Sober in Mecca, Drunk in Byzantium: Antinomian Space in the Poetry of ʿaṭṭār

Cyrus Ali Zargar Draft Chapter: Please Do Not Circulate or Cite Sober in Mecca, Drunk in Byzantium: Antinomian Space in the Poetry of ʿAṭṭār ABSTRACT: This paper investigates premodern conceptions of spaces of otherness, particularly within the context of Persian Sufi poetry. Abbasid-era travel literature describing monasteries, as well as real hostilities between Muslims and Christians, gave symbolic dimensions to spaces of antinomian activity in thirteenth-century eastern Iran. Making use of Edward Soja’s thirdspace, as well as Jorge Luis Borges’s “the Aleph,” this paper pays particular attention to the pseudo-hagiographical narrative of the “Shaykh of Ṣanʿān” in the poem Manṭiq al- Ṭayr (Speech of the Birds). In this account, by the Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221), Byzantium contrasts with the Kaʿba in Mecca, just as the wine-house, the Christian church, and the ruins contrast with normative spaces wherein expectations of decorum can lead to ostentatious and insincere modes of worship. By creating magical spaces of infidelity, spaces devoid of piety, ʿAṭṭār conveys themes of losing oneself to a carnal and ultimately divine Other. PAPER: This paper unravels some implications of antinomian spaces in premodern Persian Sufi poetry. In a time before the secular, before the disenchanted had been conceived, Sufi poets discerned a sense of secrecy and contradiction in such spaces, finding within them freedom from the constraints of piety. The antinomian spaces in question corresponded to real, usually urban locations in premodern geography. They were lived spaces that premodern Muslims considered to be outside of pious norms, from taverns and dens of iniquity, to churches and temples housing idols. Through poetry, such spaces became part of a system of symbols that was shared widely and had lasting theological, literary, and cultural effects. The poetically imagined instantiations of such spaces are what I label “magical spaces of infidelity,” that is, antinomian spaces as conceived and endowed with Islamic theological significance. Such spaces were “magical” 1 Cyrus Ali Zargar Draft Chapter: Please Do Not Circulate or Cite because they allowed for wonder and for a sense of openness that occasioned ethical and theological explorations, explorations that, while heretical in language, were grounded in manuals of practical ethics and treatises on the stations of the path to God. They were magical in the way that we moderns might locate specialness in enchanted spaces. They were also secret, forbidden, and transformative, like an alchemical elixir, providing an eversion and awakening that one such poem compares to the surprise conquest of a city.1 In order to represent a critical teaching, one that would necessarily undermine the commonly accepted understandings of other Muslims, they shined light on the beauty of the ruins and extolled infidelity. Exploring such spaces, this paper focuses on one particular narrative recounted by the Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221). The pseudo-historical account of the “Shaykh of Ṣanʿān” appears in a long poem titled Manṭiq al-Ṭayr, or The Speech of the Birds. In this hagiographical account, Byzantium (or Rūm) contrasts with the Kaʿba in Mecca, just as the wine-house, the Christian church, and the ruins (kharābāt), places associated with ignominy, contrast with normative spaces. In each of these cases, ʿAṭṭār draws from both literary geography as well as his familiarity with the lived geographical dynamic of medieval Nishapur, or, rather, the literary and the lived reinforce one another in the development of spatial symbols. The aim here is to gauge the degree to which not “non-religion” but rather “counter-Islam” becomes a part of spaces in premodern poetry, theorizing ways in which spatiality conveys themes of losing oneself to a carnal and yet ultimately divine Other, and thus finding unexplored avenues of investigation, particularly regarding Shahab Ahmed’s recent intervention in Islamic studies.2 As will be argued, these spaces take on one more layer of significance in a post-secular setting. Reading such magical spaces through a post-secular lens, observing especially the freedom from piety ascribed to them, we can see in them what might be called “proto-secular” spaces. 1 The poet, Aḥmad-i Jām (or, Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn Abū al-Ḥasan Jāmī, d. 1141), plays on the dual meanings between “conquest” and “spiritual realization” in this double-line: “In the tavern, they conquered this here lush, intoxicated from the Age of Pre-Eternal Souls, / an unanticipated breakthrough victory took place, leaving this drunken lover subdued” (Jām 1998, 123). 2 The term “non-religion” alludes to Ahmed’s contention, as discussed in the next section. 2 Cyrus Ali Zargar Draft Chapter: Please Do Not Circulate or Cite The contrast I describe between imagined spaces of post-secular life and literature and those of premodern Sufi literature appears in sharp relief when one considers a key symbol used by Edward Soja, “the Aleph,” which he borrows from Jorge Luis Borges. The titular image of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “the Aleph” is a crevice containing all other points in space. This Aleph, referencing the mysterious Hebrew letter, hidden near the nineteenth step of a cellar, allows the viewer to see everything and everywhere: On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me … I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom…. (Borges 1970, 26-7) Borges’s account alludes to alchemy, Kabala, and Sufism, yet it stresses the quotidian, for the Aleph is not a vehicle of revelation, but rather an accidental spot in an arbitrary place. His discovery emphasizes the infinite, but within the context of a lack of wonder and a failure of transcendence: After his peek into boundlessness, the narrator rides a subway, spends a few nights in bewilderment, but soon returns to his former state of “oblivion” (Borges 1970, 29). The irony of Borges’s effect here—his interpretation of magical realism—lies in the discovery of the infinite by a mildly interested narrator. Akin to Charles Taylor’s conception of the modern “buffered self,” Borges’s narrator is invulnerable to forces beyond the sensory, even when presented with empirical evidence (Taylor 2007, 300). Borges’s narrator’s self-absorption and pettiness inhibit his discovery from 3 Cyrus Ali Zargar Draft Chapter: Please Do Not Circulate or Cite retaining any sense of enchantment. For Taylor, it is the premodern world that is both enchanted and “porous,” porous in that spirits, nature, self, and society lacked the boundaries introduced by modernization. Taylor’s disenchanted, modern world—the world in which Borges’s narrator lives—has led to the modern desire to “‘re-enchant’ the world” (Taylor 2016, 15). Strikingly different, ʿAṭṭār presents a premodern world that would seem to occasion a revision to the idea that enchantment was once everywhere. Certainly, piety and the monitoring of normative, pious behavior was widespread. But ʿAṭṭār’s poetry locates a certain transformative property in locations outside of premodern normative spaces. There are, for ʿAṭṭār, secrets at the moral margins of the city or even in the geographical heart of disbelief that facilitate the transformation of the self. In a sense, then, premodern piety can be seen as a variety of disenchantment, for only in its counterpart—spaces of infidelity—does the subject discover the wonder that leads to transcending selfhood. Spaces of Infidelity and Genealogies of Secularity in Islamic/Religious Studies The goal here is to historicize certain reoccurring symbols in Sufi poetry while avoiding a simplistic dichotomy, what Fenella Cannell rightly calls “broad-brush contrasts between a religious past and a secular present” (Cannell 2010, 89). After all, as Talal Asad has argued, the Weberian concept of “disenchantment” can often rely on post-Romantic assumptions, a function of projecting onto the past an enchantment that suits an increased consumption of “imaginative literature” (Asad 2003, 13-14).3 According to Jason Josephson-Storm, to say that the world became “disenchanted” after the rise of some new epoch called “modernity” ignores a number of realities (Josephson-Storm 2017, 308-9). First, it ignores the reality that enchantment—from magic and Spiritism to all manners of framing otherworldly narratives—never disappeared from mainstream and even scientific Western thought. Second, it overlooks the reality that “modernity” as a 3 Asad does seem to acknowledge a modern literary sense of disenchantment in his discussion of Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (Asad 2003, 66n.102). 4 Cyrus Ali Zargar Draft Chapter: Please Do Not Circulate or Cite point of difference combines a number of societal changes that cannot be explained by one neat phrase, especially when the shift exists mostly as a matter of convention and cannot be pinpointed to a particular time, event, or transformation. Rather than living in a “disenchanted” world, Josephson-Storm posits, we live in a “disenchanting” world, one “in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere” (Josephson-Storm 2017, 305).

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