ru’yā Munajjim in 2007). More recently, Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love (New York: Penguin 2010) weaves the story of a Jewish woman in Massachussetts who reads a book about Shams and corresponds with the author; on this, see the review by Marcia Hermansen in the pages of Mawlana Rumi Review V (2014), pp. 204–07, which draws a thread between the perspectives of Tajadod and

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perspective that Saideh Ghods tries to imagine in Kīmiyā Khātūn, through a socially embedded group of people in Rūmī’s circle who are not argumen- tatively looking on things with a feminist gaze, but who are looking from a woman’s point of view, through a story that is at least 90 per cent fictional, despite its claims of having been based on research.11 The book seems to have been something of a lark or a thought experiment for its author, who has published no other book before or since. In fact, though Saideh Ghods’ website does have a page dedicated to the novel, the website foregrounds her charitable work, providing more information about her philanthropic health care foundation named MAHAK, the noble aim of which is to promote cancer treatment and access to healthcare for the poor.12 But the novel kept rapidly selling out, and by 2015 (1394 A.Hsh.) it had gone through at least twenty-nine printings.13 Since print runs for a typical novel in Iran produce about 3,000 to 5,000 copies, it is quite likely, as the (US) Amazon page for the book claims, that it has sold more than 80,000 copies), which puts it among the best-selling novels in Iranian publishing history.14 Kīm- iyā Khātūn was also translated into Turkish in 2007,15 and more recently

Shafak as female émigrée writers from the Middle East. More recently, Holly Payne has also tried to capitalize on this theme, with a fiction about Rumi and a different girl (an orphan who makes rosewater) in her Damascena: The Tale of Roses and Rumi (Sausalito, Calif.: Skywriter Books 2014), which was translated into Hungarian in 2015 by Vera Bánki and Anna Szabó. 11 The website http://www.saidehghods.com/kimya-khatun claims ‘For the first time in written literature, Kimya’s real story has been unearthed and brought into the attention of the (sic) Rumi’s scholars and the general public alike.’ 12 Ghods serves on the director’s board of MAHAK, which aims to promote cancer treatment and access to healthcare for the poor. She became a cancer-care activist when her own two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with cancer. See the English version of the MAHAK website (available at http://mahak-charity.org/main/index.php/ en/home-en), accessed 28 November 2012. 13 At least four by 2006, followed by a 13th printing by 2007, a 17th by 2008, a 19th by 2009, a 25th by 2011, and a 29th printing by 2015. Azadeh Moaveni took notice of the commotion in her article, ‘Seeking Signs of Literary Life in Iran’, New York Times, 27 May 2007 (available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/ Moaveni-t.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all), accessed 28 November 2012. 14 It is difficult to establish cumulative sales of individual books, and therefore also comparative statistics for novels published in Iran. There is no established industry stand- ard for measuring this, according to ʽAlī-Riḍā Ramaḍānī, director of Nashr-i Markaz Publications in Tehran (personal communication to Zuyā Pirzād, 27 November 2012), and statistics of sales totals are generally based upon the random reports of about ten bookstores. The author’s information about Sa‘īda Quds on Amazon.com (https:// www.amazon.com/Kimya-Khatun-Rumis-Daughter-Philips/dp/9642667606/ ref=tmm_hrd_title_0), accessed 28 November 2012, which is apparently provided by the author, pegs sales ‘in excess of 80,000’, which seems quite credible. 15 Translated into Turkish as Mevlānā Celaleddin-i Rūmī’nin hareminden kimya hatun,

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 47 into English, as Kimya Khatun: The Mystic and the Dove.16 It has also been turned into an unpublished screenplay (with a working title of Rūmī’s Kīm- iyā) by the founding figure of Iranian new wave cinema, Dariush Mehr- jui (Dāryūsh Mihrjū’ī); he was angling for Golshifteh Farahani (Gulshīfta Farāhānī) to play the role of Kīmiyā, though the project funding remains as yet unsecured.17 Surveys taken in the United States, Canada, and Britain suggest that men account for only about one in five readers of fiction.18 I have yet to read any serious study of the gender demographics of Iranian fiction-reading equivalent to Jacqueline Pearson’s Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation,19 or Belinda Jack’s The Woman Reader,20 though I am confident we can safely dismiss the picture that inadvertently emerges from Azar Nafisi’sReading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books21 as being

trans. Veysel Basçi (Istanbul: Sonsuz Kitap Yayınlari 2007). This translation came out before the prominent Turkish novelist Elif Shafak wrote her own fictional treatment of the historical setting of Mawlānā/Mevlana entitled Aşk (Istanbul: Doğan 2009); translated into English by the author as Forty Rules of Love (New York: Viking 2010). 16 Translated by Sara Phillips and published by an Anglo-Iranian company in London called Candle and Fog Ltd. in 2011. The translation is entitledKimya Khatun: The Mystic and the Dove, somewhat divergent from Ghods’ Persian title (literally ‘Kimi- ya Khatun: A Tale from Mowlana’s Women’s Quarters’). Meanwhile, the title ‘Rumi’s Daughter’ was already taken by Muriel Maufroy. 17 Doniphan Blair, ‘Middle East Epic Emerges by the Bay: Producer’s Interview’, Cine- Source, 30 October 2012 (available at http://cinesourcemagazine.com/index.php?/site/ comments/middle_eastern_epic_emerges_by_the_bay), accessed 28 November 2012. The screenplay is by Dāryūsh Mihrjū’ī in Persian, translated into English by Dor- na Khazeni, with locations scouted out near Mumbai, India. I provided, at Mihrjū’ī’s request after his visit to Chicago, translations of several quatrains by Mawlānā for the script, though I note that it now seems as if they hope to use Coleman Barks’ English versions (and influence) as part of their fundraising efforts. The producer, currently raising money for the film, is Marjaneh Moghimi. 18 See Eric Weimer, ‘Why Women Read More Than Men’, National Public Radio, 5 Sept ember 2007 (available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId= 14175229), accessed 13 May 2010. He reports on an Associated Press/Ipsos survey that found, according to Weimer, that ‘women read more than men in all categories except for history and biography’. The gender gap is widest with respect to fiction: ‘Men account for only 20 per cent of the fiction market’, according to surveys con- ducted in the United States, Canada, and Britain. For a sociological analysis of this gender gap, see Steven J. Tepper, ‘Fiction Reading in America: Explaining the Gender Gap’, Poetics 27 (2000), pp. 255–75. See also Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins, ‘The Books That Move Men’, Guardian, 5 April 2006 (available at http://www.guardian. co.uk/world/2006/apr/06/gender.books), accessed 13 May 2010, which polled men and women for the specific novels that were influential to them. 19 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005). 20 Belinda Jack, The Woman Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press 2012). 21 Azar Nafisi,Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House 2003).

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unrepresentative of the general economics of fiction reading and writing in Iran. Not only do Iranian women read fiction, perhaps in greater pro- portions than men, but several novels written by women stand out among the acknowledged bestsellers of Iranian publishing history: Simin Danesh- var’s Savushun (1969),22 Fattāna Hajj Sayyid-Javādī’s Bāmdād-i khumār (The Morning After, 1998), Zoya Pirzad’s Chirāgh-hā rā man khāmūsh mīkunam (2002),23 which had sold 130,000 copies in Persian by its 44th printing in 2012; and now Ghods’ Kīmiyā Khātūn (2005). While I have no statistical evidence about the gendered specifics of the readership that has made the fictional tale of Kīmiyā – or any other Persian-language novel about a female protagonist – a popular success, my hunch from anecdotal observa- tion (in social fora, such as goodreads.com, for example)24 is that women may well form a majority of this readership.25 But regardless of the precise gender demographics of reading in Iran, Kīmiyā Khātūn reverses the male-gendered gaze, the dominant vantage point from which the Sufi tradition generally – and the circle of Rūmī’s teachers specifically – view the world, religion and the spiritual path; (I refer here to Sulṭān al-ʽulamā’ Bahā al-Dīn Valad, Burhān al-Dīn Muḥaq- qiq-i Tirmidhī, and Shams al-Dīn-i Tabrīzī, as well as Rūmī himself and his early community of followers and expounders in Konya, represented by his son Sulṭān Valad, and the two hagiographers, Sipahsālār and Aflākī). As such, Ghods’ fictional character Kīmiyā Khātūn returns a regendered gaze that looks backs from the vantage point of a critique, viewing with impli cit accusation an Iranian and Sufi patriarchy that is complicit in thwarting the realization of Kīmiyā’s desires, and beyond that in creating systemic inequality for women. It perhaps recalls, to an extent, Virginia Woolf’s

22 Translated into English as Savushun: A Novel of Modern Iran, trans. Mohammad Ghanoonparvar (Washington, DC: Mage 1991); and again as Persian Requiem, trans. Roxanne Zand (London: Georges Brazillier 1992). The Mage website claims that Savushun has sold over half a million copies. Available at http://www.mage.com/ fiction/savushun.html), accessed 16 December 2012. 23 Translated by Franklin Lewis into English under the published title of Things We Left Unsaid (Oxford: Oneworld 2012), although my own original translation of the title was ‘I’ll Get the Lights’. 24 See the Good Reads page in Persian for Kīmiyā Khātūn: https://www.goodreads.com/ book/show/300953, accessed 16 December 2012. 25 Nahid Mozaffari has suggested that this may be due in part to the influence of women’s reading circles in Iran, as well as Sufi study circles (personal communication, 29 November 2012). It should be noted that a large number of modern Persian fiction works written by men, beginning in the 1920s, have focused on female protagonists as representatives of the body politic of Iran. See Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2002), pp. 68–73.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 49 thought experiment about Judith, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, although the creative outlets for the fictional Kīmiyā are not time and a room in which to write, but love and independent self-determination regarding her affections. The novel gently calls into question the behaviour of an icon – perhaps the icon – of Persian spirituality: Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. He is often seen and represented as an exponent of an expansive and ecumenical Iranian form of Islamic mysticism and personal relation to the divine, as opposed to a more narrow, doctrinal, and restrictive set of clerical concerns identified with the theological state.26 The basic plot of ‘Kīmiyā Khātūn, the novel’ concerns a young girl in the extended family of Rūmī, purportedly his step-daughter through his second wife, Kirrā Khātūn. The novel is divided into two parts, the first wholly imagined, in which the protagonist is not greatly discontented. Kīm- iyā somewhat fancies ʽAlā’ al-Dīn, Rūmī’s older son from his first marriage to Gawhar Khātūn, and he seems to return her affection. After the arrival of Shams in Konya, Shams hankers for Kīmiyā, and Rūmī’s devotion to Shams leads him to capitulate to Shams’ concupiscent interest in Kīmiyā, and he marries her off to him, even though Shams is old enough to be her father. It is thus a Laylī and Majnūn-like tale of patriarchal oppression, a classic premodern love triangle in which the older man gets his way over the woman he desires and the younger man who desires her. In this iteration of the triangle, the younger man, ʽAlā’ al-Dīn, is constitutionally unable to challenge his older rival, Shams, but nevertheless succeeds in rousing his jealousy, which Shams then takes out in a fit of rage on Kīmiyā, losing all affection for her and leading her from resigned and cultivated contentment to death. The historical evidence for Kīmiyā’s life is so slight (much slighter than that for Socrates, whose very existence was once called into question) as to tempt us to consider her to be a symbolic foil, a character with a Haw- thorne-esque and conveniently allegorical name, ‘Lady Alchemy’. Ghods suggests that her version of events is based on research she did ‘unearth- ing Kīmiyā’s long-forgotten young body from amidst the piles of worn-out historical documents that had languished for centuries’ (bīrūn kishīdan-i paykar-i javān va farāmūsh shuda-yi Kīmiyā Khātūn az lā-bi-lā-yi awrāq-i

26 For a retrospective view on how Rūmī was received and made into a cultural icon, see Franklin Lewis, ‘Insān va shamāyil-ash: Dar justujū-yi chihra-yi tārīkhī-yi Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’, Īrān-nāma 24/1 (2008), pp. 1–22; and also Franklin Lewis, ‘Reflec- ties naar aanleiding van het Rumi-jaar 2007’, in Tree voor tree naar Gods troon: Essays over Het leven en werk van Mowlānā Jalāl al-Din Rumi, ed. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Leidschendam: Uitgeverij Quist 2010), pp. 127–55.

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pūsīda va farāmūsh-shuda-yi tārīkh az pas-i qurūn va a‘ṣār), which allowed her to ‘iron out [the] discrepancies that currently exist in the story’ based on ‘available documents’ (bi-liḥāẓ-i kambūd va tiḍād-i manābi‘ va mutūn). This research was supposedly carried out in the National Library in Iran and ‘Qanj Bakhsh in Islamabad, Pakistan’,27 where there are no known unpublished documents pertaining to the historical Shams-i Tabrīzī or Kīmiyā Khātūn; nor are there any in the shrine/tomb dedicated to Shams al-Dīn Tabrīzī in Multan, Pakistan – a shrine that has absolutely no known historical association with Shams, and where Shams is most unlikely to be buried (he has other burial sites at Konya in Turkey, and at Khuy and Tabrīz in Iran!).28 The jealousy and anger of Shams toward Kīmiyā, though not the beating, can find interpretive support, depending on how one con- strues the sketchy allusions in the six scattered and largely indecipherable mentions of Kīmiyā by Shams al-Dīn himself. These occur in the disjecta membra of the Muvaḥḥid edition of Shams’ Discourses (Maqālāt), and in three small anecdotes in two fourteenth-century hagiographical sources: first, Shams al-Dīn Aflākī’s The Acts of the Gnostics (Manāqib al-ʽārifīn), compiled between 718/1318 and 754/1353, a record of oral lore circulating in Konya between forty and eighty years after Rūmī’s death, and collected without comment about the reported anecdotes’ authenticity; and second, Sipahsālār’s Risāla, a treatise about the early Mevlevis, dating to between 720/1320 and 739/1338, though the later sections may have been completed by a second hand. Sipahsālār, who claims to have served as a disciple in Rūmī’s circle for forty years, is generally more discriminating in his report- age than Aflākī, though both pertain to hagiographical-biographical genres of Perso-Arabic literature (known as maqāmāt or manāqib), and purport to present not so much earthly history as spiritual feats – the symbolic inter- vention in the phenomenal world of saints connected to the invisible world. I have described the problematics in reading these sources for historical detail elsewhere.29 For the present purpose of reconstructing a history of Rūmī’s life and circle, and understanding his attitude toward the role of women, we may only add that the sources of reports are varied and include

27 Ghods, Kimya Khatun: The Mystic and the Dove, trans. Phillips, pp. 4–5 (acknowledg- ments). The National Library in Iran is Sāzimān-i Asnād va Kitābkhāna-yi Millī-yi Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī-yi Īrān; see the National Library website (available at http://www. nlai.ir), accessed 12 December 2012. By ‘Qanj Bakhsh’, evidently the Ganj Bakhsh Library at the Iran-Pakistan Institute of Persian Studies (IPIPS) is intended. The Per- sian text given here comes from Ghods, Kīmiyā Khātūn, 7th ed. (Tehran: Chishma 1385 A.Hsh./2006), p. 7 (‘Sipās’). 28 See Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000; rev. ed. 2008), pp. 187–91, 198–200. Shams is most probably buried in Khuy. 29 Ibid., especially ch. 6 (‘The Mythological Rumi’), pp. 242–68.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 51 anecdotes attributed to female members of the extended household; while the attributions are often dubious, some reports could well have been trans- mitted largely in female circles for two or three generations before being recorded by Aflākī or Sipahsālār. In this regard it is worth noting the death dates of two of the significant female figures in this circle – Kirrā Khātūn, Rūmī’s second wife, in 691/1292; and Malika Khātūn, Rūmī’s daughter by Kirrā Khātūn in 705/1306, who may have been in a position to provide first- hand family lore.30 While these reports must be used very judiciously, a systematic study of them might allow us to make some interesting obser- vations and intimations, which although not necessarily historical, are nevertheless less novelistic and imaginal than the portrait that Ghods’ Kīmiyā Khātūn presents. I am belabouring the point about the source material for the novel here in part because the popular discourse on Mawlānā Rūmī seems largely resistant to scholarly correction; even among scholars, information that has been disproved or discounted – such as Rūmī’s father’s supposed fame in Balkh – continues to pass as historical fact. This is unfor- tunately true of one article that attempts to describe some of the women of Rūmī’s household, credulously and inexplicably using the fictional account of Saideh Ghods as evidence for the lives of Kīmiyā and Shams!31

A Survey of Primary Sources on Women in Rūmī’s Life and Works Aflākī relates one anecdote about a certain Kīmiyā (described below) that is attributed to the authority of Rūmī’s son Sulṭān Valad, who was about 20 years of age when Shams left Konya for good. Although this anecdote is attributed to Sulṭān Valad, Sulṭān Valad himself makes no mention of it in his verse history of Rūmī, Shams, and his father’s circle – entitled the Valad nāma or Ibtidā-nāma, written in 1291 – which ought to raise our suspi- cion about the accuracy of this attribution.32 The chain of narration isnad( )

30 The date for Kirrā Khātūn comes from her sarcophagus at the shrine in Konya, as reported by Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Melvânâ’dan sonra Mevlevîlik (Istanbul: Inkılap Kitabevi 1953; 2nd ed. 1983), citing the Persian translation, Mawlavīyya baʿd az Mawlānā, trans. Tawfīq Subḥānī (Tehran: Kayhān 1988), pp. 429–30. There the date on the sarcophagus for Malika Khātūn is given as 18 Shaʿbān 703 (26 March 1304), but Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı gives the date as 705/1306 in his Mevlâna Celâleddin: hayatı, felsefesi, eserleri, eserlerinden seçmeler (Istanbul: Inkılap 1951; rev. ed. 1985); translated into Persian as Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn: Zindagānī, falsafa, āthār va guzīda-ī az ānhā, trans. Tawfīq Subḥānī (Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ʿUlūm-i Insānī va Muṭāliʿāt-i Far- hangī 1375 A.Hsh./1996), p. 238. 31 See Dahlén, ‘Female Sufi Saints and Disciples’. 32 Sulṭān Valad, [Ibtidā-nāma] Mathnawī-yi Valadī, inshā’-i Bahā’ al-Dīn b. Mawlānā

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linking the anecdote to Sulṭān Valad may have been provided by Aflākī or ‘remembered’ by the individuals reporting it to him, in order to invest the story with greater authority; however, since the purported authority (Sulṭān Valad) did not choose to narrate this in his own voice in his book- length presentation of the events of Shams and Rūmī, a hermeneutic of sus- picion seems warranted. The anecdote is likely to have come into existence sometime after 1291, when Sulṭān Valad versified the history of his father, and quite possibly after Sulṭān Valad’s death, when he would not have been able to refute or confirm it. The anecdote itself, as recorded by Aflākī, indicates only that Shams al-Dīn Tabrīzī ‘had a wife named Kīmiyā’, who one day leaves for the gar- dens of Marām (a locale outside Konya) after becoming angry with Shams. Mawlānā Rūmī instructs the women of his ‘madrasa’ (which functioned more like a Khānaqāh) to go and find Kīmiyā and coax her to return to her husband’s side, because Shams is greatly attached to her. Rūmī thereupon enters the enclosure or pavilion (khargāh) where Shams is quartered, and sees that, lo and behold, Kīmiyā is with him, wearing the same clothes she was last seen in before she disappeared, though the women dispatched to fetch her had not yet set off for Marām (despite the hagiographical impli- cations, this hardly seems to qualify as even a minor miracle). Since Rūmī espies Shams touching and fondling her (dast bāzī mīkunad), Rūmī dis- creetly exits the building and paces around the madrasa to allow them time to fulfil their desires and engage in lovemaking dar( madrasa ṭavāfī mīkard tā īshān dar dhawq va mulāʽiba-yi khwud mashghūl bāshand). However, a bit later Shams calls Rūmī to come in, who now finds there is no one there but Shams. Rūmī asks him what happened to Kīmiyā, and Shams answers that God manifests himself to Shams in whatever form Shams desires, and at that moment He had just taken on the form of Kīmiyā /alchemy (bi- ṣūrat-i kīmiyā āmada būd u muṣavvar shuda). Although Kīmiyā and Shams figure prominently in the narrative, the purpose of this anecdote is not actually to provide biographical information about Kīmiyā (who proves at the end not to have been Kīmīyā at all, but rather an act of Shams’ divine alchemy). The whole episode functions rather as a parable or analogy, which provides information (a kind of saintly ḥadīth) about the behaviour of Mawlānā and the spiritual station of Shams, perhaps also including some commentary about Rūmī’s attitude toward

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn-i Balkhī, mashhūr bi Mawlavī, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humā’ī (Tehran: Iqbāl 1316 A.Hsh./1937); for the passage about Shams’ return to Kon- ya and final disappearance, see pp. 42–61.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 53 sexuality. In fact, the anecdote constitutes the bulk of Sulṭān Valad’s putative memory of Rūmī’s response to a question once posed by some Sufis about the meaning of the Arabic words of the great Sufi saint Bāyazīd: ‘I saw my Lord in the face of a beardless youth’ (ra’aytu rabbī fī ṣūrati amrada).33 Here we may affirm what gender studies has been illustrating in recent decades: that studies of the representation of women and the performance of fem ininity as embedded in cultural texts and societal roles should not attempt in isolation to recover a full picture of what it meant at any given cultural historical moment to be a woman. Gender operates on a continuum that must be contextualized by establishing normative roles or constructs of ideal masculinity and ideal femininity, and what lies between these poles. This particular anecdote therefore also begs an investigation into Rūmī’s statements about homoeroticism, the practice of witnessing beauty in the faces and bodies of young boys (shāhid-bāzī), and homosexuality – but that is for another study.34 In our anecdote, Rūmī chooses to answer the question about Bāyazīd and the contemplation of beautiful boys by making a comparison with Shams and Kīmiyā and their imagined love-play. He first postulates that Bāyazīd’s words mean one of two things: either he saw God in the face of a prepubescent boy, or God actually projected Himself into the image of the beautiful boy before Bāyazīd (khwud-i khudā pīsh-i ū bi-ṣurat-i amrad muṣavvar mīshud).35 Because Kīmiyā was manifested as the outward form of Shams’ desire, Bāyazīd’s statement must likewise mean that God (ḥaqq) appeared before him (Bāyazīd) in the guise of an amrad. Thus, theimplicit antinomian purport of this story is that there are no sanctions about homo- or hetero-normativity in contemplating the forms of human beauty – whether in a youthful male beauty or a female matrimonial beauty – as long as the amorous observer is a saint and the beloved is God. The imagined anecdote about Kīmiyā would seem to indicate this (though the change from homoerotic to heterosexual desire may be theologically and/or doctrinally significant, demonstrating the early Mevlevi community’s understanding of Rūmī’s attitude), and it is also reinforced by another story about wine drinking in the same cluster of anecdotes (which seeks to defend Shams

33 See the chapter on Shams al-Dīn Tabrīzī in Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad-i Aflākī,Manā - qib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi 1959), vol. 2, anecdote 39, pp. 637–38; also found in The Feats of the Knowers of God (Manāqeb al-‘arefīn), trans. (from Persian) John O’Kane (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill 2002), pp. 439–40. 34 See Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, pp. 320–24. 35 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 2, p. 637.

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al-Dīn from a real accusation of drinking).36 Aflākī’s anecdote concludes that as it was with Shams and Kīmiyā, so it was with Bāyazīd.37 Interestingly, this cluster of anecdotes in Aflākī’s hagiography includes several about miracles, and about exaggerated or heroic sexuality. Two stories later, Shams is reputedly relating (again, according to Sulṭān Val- ad’s authority) about the qualities of virtuous and chaste women (ṣifat-i zanān-i nīk va ʽiffat-i īshān). He asserts, in a description that seems more suggestive of a Shiva lingam than a scenario we would visualize in an Is- lamic context, that if a pious woman’s place were higher than the Throne of God (ʽarsh), ‘if her gaze were by hazard to alight on the lower world (nāgāh naẓarī bi-dunyā uftad) and she saw there an erect phallus on the surface of the earth (dar rū-yi zamīn qaḍībī rā bar khāsta bīnad), she would cast herself madly down upon the phallus (dīvānavār khwud rā partāv kunad va bar sar-i qaḍīb uftad), because in their creed there is nothing higher than that (az ānka dar madhhab-i īshān bālātar az ān chīzī nīst)’!38 Shams goes on, according to this phallophilic report, to mention the story of Shaykh ‘Alī Ḥarīrī of Damascus,39 a Sufi of spiritual rank (ṣāhib-qadam), whose gaze had a miraculous effect on people when he performedsamā ʽ. The son of a caliph came to watch him and became his disciple, which angered the caliph enough to want to kill the shaykh; but the gaze of the shaykh on the caliph converted him as well, leading to the caliph’s wife wanting to visit 36 Ibid., anecdote 41, pp. 639–40. 37 Whether it is possible that Sulṭān Valad would have told an account of this nature is difficult to say. Aflākī heard that it was attributed to ṭSul ān Valad, apparently some years after the latter’s death in 1312 (since Aflākī only began his work of compiling anecdotes in 1318). In any case, there are many such tales of dreams and miracles, as well as hearsay evidence about members of Rūmī’s extended household (one is tempt- ed to call them by the old appellation ‘wives’ tales’, although they are not attributed only to the women of the early Mevlevi community). These tales are repeated verba- tim without judgment as to their veracity by Aflākī, who was as much a collector of folklore as of historical anecdote; as such, he left us with something of a mixture of legend, fable, and rumor with a kernel of history, in his efforts to construct a genuine biography of Mawlānā the man. 38 Ibid., anecdote 42, pp. 640–41. 39 Perhaps this is Shaykh Muḥammad-‘Alī al-Ḥarīrī (d. 645/1248), head of an antinomian Sufi lodge (zāwiya) in Damascus, whose followers adopted a strange mode of dress and became known as the Ḥarīrīya movement. See Daphna Ephrat and Hatim Ma- hamid, ‘The Creation of Sufi Spheres in Medieval Damascus (mid-6th/12th to mid- 8th/14th centuries)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 25/2 (2014), pp. 1–20. Available on CJO 2014 doi:10.1017/S1356186314000601. 40 One may recall here that St Francis of Assisi went with the fifth Crusade to Damietta, Egypt, in 1219, where he attempted to see the Ayyubid Sulṭān al-Kāmil (r. 1218–1238), nephew of Saladin, and convert him to Christianity. See John Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian–Muslim Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), esp. pp. 40–53.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 55 the shaykh, too.40 She invited the shaykh to her house. She laid her head on the shaykh’s feet and tried to reach up to kiss his hand, but he instead put his penis in her hand, explaining that ‘my hand is not the object of your devotion, but this is’, whereupon he began to perform samāʽ – which only increased the caliph’s devotion to him.41 Tales of the Dervishes, indeed! The contention that ‘Rumi is the only mystic of medieval Persia whose work includes representation of the phallus as an esoteric symbol’42 seems rather too exclusive a claim, but there are several stories in the Mathnawī where the penis figures as the butt of a joke or a pointed representation (either symbolic or overtly stated) of something else. This strange story immediately precedes the only other brief anecdote in Manāqib al-ʽārifīn that mentions Kīmiyā, which is conveyed by Aflākī with no attribution – simply the anonymous isnad: ‘it is also related’ (ham- chunān manqūl ast). This second anecdote describes Lady Kīmiyā as a beautiful and chaste woman who is lawfully wedded to Shams (mankūḥa-yi Mawlānā Shams, Kīmiyā Khātūn, zanī būd jamīla va ʽafīfa). One day, without Shams’ permission, she is taken along in the company of other women for recreation (bi-tafarruj) to see Sulṭān Valad’s grandmother (jadd) in her garden. Since Mawlānā Rūmī’s own mother, Mu’mina Khātūn, lies buried in Karaman and therefore most likely died some time before 1229, if there is any kernel of historical reality to this tale, the grandmother in question must be the mother of Rūmī’s first wife, Gawhar Khātūn (who seems to have died when her children were still young).43 When Shams returns home he asks for Kīmiyā, and finding her absent, he becomes angry. Arriving home later, Kīmiyā immediately feels a debilitating pain in her neck, such that she cannot move it. It leaves her screaming for three days, until she dies. Seven days later, Shams leaves Damascus, the month being Shaʽbān of 644, corresponding to December–January of 1246–1247 (which does not tally with other dates for Shams’ final departure from Konya).44 Of course, the point of such anecdotes in the hagiographical works about Rūmī is not to give a biography of the women who people the narrative, but rather to describe the masculinity of the spiritual champions who are the proper subject of the heroic life depicted. Real saints are real men and have a healthy appetite (here heterosexual) and virile jealousy (ghayrat).

41 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 2, anecdote 42, p. 641. 42 Mahdi Tourage, ‘Phallocentric Esotericism in a Tale from Jalal al-Din Rumi’s “Mas navi-yi Ma’navi”’, Journal of Iranian Studies 39/1 (2006), pp. 47–70. 43 See Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, pp. 45, 71–72, 77, 92, 109, 276. 44 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 2, anecdote 43, pp. 641–42.

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The other hagiographical work (somewhat more sober than Aflākī) that mentions Kīmiyā is the ‘Treatise’ (Risāla) by Farīdūn b. Aḥmad Sipahsālār, compiled sometime between 1320 (or perhaps as early as 1312) and 1338. In the course of this work Sipahsālār twice asserts that he served as a disciple of Rūmī for forty years. If by this he means the actual personage Rūmī, and not the dervish community that he founded, Sipahsālār would have to have been a disciple of Rūmī (who died in 1273) in the early 1230s, perhaps even before Rūmī’s father passed away. It seems unlikely, then, that Sipahsālār could have lived until 1338, a date that is referred to in the text of his treatise. Perhaps, as has been argued, the latter section of the book (which covers the heads of the Mevlevi order after Sulṭān Valad) is a supplement added by another hand. This would allow us to believe that Sipahsālār’s actual portion of the work was completed by 1312, and would harmonize with a later report that Sipahsālār died during Sulṭān Valad’s lifetime (that is, before 1312). On the basis of the internal evidence of the text, it seems to me unlikely that Sipahsālār ever met Rūmī’s father or the father’s disciple, Burhān al-Dīn Muḥaqqiq (d. 1241), and probably not Shams al-Dīn either; Sipahsālār himself makes no explicit claim to have met them. It is possible that he joined the community when Rūmī was alive, during Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Zarkūb’s tenure as head, or figurehead of the community – that is, to put a date on it, sometime between about 1248 and 1258. This would mean that Sipahsālār’s information about Kīmiyā Khātūn is also second-hand, but he gives us more of the skeleton of the story – which becomes the basis for the essential plot of the last few chapters of Saideh Ghods’ book – than does Aflākī. According to Sipahsālār,45 after the return of Shams from his first disappearance to Syria, Rūmī and Shams once again retreat from the company of the disciples and pass their days and nights in conversation with one another:

His Holiness Shams al-Dīn, God be pleased with him, after a long while, beseeched Rūmī (iltimās namūd) that a certain girl named Kīmiyā, who had been raised in the women’s quarters of his Lordship, Rūmī’s, household (ki parvarda-yi ḥaram-i ḥaḍrat-i khudāvandgār būd), be bound to him in marriage (ki dar qayd-i nikāḥ āvarad).

Rūmī is asked for permission as the senior male in the household, and/or as the leader of the disciple community.

45 Risāla-yi Sipahsālār, ed. Sa‘īd Nafīsī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iqbāl 1325 A.Hsh./1947); repr. as Zindagī-nāma-yi Mawlānā Jalāl al-Din-i Mawlawī (1363 A.Hsh./1984), pp. 132–34.

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His Lordship, Rūmī, accepted his entreaty with utmost glee (bi- khurramī-yi har chi tamāmtar), and the matter was announced (khiṭāb-i īshān rā bi-khuṭba maqrūn kardand). Because it was winter, His Lordship had a pavilion (khargāhī) erected for the wedding night in the confines of the heated house that they lived in during the winter.

Whenever Rūmī’s older son,46 ʽAlā al-Dīn (from Gawhar Khātūn, the full brother of Sulṭān Valad) – who is described as ‘handsome, refined, learned, and sweet’ – would pass by the pavilion on the way to greet and honour his father and mother, it would create a feeling of trespassing against the house and honor of Shams al-Dīn (Mawlānā Shams al-Dīn rā ghayrat-i vilāyat dar jūsh mī-āmad). He kindly counseled ʽAlā al-Dīn – who was already unhappy because his brother, Sulṭān Valad, received more attention from Shams – that he would have to stop coming through without knocking (baʽd az īn dar īn khāna taraddud bi-ḥisāb farmā’ī). This counsel was difficult forʽ Alā al-Dīn to take, who went out and incited a crowd of people (who were doubtless already jealous over Shams’ access to Rūmī) by saying that Shams was not permitting Rūmī’s own son to see him. This initiated an extended series of insulting behaviours, which, according to Sipahsālār,47 were the reason for Shams’ final departure from Konya toward ‘Damascus’. Here we find no story of the garden of Marām, or of the death of Kīmiyā, and only the discreet in-between-the-lines intimation of a love triangle – whether it is the desire to visit his father that really motivates ʽAlā al-Dīn to pass by the quarters where Shams and Kīmiyā live within the larger com- pound is not known. And the dating Aflākī provides for Shams’ disappearance from Konya is off by a year according to Aflākī’s other accounts for his final departure (or his murder, according to highly implausible accounts), which suggest early winter 1247–1248. Nevertheless, a modern biographer of Rūmī, Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı,48 offers that this discrepancy in the date can be explained away by a copyist’s error, and speculates that ʽAlā’ al-Dīn may

46 There is a discrepancy in the birth order of Sulṭān Valad and ‘Alā al-Dīn in the sources. To Gawhar Khātūn and Rūmī two sons were born. Some reports related by Aflākī assume they were born in the same year, while others make ‘Alā al-Dīn the elder of the two. If we assume, however, that Sulṭān Valad was the elder, then ‘Alā al-Dīn could be considered Rūmī’s middle son, with the third son being Muẓaffar al-Dīn Amīr ‘Ālam Chalabī, born to Rūmī and his second wife, Kirrā Khātūn, in the mid-1240s. See Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, pp. 71, 121–22. 47 Ibid., pp. 133–34. 48 Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Mevlâna Celâleddin, per its Persian translation by Tawfīq Subḥānī, Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn, pp. 155–56 and 156 n.1.

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have blamed Shams for the death of Kīmiyā (which we will recall happened telepathically, or figuratively, in the second anecdotetransmitted by Aflākī), whom ʽAlā al-Dīn may have secretly loved and wished to marry himself. This supposition is not, however, entirely ungrounded; it is based upon a statement that Shams himself makes in his Maqālāt, reflecting his anger over ʽAlā al-Dīn visiting his wife without his permission, which leads him to drive ʽAlā al-Dīn away.49 Losing Kīmiyā, surmises Gölpınarlı, led ʽAlā al-Dīn to break with his father. Rūmī’s letters (Maktūbāt) do show that there was some familial tension and estrangement with ʽAlā al-Dīn (though we do not know the precise date of when this estrangement occurred). In these letters, Rūmī invites ʽAlā al-Dīn to return to the family home – he is sleeping elsewhere, and therefore not dwelling at home (az khāna bīrūn mīkhusbad), and he is furthermore ignoring the feelings of the women (dildārī-yi ān ḍaʽīfān nimīkunad). Rūmī clearly misses ‘Alā al-Dīn; he suggests that his son has been caught up in ephemeral worldly desires (havā va havas-i dunyā-yi fānī-yi bīvafā) and wishes him to return to the family fold. He seems to be living in a garden.50 I have belaboured this point to highlight how opaque the historical record is, how tendentious the terrain is, and how susceptible the fragmen- tary accounts are to construal according to our presentist concerns. What I would like to propose are a few factual pegs upon which to drape our interpretations, a few methodological considerations, and some tentative suggestions that I think hold out some hope for reaching at least an in- formed opinion on the question of the general dynamics of gender relations in the proto-Mevlevi community during Rūmī’s lifetime. This may help in- form future scholarly work in uncovering and analysing information about specific women in the early Mevlevi circle, and about Rūmī’s social, theo logical, and emotional orientation toward Woman as a conceptual category. The primary sources that give us direct access to Rūmī’s beliefs and attitudes are, of course, his poetry, and the surviving prose sources: personal letters, collected as Maktūbāt; his sermons (Majālis-i sabʽa), thought to derive from the period before his encounter with Shams; and his Dis- courses (Fīhī mā fīh) – mostly records of lectures or meetings he had with

49 See Shams-i Tabrīzī, Maqālāt-i Shams-i Tabrīzī, ed. Muḥammad-ʽAlī Muvaḥḥid (Teh- ran: Khwārazmī 1369/1990), p. 198, and Muvaḥḥid’s accompanying note (pp. 508–9) on this anecdote. For an English translation, see Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi, trans. William Chittick (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae 2004), pp. 285–86, 344–45 (accompanying note). 50 Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Maktūbāt-i Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, ed. Tawfīq Subḥānī (Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Dānishgāhī 1371 A.Hsh./1992), letter 24, pp. 92–94; see also letter 7, pp. 71–72.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 59 his disciples or important visitors, which were recorded by his disciples. Here, as in the Mathnawī, he does speak frankly about sexual desire and its dynamics, such as the story in Discourse 19 about a greengrocer infatuated with a certain woman (zanī rā dūst mīdāsht), who conveys messages to the lady’s maid (kanīzak-i khātūn) divulging that he is in love and burning with passion for her, and he is like this and he is like that and has no peace, and this is greatly oppressive for him, and yesterday he suffered this, and last night was like that for him. The grocer goes on and on with these stories. The maid goes before her ladyship and says, ‘The grocer sends his greetings and says he wants to do you like this and like that.’ The lady asks, ‘So coldly as that?’ The maid explains, ‘He went on at length, but that was the gist of it. The gist is the point, the rest of it just a waste of time.’51 But Rūmī does not talk about his wives in the discourses or the Mathnawī – and social conventions would not lead us to expect that he would, though Rūmī’s father, Bahā al-Dīn Valad, does speak quite openly about his own wife, or wives – for he names several different women, including Rūmī’s mother, Mu’mīna Khātūn (who died in Larende/Karaman, where her shrine survives to this day). Another woman’s name is mentioned, Bībī ʽAlavī, which some believe52 was simply a nickname for Mu’mī- na, whereas others53 take Bībī ʽAlavī to be a separate wife. Bahā al-Dīn also speaks candidly about his sexual desire for the daughter of a certain Qāḍī Sharaf;54 since she was the daughter of a judge, we may assume that she was of a class and standing to be a legal wife of Bahā al-Dīn, and not a slave girl. Things do not end there, however; Bahā al-Dīn also speaks frankly about a desire for coitus with a certain Tarkān, which though it may be a nickname for one of the other women, would seem to be a fourth wife.55 Despite all this forthright talk of lusting after the bodies of particular women, Bahā al-Dīn had an ascetic temperament and tried to control his passions;56 this is evident in an incident he relates when his concentration was disturbed in the midst of meditation, and his wife Bībī ʽAlavī came over

51 Rūmī [Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad mashhūr bi-Mawlavī], Fīhi mā fīh, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, 5th ed. (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr 1362 A.Hsh./1983), p. 85. 52 Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb, Pila-pila tā mulāqāt-i khudā: Darbāra-yi zindagī, andīsha va sulūk-i Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ‘Ilmī 1373 A.Hsh./1994), p. 61. 53 Fritz Meier, Bahā’-i Walad: Grundzüge seines Lebens und seiner Mystik. Acta Iranica, 3ème série: Textes et Mémoires, no. 14 (Leiden: E. J. Brill 1989), p. 427. 54 Bahā al-Dīn Walad, Ma‘ārif, ed. Badī‘ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, 3rd ed. (Tehran: In- tishārāt-Ṭahūrī 1382 A.Hsh./2003), vol. 1, pp. 327–28. 55 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 175. [On Bahā al-Dīn’s startling views on sexuality, see also the article by Sassan Moqaddam in the present volume of the Mawlana Rumi Review – Ed.] 56 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 352.

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to him, inadvertently stoking his passions. Bahā al-Dīn struggles against these feelings, but eventually realizes that they are promptings that God has inspired in him, and should not therefore be a cause of torment (ʽuqūbat) to him. As Bahā al-Dīn understands it:

Reflect whether or not the incitement will lead to punishment and degradation and suffering; in which case pray to God that He not incite you so. And if it is the cause of grandeur and fortune, praise God so that He may always keep you in that state.57

Of course, the genre of writing here is that of a spiritual diary – a rūz-nāma, or journal, that helps one who is following a spiritual quest to watch over his motivations (murāqaba). It was not likely to be intended for publication or for a wider audience, which is perhaps why there are such intimate and personal details (by which I mean primarily the names of his wives, and not necessarily the fact of feeling lust). We also know that Rūmī was privy to his father’s journal, and used it as material for his poetry in later life – so he was certainly familiar with these written intimations, even if the two never spoke candidly, father-to-son, about such matters in person. Clearly, however, the father adhered to the social norms of Islamic Persia about decorum and female modesty. He speaks of his astonishment at the behaviour of Khotanese women at a circumcision ceremony he at- tended, who appeared in public with no headcover, held hands with the men in public, drank wine (siyakī – a mixture of water and wine), danced, and even bared their breasts.58 Although Rūmī never mentions his own wife, Shams al-Dīn does, taking Rūmī’s willingness to have his wife treat Shams as if he were an extended family member as a sign of Rūmī’s great trust in him. In his Maqālāt (a record of his conversations and lectures), Shams says the following about Rūmī’s wife, Kirrā Khātūn:59

Do you not consider my entrance into this household? He even permitted his own wife in my company! Though he was jealous even of the Angel Gabriel looking upon her, she would sit before me just as a son sits at his father’s foot until you give him a bit of bread. Do you not see how much power this is?

57 Ibid., p. 381. 58 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 59 Shams-i Tabrīzī, Maqālāt-i Shams-i Tabrīzī, ed. Muvaḥḥid, p. 661 (vol. 2, p. 63).

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Nimī-andīshī ki īn rāh yāftan-i man darīn khāna va zan-i khwud rā ki az Jibra’īl-ash ghayrat āyad ki dar ū nigarad maḥram karda va pīsh-i man hamchunīn nishasta ki pisar pīsh-i pidar nishīnad tā pāra’ī-ash nān bidahad. Īn quvvat rā hīch nimībīnī?

We may also conclude from this anecdote that Rūmī seems to have included his wife, at least some of the time, in his private discussions with Shams about spirituality and theology, whereas other disciples complained about being excluded from Mawlānā Rūmī’s company once Shams came to Konya. One may wonder if Shams, who pronounces himself as likewise strongly jealous in temperament (bā ghayrat), is not perhaps projecting here his own jealousy as he considers the idea of his own wife sharing the company of another man as if he were her father, brother, or husband (maḥram). The presumption of such jealousy is also the motivating plot premise of Ghods’ novel, Kīmiyā Khātūn. This second wife, Kirrā Khātūn, whom Rūmī married after the death of his first wife, Gawhar Khātūn (c. 1229), is only mentioned twice in Sipah sālār, but appears a score of times in Aflākī, from which comes most of what we know about her. This includes an anecdote whose typological purpose is obviously to illustrate that as a ‘saint’, Rūmī was one who had great virility. The ‘Perfect Man’ of the Sufis would apparently not be one who lacked sexual desire, but rather one who possessed it in great abundance, keeping it in check out of a developed ascetic temperament. This anecdote has Kirrā Khātūn complaining that Rūmī is obsessively occupied with fasting, performing samāʽ and lecturing on mystical subjects and theology. She complains: ‘he does not even look in my direction and does not attach importance to physical beauty’ (gird-i shāhid-bāzī nimīgardad); this could also mean that not only is he uninterested in his wife’s feminine charms, but neither does he participate in ephebery – the lustful looking, or spiritual contemplation, of the beauty of young boys (shāhid). Kirrā Khātūn won- ders if ‘any traces of human quality and marital lust are left in him, or his appetites have left him entirely and he has abandoned them’. Having read her mind, however (another kind of saintly miracle), Rūmī that very night performs conjugal acts with her like a wild roaring lion (shīr-i gharrān-i mast), penetrating her seventy times (haftād nawbat dukhūl kard). She has to flee up on to the roof of the madrasa in order to catch her breath. Rūmī explains in this anecdote60 that the men of God do not neglect the needs

60 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 1, anecdote 416, pp. 449–50; trans. O’Kane, p. 310.

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of people, though his contemplation of God has led to a decrease in the couple’s sexual activity. We may also note that most of the women in these accounts are ad- dressed with the honorific title Khātūn, ‘lady’, which says something about the awareness or pretensions of class that the men and women in these circles have, and the eastern Persian sense of decorum about how one should speak politely and address women in mixed company, and in soci ally stratified contexts. We may surmise a few things about this first wife, Gawhar Khātūn, who is mentioned only twice in Aflākī and not at all by name in Sipahsālār. She was married to Rūmī when both were quite young – in 621/1224, when Rūmī was only 17 years of age. This seems a rather young age for a man to get married, but the two may have been betrothed to one another even in childhood, before Bahā al-Dīn and his family left Khurāsān, perhaps in around 1216. Gawhar Khātūn was the daughter of a certain Khwāja Sharaf al-Dīn-i Lālā from Samarqand, from which city Rūmī’s father emigrated with his family in 1213. This is mere speculation, but it was possibly here that Bahā al-Dīn met her father, in which case the destiny of Rūmī and Gawhar Khātūn may have been sealed at this time, when they were children; as a result, she (and perhaps also her father) migrated with the band of Rūmī’s family when she was not yet a teenager. In the 1220s she became the mother of Sultan Valad and ʽAlā al-Dīn. So there is no overt mention of these wives by Mawlānā Rūmī. He does, however, more than once speak of his daughter-in-law, Fāṭima Khātūn. She is the wife of his son Sulṭān Valad, and the daughter of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Zarkūb, the first successor to Shams al-Dīn as Rūmī’s choice of figurehead for the community of disciples. In addition to letters by Rūmī that seem to promise he will take Fāṭima’s side in any marital dispute between herself and Sulṭān Valad, 61 Fāṭima appears, though not by name, as the public celebrant in two poems her father-in-law composed as epithalamiums on the occasion of their wedding. It would seem that she (and possibly also her sister Hidīya – both of whom, alongside their father, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, had been disciples of Rūmī since the time of Bahā al-Dīn Valad) may have been thought of as a leading female disciple; as such, she may have taken on a quasi-public role, although apparently not so public as another Fāṭima, the much older sister of Mawlānā Rūmī, whom Aflākī describes as a religious scholar (‘ālima) issuing her own fatvās; this Fāṭima, Rūmī’s sister, stayed behind in Balkh when the family emigrated, because she was married there with a family of

61 Rūmī, Maktūbāt-i Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, ed. Subḥānī, letter 56, pp. 132–33.

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May the blessings that flow in all weddings Be gathered, God, together in our wedding! The blessings of the Night of Power, The month of fasting The festival to break the fast The blessings of the meeting of Adam and Eve The blessings of the meeting of Joseph and Jacob The blessings of gazing on the paradise of all abodes And yet another blessing that cannot be put in words: The fruitful scattering of joy Of the children of the Shaykh [Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Zarkūb] And our eldest! In companionship and happiness May you be like milk and honey In union and fidelity, Just like sugar and halva. May the blessings of those who toast And the one who pours the wine Anoint the ones who said Amen and The one who said the prayer.63

Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Zarkūb would bring his daughters, Fāṭima and Hidīya, to the classes of Mawlānā Rūmī and his father, so Rūmī had known them from childhood.64 Aflākī reports Rūmī to have said, ‘All women who visit me come to me veiled, except Fāṭima Khātūn and Hidīya Khātūn; Fāṭima is my right eye and Hidīya my left eye.’65 They were thus clearly members of the inner personal circle and among those who were privy to Rūmī’s eso teric teachings. Rūmī, indeed, had taken on Fāṭima’s spiritual upbringing out of the great interest he took in her (az ghāyat-i ‘ināyatī ki dar ḥaqq-i ū 62 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 2, anecdote 1, p. 994. 63 Rūmī, Kulliyāt-i Shams yā Dīvān-i kabīr az guftār-i Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad mashhūr bi Mawlavī, ba tasḥīḥāt wa ḥavāshī, ed. Badī‘ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, 3rd ed. (Tehran: Sipihr 1363 A.Hsh./1984), vol. 1, p. 148; ghazal 236. Translated in Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Swallowing the Sun (Oxford: Oneworld 2008), pp. 130, 195. 64 See Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, pp. 211–12. 65 Aflākī,Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı, vol. 2, anecdote 20, p. 719.

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dāsht), teaching her to read and write, and to interpret the meaning of the Qur’ān (kitābat va Qur’ān).66 Indeed, Aflākī ascribes mystical powers and the performance of saintly miracles to her (karāmāt),67 and Sipahsālār calls her ‘God’s saint on earth’ (Valīyat Allāh fī al-arḍ).68 This is hardly unpre cedented – Ibn ʽArabī, for one, had been taught by several female shaykhs, though his Andalusian background may have made him more open to this than those coming from Khurāsān. Still, even though training of disciples in the Sufi orders was accomplished in a primarily homosocial environment, numerous Sufi authors did consider that women could attain the station of sainthood. Al-Sulamī (d. 1021) enumerates at least eighty female Sufis from the first two centuries of Islam in his workDhikr al-niswa al-mutaʽabbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt (Mention of the Female Sufi Worshippers).69 ʽAṭṭār’s description of Rābiʽa al-ʽAdawiyya in his Tadhkirat al-awliyā is rather apologetic about her inclusion in a work that is clearly modelled on the Book of Men genre (Rijāl – though as Ruth Roded70 and others have shown, it is quite common for some women to be included in collections of the Ṭ abaqāt al-rijāl). ʽAttār explains that God does not observe the forms of human beings, and that ‘Ā’isha (d. 58 ah /678), wife of the Prophet Muḥammad, has transmit- ted a huge bulk of the Ḥadīth, and that on the plain of the Resurrection there will no longer be men and women – and therefore it should not be strange that a woman could be a saint. Indeed, in the opening story of his Ilāhī-nāma, ‘A ṭṭār describes at great length the trials and tribulations of a beautiful female saint who is the cause of redemption of all the men around her. As ʽAṭṭār says: when a woman is a man on the path of God, she cannot be called a woman.71 However, women can be a snare of sexual longing and the preoccupations of the material world, even for ‘Aṭṭār; this is the case with Shaykh Ṣan‘ān and a Christian girl, who drags the shaykh through the muddy degradation of swineherding and wine drinking before he is

66 Ibid., anecdote 19, p. 719. 67 Ibid., anecdote 22, pp. 720–21. 68 Risāla-yi Sipahsālār, pp. 169, 179. 69 Al-Sulamī, Dhikr al-niswa al-muta‘abbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī 1993). Interestingly, this work was translated into Persian by Maryam Ḥusaynī not long afterKīmiyā Khātūn came out (Tehran: Nashr-i ʽIlm 1385 A.Hsh./2006). For the English translation of this work, see Rkia Cornell (trans.), Early Sufi Women: Dhikr al-niswa al-muta‘abbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt(Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae 1999). 70 Ruth Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections: From Ibn Saʽd to Who’s Who (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner 1994). 71 ‘Attār, Farīd al-Dīn, Farid al-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis, trans. Paul Losensky (New York: Paulist Press 2009), p. 97. Michelle Quay at Cambridge University is working on this subject, as detailed in her conference paper, ‘Female Heroism in Sufi Hagiographical Texts – From Sulami (d. 1021) to ‘Attar (d. ca. 1221)’.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 65 restored to sanctity, and she sees the error of her Christian ways.72 Likewise, at the beginning of the Ilāhī-nāma, the first son wishes to possess – sexually or matrimonially – the virgin daughter of the king of the fairies, who is of incomparable and unparalleled beauty.73 He describes her as follows:

bi-zībā’ī-yi ‘aql u luṭf-i jān ast / nikū-rū-yi zamīn u āsamān ast agar īn ārizū yābam tamāmat / murād-am bas buvad īn tā qiyāmat

She is in beauty sharp as the intellect, and in subtlety fine as the soul. She is the perfect face of earth and heaven. If I attain this desire in its entirety, it will be enough fulfilment for me until the Resurrection.

His father, the caliph, vehemently retorts to this:

pidar guft-ash zahī shahvat-parastī / ki az shahvat-parastī mast-i mastī

What a slave to lust you are, completely inebriated by lust.

He goes on to explain that the man whose heart is fixed on the vulva has wasted the entire capital of his physical existence, whereas any woman who acts in a heroic, virile manner is wholly freed from the taint of such lust:

dil-i mardī ki qayd-i farj bāshad / hama naqd-i vujūd-ash kharj bāshad valī har zan ki ū mardāna āmad / az in shahvat bi-kul bīgāna āmad 74

The heart of a vulva-fixated man his capital, his whole existence – spent! But any woman acting like a fearless man she is wholly untainted by this lust.

72 For a discussion of the Shaykh Ṣanʿān story and a general view of sexual othering, see Franklin Lewis, ‘Sexual Occidentation: The Politics of Boy-love and Christian-love in ʽAṭṭā r ’, Journal of Iranian Studies 42/5 (Special issue: Love and Desire in Pre-modern Persian Poetry and Prose 2009), pp. 693–723. 73 Ki dārad shāh-i paryān dukhtarī bikr / ki natvān kard mithl-ash māh rā dhikr. 74 Farīd al-Dīn ‘At t ā r, Ilahi-Name: Die Gespräche des Königs mit seinen sechs Söhnen. Eine mystische Dichtung von Farīdaddīn ‘Attār, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul: Staats druckerei 1940; repr.. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Tūs 1359 A.Hsh./1980), p. 31.

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This introduction leads in ‘Aṭṭār’s Ilāhī-nāma to one of the longest tales he tells – and it is a tale of heroic feminine spirituality, linked to beauty and chastity. This is the tale of Ma‘ṣūma the Chaste (or in some manuscripts, Marḥūma the Deceased, or gratia plena), a chaste wife (zan-i pārsā) whose husband leaves on a journey, commending her to the care of his brother. Upon glimpsing her beauty, the brother attempts to cajole and coerce her into infidelity, as do a series of other men whom she encounters. She eventually frees herself from their clutches and becomes a crowned mon- arch (while disguised as a man), and then a holy woman; in this role, she redeems all her erstwhile persecutors by making them confess their sins.75 Parallel to ‘Aṭṭār’s caliph and his condemnation of his son’s lust, Mawlānā Rūmī in the Mathnawī describes male sexual desire (al-hawā) as a constitutional weakness, which he calls in Arabic the ‘menstruation of men’.76 Rūmī’s Mathnawī does not give us major tales in which women act on their own, in roles not socially defined by a male counterpart; his heroines enjoy considerable agency, but remain bounded in the stories by a socially gendered role: slave girl, lover, wife, mother, and so on, but not heroine tout court. As such, it lacks a female gaze, except where it is a com- plement or a balancing response to a male gaze. The major exception to this in the lyrical as well as the narrative oeuvre of Rūmī is Mary the Madonna. She too, of course, is defined by the parameters of the Qur’ānic verses and the lore about her in the ‘Tales of the Prophets’ (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā); in lyric tableaux and narrative pericopes she appears in the various paradigms of the chaste and wronged woman, or the fearful woman (preyed upon by God or an angel), or the saintly and even quasi-prophet woman – even before becoming the Theotokos and giving birth to Jesus. However, her symbolic function always anticipates her becoming the mother of Jesus, and a genetrix of mystic spirit (rūḥ Allāh) who shows us that we too must give birth to our inner Jesus of the spirit.77 Here then, we the readers are asked to engender ourselves with the female gaze, a maternal gaze, vis-à-

75 For a poetic translation of this story, see my ‘Tale of the Righteous Woman (Whose Husband Had Gone on a Journey)’, in Converging Zones: Persian Literary Tradition and the Writing of History, ed. Wali Ahmadi (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda 2012), pp. 200–19. 76 Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, The Mathnawī of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí, ed., trans., and comm. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Gibb Memorial Trust 1925–1940), VI: 2935. Ay rafīqān z’īn maqīl u z-ān maqāl / ittaqū inna’l-havā ḥayḍ al-rijāl 77 For examples of this idea in Rumi’s poetry, see my chapter ‘Poems about Birthing the Soul’, in Rumi: Swallowing the Sun, pp. 151–65. For the use of this metaphor in Rumi’s discourses, see Fatemeh Keshavarz, ‘Pregnant with God: The Poetic Art of Mothering the Sacred in Rumi’s Fihi Ma Fih’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22/1–2 (2002), pp. 90–99.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:10:18AM via free access rm and the gendered gaze 67 vis our own spirit. And as this is essentially what the Mathnawī and the ghazaliyyāt of Rūmī urge us to achieve, this rebirthing may in some sense be both the culminating moment and the supernal vision to which Rūmī intends to guide us. The effort to recover the story of the actual women in the life of Mawlānā Rūmī and his circle – insofar as the sources and textual struc- tures allow us to do so – is an admirable and intellectually significant goal, and one to which students of Sufi communities, lineages, and brotherhoods (and sadly under-documented sisterhoods) ought to devote concerted attention.78 While the imaginal fictions built up around Kīmiyā Khātūn may indulge our presentist concerns and clearly speak to a contemporary need, they make for a poor mirror by which to see the unrefracted past and understand historical actors and their motivational dynamics in Konya in the mid-1200s. Understanding social networks, family alliances, and the role of women in this and other such communities will create a much full- er and more accurate picture of specific individuals, the development of orders, and the important role of women in the development of Islamic spirituality. Moreover, an understanding of this social context will in turn help us understand the significance of the social situations depicted in Rūmī’s Mathnawī, as well as the symbolic import of the feminine in his ghazals. As such, grappling with the actual content of the sources and rec- ognizing their limitations provides an important preliminary background for reading the literary creations of Rūmī himself.

Bibliography Abou-Bakr, Omaima. ‘Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-modern Period’, in Arab Studies Quarterly 32/3 (2010), pp. 127–44. Aflākī, Shams al-Dīn ḥA mad. Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı. 2 vols. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi 1959. 2 vols. —— . The Feats of the Knowers of God (Manāqeb al-‘arefīn) John O’Kane. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill 2002. Al-Sulamī, Abū ‘Abdu’l-Raḥmān. Dhikr al-niswa al-mutaʽabbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt. Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī 1993. —— . Trans. (into Persian) Maryam Ḥusaynī. Tehran: Nashr-i ʽIlm 1385 A.Hsh./2006.

78 As one example of how to theorize and strategize the recovery of female voices from premodern narratives of the Islamic world, see Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-modern Period’, Arab Studies Quar- terly 32/3 (2010), pp. 127–44.

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