The Haft Paykar : Love, Color, and the Universe

Cameron Lindley Cross

March 2010

Introduction
Our story begins with a colorful description of a King and his opulent court. In raiments of red and yellow
(surkh and zard, the colors of good health) the King would receive any visitor who appeared before him
with lavish banquets, ne entertainment, and excellent hospitality. In return, he would demand of his
visitor a tale, be it good tidings or ill, through which he could, in his imagination, visit the lands outside
his realm. In such wise the king spent his days / lifelong, and never changed his ways. Then one day,
the King abruptly set out on a journey, abandoning his court and kingdom and leaving no indication of
where he had gone. For some time, aairs remained in abeyance and no news of him could be heard, until,
just as suddenly, the King returned, dressed in black om head to toe. Although his rule om then on was
marked by wisdom (tz-hush) and prosperity (b-mubat), it was forever conducted in a state of mourning:
He dwelt in blackness, like the Stream / of Life (dar siyh chu b-i ayvn zst). No-one could fathom
how such a hearty fellow could have undergone such a dramatic change, and the secret remained hidden
until, nally, the Kings most trusted hand-maiden pressed him one night into telling her his story. He
was in mourning, she learned, because he had been snatched out of the heavenly gardens of Iram, and as
the details of his story took shape, she was so aected by his loss that she, too, donned black robes of
lamentation; thus the King and his slave were united in a kind of fellowship that would have normally been
impossible for two individuals of such unequal rank.
Another story begins, instead, with a paradise on earth, a garden that was so beautiful, its owner, a
pious, handsome youth, built four high walls around it to keep it safe om thieves and the evil eye. One
day, returning om Friday prayers, he was startled to nd his own garden locked om the inside; forcing
his way in, he discoverd that a group of women had stolen in and were now feasting, singing, and bathing
in his pristine pools. If he had any objection to such an intrusion, it was quickly stilled by a sudden,
searing desire for one of the ladies in particular, a lute player whose charms a thousand hearts had lured
/ whoever saw her quick expired. With the help of the two women who had been standing guard, the
Nim Gaav, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance, trans. by Julie Scott Meisami (Oxford University Press,
1995), l. 35, p. 107.
Ibid., ll. 39-40, p. 107 and Al Qul Mamd Bakhtiyr, Haft nigr dar haft tlr: guzrish az Haft Paykar-i Nim,
(Tihrn: Intishrt-i A, 1376 [1997]), 132. The Stream of Life is a reference to the Water of Life for which Moses/Khidr
and Alexander searched in the realm of darkness (ulmt).
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 132, p. 223.
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youth made his feelings known to her, and the two agreed to rendezvous at a secret place in the garden.
No matter where they met, however, things just did not seem to work outrst the pavilion upon which
they lay collapsed, then they were surprised by an angry tom-cat, then a eld-mouse chewed apart a string
which sent a line of gourds tumbling down upon them; it was as if all of Gods creation was conspiring to
keep them apart. Finally the youth, cowed into reection, realized that the only way his eorts could bear
uit would be through the lawful path of marriage. When the arrangements were made and the ceremony
carried out, the two lovers were nally able to retire together and eoy their love as it was meant to be:
pure, unsoiled, and white.
There are many other stories to tell: that of the patient, upright man Bishr, who clothed his wife in
green, as she seemed to him so like a houri of Paradise; or that of the Princess of the Fortress, better known
in European circles as Turandot (Pers. Trndukht, daughter of Turan), whose orid beauty so inamed
the hearts of men that many came to a bloody end for it; or that of the unfortunate merchant Mhn,
whose greed and impetuousness led him through such tribulations that he vested himself in blue, the color
of mourning, to commemorate his near-death and deliverance through the hands of his Creator. Although
each story has its own theme and characteristics, love and desire clearly take the central rolein each case,
love has smitten the hero, who, depending on his virtue, character, and strength of will, will be guided to
any number of conclusions, each symbolically marked by a particular color, be it the black of mourning and
melancholy, the white of chastity and purity, or the red of passion and sanguinity. All of these stories are
linked together by a ame-tale in the Haft Paykar, Seven Beauties, a medieval Persian romance by the
poet Nim of Gaa (modern-day Azerbaan) in the year 1197 . The ame-tale revolves around King
Bahrm Gr of Sasanian Persia, who builds seven palaces to hold his seven queens, each one a princess of
a dierent realm; it is in these towers that a series of seven short tales are told, each one a tale of love in
connection to a particular color.
This attention to love in its endless varieties and manifestations should not be underestimated or mis-
construed as a ivolous topic. Just as Boccaccios hundred tales of love for his dilicate donne are far more
than a diversion for the bored captives of family honor (as the author claims them to be), and just as
Or her; indeed, the relation of the women in these stories to love and the hero is critical for the storys development. The
narrative focus, however, remains entirely on the male hero.
For [ladies], in fear and shame, conceal the hidden ames of love within their delicate breasts, a love far stronger than one which is
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Petrarchs ruminations on his love for Laura bespeak a deeper inquiry into the nature of God and his cre-
ation, love within medieval Persian literature is very much understood as a key component of the worlds
physical and moral makeup. These are ideas that extend back far beyond the periods of classical Islam or
medieval Christendom, and part of my aim in writing this paper is to demonstrate how both traditions
are in dialogue with ideas articulated in archaic Greek philosophy, classical Latin poetry, early Christian
theology, and Perso-Hellenistic mystical thought of late Antiquity, as well as with each other. Given the
rich and extensive trade taking place in the lands of the Mediterranean and southwestern Asia, the mas-
sive inux of newly-translated Greek texts into Arabic and Latin, and the tight political bonds between
Christian and Muslim kingdoms in cultural axes like the Iberian peninsula, Norman Sicily, the merchant
city-states of Genoa and Venice, Ayyubid Cairo and the Latin kingdoms of the Holy Land, and the great
overland hubs of Baghdad and Tabriz, which connected Europe to the cities of Central Asia, India, and
China, it is not at all surprising that we nd examples of the same tales occurring in the canons of a wide
variety of literary traditions, nor that an abundance of dierent approaches to a particular theme or idea is
evident. The mirror for princes genre, for example, is widely diused throughout the court literature of all
major languages of the Near East; so too is the narrative of the mirj, the ascent to Heaven, which occurs
most famously in Dante Alighieris La Divina Commedia. The court romance, of which Nim was the
poet par excellence in the Persian tradition, was also a widespread genre within Europe, with Tristan and
Iseult, Troilus and Criseyde, Gawain and the Green Knight and other Arthurian legends as central examples;
certain elements of Nims style are also visible in the epic Italian romances of the sixteenth century ,
the Orlando sequences of Boiardo and Ariosto, and Tassos La Gerusalemme Liberata, which all take place,
interestingly enough, in the Holy Land.
Like many of the great works of medieval literature, the Haft Paykar is a highly elaborate work that
applies elements of structure, symbol, and sequence to create a detailed mappemonde of ethics and wisdom
as its author would have seen it. We recall that each tale in the sequence of seven function as exemplary
fabulae on love and its relation to morals, comportment, and power. These seven tales, in turn, are enclosed
openly expressed, as those who have felt and suered know; and besides this, restricted by the wishes, the pleasures, and the commands of
fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands, they remain most of the time enclosed in the connes of their bedrooms where they sit in almost
complete idleness, now wishing one thing and now wishing another, turning over in their minds various thoughts which cannot always be
pleasant ones. Giovanni Boccaccio; Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella, editors, The Decameron: a new translation: 21 novelle,
contemporary reactions, modern criticism, (New York: Norton, 1977), 2.
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within the broader narrative of Bahrm Gr, who has his own adventures both before and aer his encounter
with the princesses. Through the tripartite structure of Bahrms journey, one can discern the heros overall
arc of progression om hot-blooded worldliness to spriritual enlightenment, with his education on love
serving as the bridge between the two stages. Even the Haft Paykar, a complete work in itself, is the
fourth in a sequence of ve epic poems by Nim, collectively called the Khamsah, Quintet, or the Pa
Ga, Five Treasures, which, as a single unit, are counted among the highest achievements of a romantic
genre that was owering in both Christendom and the Dr al-Islm in the eleventh and twelh centuries
. Drawing om the wider world of contemporary science, philosophy, theology, and political thought,
the romance could demonstrate the holistic intertwining and interconnectedness of all these disciplines
through the seemingly simple vehicle of a love story. Nor was this mere metaphor; Nim and some of
his contemporaries regarded love as the actual engine of all movement, the glue that bound the Universe
together. Thus a romance like the Haft Paykar was an expression of art and knowledge on multiple levels,
om an entertaining tale, to a treatise on politics and kingship, to a literary planetarium of the cosmos and
mans place in it.
That people held such complex and manifold attitudes towards love is certainly nothing unique to any
particular culture or timeas only bets a feeling so hard to articulate! There is a particular historical
trend I would like to follow, however, in which love is theorized into a particular amework that tends
to gather it, in all its innite shades and avors, into two basic categories. Aer a thorough treatment
and analysis by the philosophers of ancient Greece, this amework seems to have become the dominant
mode of describing love within all the major intellectual traditions of the Mediterranean and southwest
Asia. In broad terms, love falls into one of two possible modes: the erotic, the ecstatic and destabilizing
pursuit of self-fulllment, or the sublime, the fundamentally altruistic love that places the well-being of
others above the desires of the self. This should not be understood as an either/or construct, but rather
two aspects of the same thing, a yin yang kind of duality in which neither part is complete or functional
without the presence of the other; when taken as a whole, the supercial contrariness of the two natures
is nullied, revealing a positive intentionality and purpose in loves aect. Such a broad characterization is
certainly reductionist to a certain degree and cannot be used to reliably describe the full understanding of
love in any specic tradition or corpus, yet I hope that it may be useful if it is understood as a theme, a
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starting-point om which the stories of Nim and other poets can be approached. To begin our journey,
then, I propose we turn to the vocabulary of love and trace its development in the philosophy and religious
thought of the Near East and its cultural inheritors, always with the erotic-sublime dynamic in mind, so
as to esh out an idea of what these two kinds of love can do to lovers, what happens to the society they
inhabit, and how these eects resolve themselves.
Ers and Agap :
The idea that love is one of the prime forces that governs the movement and destiny of bodies, terrestrial
and heavenly alike, is a strong theme even in the earliest examples of early Greek thought. The pre-Socratic
philosopher Parmenides says that Eros was created rst of all the Gods, and Hesiods Theogony names him,
along with Chaos, Gaia, and Tartaros, as one of the four elemental constituents of being, entities whose
law is so fundamental to existence, even Zeus and his pantheon must abide by their decree. They are the
foundation for what would be called in later centuries natural law, in which givens like light, gravity,
motion, and body are established. Although Eros is the fairest of the four, he is also the most dangerous,
for it is he who unstrings the limbs and subdues both mind / and sensible thought in the breasts of all
gods and men. The justication why such incredible power could reside in the hands of Love is explained
partly by the fact that ers is a word with a far broader range of application than the modern English love
would suggest. In archaic poetry, ers is a force external to the body that drives one to satis a need,
including such basic ones as food and drink. If le unattended, the ers for these needs will eventually
take over the body and result in its death, aer a period of grievous suering. Similarly, unfullled ers
between persons is a kind of aiction that can bring about madness and despair. It is not surprising then
that ers was not to be taken lightly; capricious and cruel, it could humble the mightiest king or ruin
the most prosperous people, in all manner of ways. Many of the great tragedies of Greek history and
literaturethe death of Heracles, the Athenians foolhardy adventure in Sicily, the Trojan Warwere all
a result of violent, uncontrolled ers, whether for power, glory, or a womans love.
With the great cultural eorescence of classical Athens in the fourth century , love underwent a
Hesiod, Theogony; Works and days; Shield, trans. by Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004), 14.
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great deal of theorizing and elaboration. In his Symposium, Plato articulates a number of kinds of love, each
one dened and defended by a prominent speaker at the great banquet. Phaedrus, the rst speaker of the
evening, praises love for the benets of courage, honor, and loyalty it confers, citing the tales of Alcestis
self-sacrice, Orpheus trip to the gates of Hades, and the bravery of Achilles for the love of Patroclus to
demonstrate his point. Pausanias complicates the issue by contending that there is more than one kind
of love to be discussed; common ers, which is is rather haphazard and restricts itself to the sexual act, is
completely dierent om heavenly ers, which orients the mind towards the eternal beauty of wisdom and
intelligence. Depending on the kind of love one feels and the object it is directed upon, ers can guide the
lover towards good or bad acts. The love ignited by a pretty youths looks will last only as long as the looks
themselves, whereas the love for his ne intellect and good character will endure long aer his physical
beauty has faded away. Other speakers see love as the pursuit of completeness, the desire for harmony, and
the appreciation of beauty, that inspire poetry and virtue. As we shall see, many of these ideas, such as
Aristophanes suggestion that every soul has a mate to which it was once bound, will recur centuries into
the future, and with each oration, love becomes further dened and complex; yet it is with Socrates, the
nal speaker of the evening, that one of Platos denitive contributions to the theory of love comes to light.
When Socrates turn to speak arrives, he begins by conrming with Agathon that love is necessarily a
state of relational absencethe lover must love what he neither has nor himself isthat which he lacks.
One cannot be in love with nothing, but must rather have an object, external to oneself, upon which love
is directed. Even if this object is within the lovers possession, there must always be that possibility of
deprivation. The story of Narcissus exemplies why this is so: if lover and beloved are one and the same,
love will feedback on itself in an innite loop with nowhere to go, paralyzing and consuming its victim.
Ers, therefore, can be neither good nor beautiful, if these are the very properties it is drawn to and desires;
as these properties exist in both the mortal realm and the divine, the common and the heavenly, love is not
entirely part of either realm, but is rather a great spirit ( ) that falls midway between the two
worlds. This is a critical role that Plato has given to love, far more involved with the aairs of humanity
than the random capriciousness of Hesiods Eros:
Cf. Dimitri Gutas, Platos Symposion in the Arabic Tradition, Oriens, 31 (1988).
Plato, Symposium, trans. by Tom Grith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 200e4.
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[Love] acts as an interpreter and means of communication between gods and men. He takes requests
& oerings to the gods, and brings back instructions and benets in return. Occupying this middle
position he plays a vital role in holding the world together. He is the medium of all prophecy and
religion, whether it concerns sacrice, forms of worship, incantations, or any kind of divination or
sorcery. There is no direct contact between god & man. All association & communication between
them, waking or sleeping, takes places through Eros.
With these words, love can now be understood as a kind of bridge that unites the lover, the imperfect
mortal, with that which he is not: immortality. In whatever way it is practiced, ers will bring the lover
some degree closer to this state. The ers between men and women produces ospring; the ers between
two warriors is commemorated in song and legend; the ers for fame will promote the composition of
beautiful poetry or great philosophy. The higher the ideal towards which ers is directed, the more noble
the progeny: as Socrates says, We would all choose children of this kind [that of Homer] for ourselves,
rather than human children.
In the guise of Socrates, Plato has thus posited two theses about love which will profoundly aect
its treatment in the literature to come. The rst is the transformation of the traditional duality of love
between teacher/lover and student/beloved, championed by Pausinas in the Symposium, into a triangular
relationship with love as the go-between that links the bond between two mortals with the world of the
gods. Thus, any relationship that is to be uitful must have love acting as its guide. The second thesis
is that the object to which love is drawn is not in fact the Good ( ), as Phaedrus had argued, but
rather beauty ()the universal that makes all other universals intelligible. As Richard Hunter notes,
such an overlap between these words is not as problematic in Greek as it is in English, as the Greek words
for beauty and ugliness (, kalon, and , aischron) also indicate commendable or reprehensible
behavior on a moral levelyet the distinction between the two is critical. Unlike the Good, which is
totally abstract and must be demonstrated in instances to be understood, beauty is a manifest property
belonging to all things that attract our attention and arouse our desire. While the search for good can be
misleading to the inexperienced, the desire for beauty will be a sure guide for the initiate and philosopher
alike. It is for this reason that Diotima tells Socrates that the true acolyte of love must begin his quest
Plato, Symposium, 202e2.
Ibid., 209c9.
Richard Hunter, Platos Symposium, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84.
Ibid., 80, 87. One will notice, of course, that the substitution of beautiful for good is a commonplace occurrence in many
modern languages of the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia.
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with the pursuit of physical beauty. This is the rst step of a series of insights om which he will
proceed to love all physical beauty, then the beauty of human behavior, then the beauty of knowledge, and
nally the perfection of eternal Beauty itself:
Then suddenly he will see a beauty of a breathtaking nature, Socrates, the beauty which is the
justication of all his eorts so far. It is eternal, neither coming to be nor passing away, neither
increasing nor decreasing All other forms of beauty derive from it, but in such a way that their
creation or destruction does not strengthen or weaken it, or aect it in any way at all Such is
the experience of the man who approaches, or is guided towards, love in the right way, beginning
with the particular examples of beauty, but always returning from them to the search for that one
beauty.
One may well notice how the language Plato uses in describing the philosophers encounter with Beauty
strongly resembles that of the beatic vision narrative in Christian and Islamic literature centuries later;
however, we must not forget that this rosy picture is not about love in general, but the sublime ers
of the intellectual realm. Back on earth, carnal desire remains an impediment to, or even enemy of,
reason. It is a property of the appetite, that unthinking and insatiable element of the soul that leads us to
gluttony and avarice if le unchecked. Of all the human appetites, Plato considers the sexual to be the most
seductive and dicult to control, and thus the most dangerous, for if it is not directed and constrained
by proper principles, it could become the ingrained norm that falsely poses as the good society. The
danger to society posed by ee love is not unique to Plato; as Kathy Gaca explores in her book, The
Making of Fornication, the regulation of the sexual appetite is an issue that also preoccupies the Stoics,
the Pythagoreans, and the Academics (not to mention our parents), and all of these thinkers produced
systems for managing ers and safely integrating it into the community. While these systems remained
purely theoretical exercises during Platos lifetime, many of their their recommendations would eventually
be incorporated into Christian practices and have a subsequently enormous impact on the sexual ethics of
late Antiquity and the high Middle Period.
The root of the danger posed by ers ultimately lies within Platos understanding of how the soul works.
The appetitive element is one component; following that are the spirited and rational. Emotions arising
Plato, Symposium, 210a6.
Ibid., 210e8.
Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity,
Volume 40, Hellenistic Culture and Society, (University of California Press, 2003), 2.
8
om the spirited element of the soul, such as fear or anger, are also benecial in their appropriate context
(the ght-or-ight mechanism, for example), but they can also overturn the rational element om its
rightful place as the arbitrator and judge of action if le unchecked. As long as the chain of command
is kept intact, the appetitive and spirited elements of the soul will function properly in keeping the body
sustained and capable of action, but if their proper order is disrupted through a weakness of character or
will, it can damage not only the individual body but also the society in which it lives. In the Republic,
Socrates illustrates this disorder with the example of a man who really wants to have a drink, even when he
knows he shouldnt. He may either remain paralyzed by his indecision, he may get drunk and regret it the
next day, or he will allow his reason to guide him and put the wine away. The acturing of this mans will
is a result of ers pitting two elements of the soul at odds with each other: the element doing the stopping
in such cases arise[s] om rational calculation, while the things that drive and drag are present because
of feelings and desires. Although ers is intrinsically sublime, being naturally oriented towards beauty, if
it is diverted away om its heavenly source by human appetite or spirit and trained upon a mundane object,
the result is, in pure terms, an abomination and perversion of the natural order; it is this very monstrous
state in which the mind commands itself and meets resistance that Augustine nds himself at odds with
in the Confessions. The use and misuse of the various divisions of the soul is a cornerstone in the thought
of Ibn Sn and other Muslim philosophers, and the Platonic division of the soul into the appetitive, the
spirited, and the rational similarly re-appears in Dantes division of Hell into the sins of cupidity, violence,
and aud.
While Platos ideas provide the basic foundation for most philosophical inquiries into love well into the
early modern era, the work of Aristotle also plays a critical role, for much of the philosophical, theological,
and literary work of the scholars of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was conducted with both thinkers
in mind, oen with the established goal of reconciling their views. Although Aristotles hermeneutics
are radically dierent om Platos, his discussion of ers does not seem to directly refute the ideas of his
mentor, but rather enrich them and complicate them with alternative possibilities. Aristotle does not work
within Platos construct of forms, but rather with his own theory of substance; nevertheless, love remains
Plato, Republic, trans. by C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 439c5.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991), VIII.ix (21), p. 147.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. by Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 36.
9
a fundamental element of existence, providing cause and reason to the motions that bind the universe.
Having divided all matter into three substances, the eternal, the destructible (which can be detected), and
the unmoved (which is beyond perception), Aristotle concludes that all observable existence must ow
om the unmoved substance, which he names the First Mover. Being the essence that confers eternity
to those incorporeal yet sensible laws (mathematics, truth, beauty, etc.), the First Mover is intrinsically
good, and all creation is moved by its presence. It is somewhat counter-intuitive at rst to imagine that the
First Mover is the one thing that does not itself move, but for Aristotle, movement represents change, and
change is an indication of temporality. The First Mover does not bring about change through any action
of its ownit is rather existence that causes its own movement by making the First Mover the object of
its desire. Thus, Aristotle considers desire and the Good as one and the same: the apparent good is the
object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish.
It is well-known that some aspects of Aristotles thought were much harder to integrate into Christian
theology than Platos. Petrarch writes that of the pre-Christian philosophers, Plato could not fully grasp
the truth, but he saw it and came closer to it than the rest. A memorable scene of Umberto Ecos The
Name of the Rose has the zealous monk Jorje of Burgos declare, Every word of the Philosopher, by whom
now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of God. He is speaking, for those who have
not read the book, of the rehabilitation of Aristotelian principles with Christian doctrine by St. Thomas
Aquinas (d. 1274), almost a millenium aer Neoplatonist thought had been successfully established in the
Church. Part of this conict is due to issues of timelessness and temporality. To suggest that God is
capable of action, of being drawn to his creation the same way it was drawn to him, would suggest that
he is, like the world, subject to changean unthinkable concept for Aristotles First Mover. This would,
in turn, put Gods eternity and total perfection into questionan unthinkable premise om a Christian
standpoint. The Aristotelean concept of unidirectional, unreciprocated ers, owing om the temporal
to the eternal, is contrary to the Biblical tradition that understands God as the supreme active agent, as
the Creator and Father who is moved and does show love towards his children. The Hebrew term for this
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), Lambda 1, p. 355.
Ibid., Lambda 7, p. 373.
Francesco Petrarca, On his own ignorance and that of many others, in: David Marsh, editor, Invectives, (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 321-322.
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1983), 473.
10
kind of love is (ah
h
), which is translated into the Greek Septuagint not as ers but as agap, the
reciprocal and unselsh love between people. In his study Agape and Eros, the Swedish theologian Anders
Nygren argues that it is the sacricial nature of agap, rather than the self-fulllment of of ers, that makes
redemption through Jesus possible and distinguishes Christianity om Platonism. C.S. Lewis also writes
that agap, which he calls gift-love, is the greatest of loves, the only one that is whole unto itself, and the
cornerstone of Christian grace. As we shall see, a similar concern regarding the proper way of loving God,
or of describing Gods love, will occupy the discussion of love in both the Latin Christian tradition and
that of Islamicate literatures in Arabic and Persian.
Amor et Caritas
The world in which Augustine lived was one of rapid change and transformation. The western half of
the Roman empire was visibly disintegrating, and Christianity, still a minority religion, was starting to
mature into a system that could incorporate elements of the old intellectual heritage and compete with
it for dominance. Augustines own life reects the heterogeneity and abundance of philosophical and
religious movements that distinguished this time. Raised with an excellent education in the classical Latin
style of Virgil and Cicero, he was never much impressed with the crude language of the Latin Bible
(before its revision by Jerome in the late 300s) and remained lukewarm towards his mothers Christianity.
However, he was inspired by Ciceros Hortensius to begin questioning the dierence between truth and
eloquence, leading him to experiment with a number of the major spiritual and philosophical movements
of his milieu, rst the anti-materialist teachings of Mn, then the absolute skepticism of the Academics in
Milan. Neither path proved satising in the long run, but they provided him with the perfect background
against which he could dene and defend his theology, a polemical approach that would distinguish his
writing for the rest of his life.
It was in this state of crisis that Augustine encounters what he calls some books of the Platonists,
Carter Lindberg, Love: A Brief History Through Western Christianity, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 15.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960), 163-170.
Henry Chadwick, Introduction, in: Confessions, (Oxford University Press, 1991), xiv.
James Wetzel, Predestination, Pelagianism, and foreknowledge, in: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, editors, The
Cambridge Companion to Augustine, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54.
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translated om Greek into Latin. While there is some debate surrounding the question of who it was he
was actually reading, Book VII of the Confessions oers a striking reprisal of the Platonic approximation
of eternity through turning into the self, expressed in an explicitly Christian context.
By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered
into my innermost citadel and with my souls eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my
soul the immutable light higher than my mindnot the light of every day, nor a larger version of
the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and lled everything
with its magnitude. It was not that light, but a dierent thing, utterly dierent from all our kinds
of light. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil oats on water, nor as heaven is above
earth. It was superior because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it. The person
who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it.
For Augustine, this path of coming to know God through love is a two-tiered process. It is not enough
to simply convert; one must conont and absolve ones own past if access to the truth is to be achieved.
Much of the Confessions is Augustines own process of self-rehabilitation, including his relationship with
his father and mother, his grief over the death of a iend, his separation om his concubine of een years,
and his own perverse pleasure in wickedness, stealing his neighbors pears merely for the thrill of doing
what was not allowed. It is through this dicult and sometimes painful self-examination that he can
conont the problem of his own evil in Book VIII, the appropriately-titled Birthpangs of Conversion, and
acknowledge the need for outside intercession. The role of introspection as the rst step towards wisdom
is the same for Plato and Augustine alike; the opening passage of the Confessions, in which Augustine
tells God, You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our
heart is restless until it rests in you, is an expression of amor, the same yearning for the beloved that
the classic writers saw as ers. However, ers is in itself a gi, borne out of a deeper love, the agap, or for
Augustine, the caritas, of a benecent God who bestows the gi of introspection and subsequent salvation
to his children.
It is this second component of conversion, the reliance upon caritas to deliver oneself om ones own
James J. ODonnell, Augustine: His Life and Times, in: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, editors, The Cambridge
Companion to Augustine, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22.
Augustine, Confessions, VII.x , p. 123.
Ibid., II.iv , p. 29.
Ibid., I.i , p. 3.
12
darkness, that distinguishes Augustines journey om that of his Neoplatonist predecessors, establishing a
model of ascent through descent that is repeated in the works of the literary giants of the thirteenth century
like Dante, Ar, and Nim. While Plotinus claims that through discipline and training, the light of
truth can be beheld without a guide, Augustine repeatedly points to the necessity of Gods intervention
in order to receive the beatic vision, writing that within the Scriptures, all the truth I had read in the
Platonists was stated here together with the commendation of your grace. The willful ignorance of this
truth, this culpable rejection the on the part of the Neoplatonists, is the real cause of mans sin. It
is ultimately Gods love, his caritas, rather than Platonic ers or Ovidian amor that recalls the soul to the
Divine and inspires goodness and virtue among humanity. The divine essence of caritas is found in its
wholly self-eacing and self-sacricing nature, in which the self is extinguished and the individuals needs
and desires play no part in the relationship: in his On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes, I call charity
the souls motion toward eoying God for his own sake, and eoying ones self and ones neighbor for
the sake of God. Most importantly, it is the caritas of Gods worldly incarnation in Jesus that gives
humanity its unique path to salvation: the realization of the Platonic eros depends on the gi of agape
through Gods Incarnation. While ers and amor remain an important element of the spiritual journey in
Augustines theology, they are ultimately dependent on caritas, a superior form of love that is not directed
to the benet of the self but to that of the other.
Although Augustines writings provide a sound foundation for the redemptive element of caritas, it is
Boethius who supports many of his conclusions om a purely rational standpoint (sola ratione), rather than
the partial or wholesale reliance on scripture (auctoritates), as had been the method of Ambrose of Milan
and Hilary of Poiters. Well-versed in both Latin and Greek, Boethius composed a body of work that
established the basis for the study of logic for many centuries aer his death, translating and commenting
Richard Sorabji, Time, mysticism, and creation, in: William Mann, editor, Augustines Connfessions: Critical Essays, (Lan-
ham: Rowman & Littleeld Publishers, 2006), 213.
Augustine, Confessions, VII.xxi (123), pp. 130-31.
William E. Mann, Augustine on evil and original sin, in: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, editors, The Cambridge
Companion to Augustine, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46.
Michael S. Sherwin, Aquinas, Augustine, and the Medieval Scholastic Crisis concerning Charity, in: Michael Dauphinais,
Barry David and Matthew Levering, editors, Aquinas the Augustinian, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
2007), 184.
Lindberg, 57.
M.W.F. Stone, Augustine and medieval philosophy, in: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, editors, The Cambridge
Companion to Augustine, (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 254.
13
upon the work of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Porphyry. In addition, he was a Christian, living in the
post-Augustinian world in which Platos identication of the Good was seen to be one and the same as God,
and it is om this position that he writes his famous Consolatio philosophiae, one of the most widely-read,
published, and translated treatises in the Middle Ages. This work in many ways exemplies the successful
synthesis of Neoplatonism with Christian theology: when Boethius is uustly accused of treason against
the state and thrown into prison, Philosophy comes to him, driving o the ineectual Muses who only
know how to fuel his grief, and reminds him how reason can reorient his bewildered mind towards the
truth and bring him to an understanding of the greater wisdom of Gods plan, turning his death itself into
a Socratic victory over iustice.
The opening chapters of the Consolatio begin with a series of classically-inspired iunctions against
Fortune, that false iend who only lures men into a false sense of security in material prosperity before
stealing it away once more. This familiar trope is then tied into a Christian-Augustinian rooting of the
nal good with God; while wealth, power, glory, and other transitory pleasures are nice while they last, at
the end of the day they are necessarily nite and worthless. The real problem, in Boethius view, is that
mans devotion to all of these happinesses, wealth, rank, sovereignty, glory, and physical pleasurewhich
are good aer all, because our hearts desire their possessioncan distract him om the greater good om
which they are all derived, in essence substituting the uit for the tree, that same elevation of common
love over heavenly love which Plato condemns. He writes: Human depravity, then, has broken into
agments that which is by nature one and simple; men try to grasp part of a thing which has no parts and
so get neither the part, which does not exist, nor the whole, which they do not seek. Wisdom is attained
when the philosopher realizes that all of these pleasures are in fact components of a greater, indivisible
substance, the true happiness promised by the Good.
The harmonious integration of philosophy with divine revelation, one of the chief goals of Boethius
intellectual career, reaches a peak in the tenth and eleventh proses of Book Three of the Consolatio. In a
series of logical steps, Boethius lays out the general schema for a Neoplatonist understanding of God that
Richard Green, Translators Introduction, in: The Consolation of Philosophy, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Pub-
lishing, 1962), xi.
Victor Watts, Introduction, in: The Consolation of Philosophy, (London: Penguin Group, 1969), xi-xii.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. by Richard Green (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing,
1962), 58.
14
would resonate in the literature of the Middle Ages for centuries to come. The sequence is as follows: if
God is the perfect good, and if true happiness comes om the perfect good, then God is true happiness.
We already know that all earthly happinesses are in fact incomplete, transitory manifestations of a deeper,
eternal, and wholly self-contained happiness, the unity of being that we call divine. The truly happy man,
then, is one who partakes in the joy of divine unity: Everyone who is happy is a god and, although it
is true that God is one by nature, still there may be many gods by participation. Fundamentally, all
things are drawn towards unity to the capacity of their own bodies, for it is through sustained and ordered
unity that their own existence continues; while animals seek sustenance through unity of body, it is in the
capacity of humankind to achieve unity of mind by disregarding the transient pleasures and focusing on
the fundamental gi of caritas that they all stem om. This is the true aberration behind the cardinal
sins: gluttony, lust, avarice, sloth, and so onthese behaviors invert the natural order and inclination of
things, confusing the part for the whole and splitting apart the very unity that bestows life and happiness
upon us. In the end of this prose, Boethius calls once again for the Platonic turning-inwards of the soul,
the reclamation of the unity of being, emanating om and bestowed by God, that gives us life and true
happiness:
The man who searches deeply for the truth, and wishes to avoid being deceived by false leads, must
turn the light of his inner vision upon himself. He must guide his soaring thoughts back again and
teach his spirit that it possesses hidden among its own treasure whatever it seeks outside itself.
Bearing these words in mind, let us now turn eastwards.
ubb, Haw, and Ishq :
As in Greek, there are many words for love in the Arabic classical tradition with decidedly dierent conno-
tations. Probably the most common, then and now, is ubb. Lane notes that ubb tends to lean towards a
Boethius, 63. This may sound a little strange for an orthodox understanding of monotheism, and indeed it is; it is good to
remember that ever since Plato, philosophers had the potential to become gods among men, due to their proximity to the esoteric
truth that would naturally elude most people. A similar elitism can be found later in the mystical traditions of Neoplatonism
and Christian asceticism, and Boethius shows it here. The early Muslim mystic Rbiah al-Adawyah, to whom we will turn
presently, is similarly counted among the ahl al-khaw (the elite, the elect).
Ibid., 69.
15
sense of admiration and praise, the acknowledgment of aect and approval, especially as a naturally arising
instinct. The Qms al-mui associates ubb with generosity (karam) and iendship (widd). Wadd
and its cognates mawaddah and widd, for their part, are dened in the Lisn al-Arab as love in all ways
towards the good (al-ubb f jam madkhil al-khayr), while Lane emphasises the aectionate, tender,
and desirous elements of wadd in his lexicon. Both words are closely related to each other and seem to
jointly express a kind of love that is not dissimilar to the Hebrew ah
h
and its Greek translation agap
in the Bible. It is therefore not surprising to nd that wadd, ubb, and their cognates appear in the Qurn
140 times in total. ubb is used in the context of both God and humankind in the same way Lane de-
scribes, with a connotation of judgement or approval: God loves the godfearing (3:76, 9:4), God loves
the just (49:9), God loves not the evildoers (3:57, 3:140); they give food, for the love of Him (76:8), if
these are dearer [aabb] than God (9:24). Wadd, on the other hand, carries a distinct avor of yearning,
longing, and desire that ubb lacks, e.g., they yearn for you to suer (3:118), would any of you wish to
have a garden of palms and vines (2:266), in addition to its familiar connotation of aectionate love I do
not ask of you a wage for this, except love for the kinsfolk (42:23). Wadd is also the root for one of the
ninety-nine beautiful names of God, al-Wadd.
The converse of ubb in the Qurn is haw, which indicates, through its cognate haw (air, wind), the
mercurial and capricious aspect of lust, whether it be for sex, power, or material desire. One need only
imagine Dantes contrapasso for the lascivious in the second circle of Hell to imagine what is implied by
haw: the infernal whirlwind, which never rests, drives the spirits before its violence; turning and striking,
it tortures them. The use of the word in the Qurn is overwhelmingly negative and consistently linked
to the deeds of the wicked (al-limn) and those who are astray (al-lln); it is, in fact, almost always
found in counterposition to the straight path (al-ir al-mustaqm), e.g., then follow not caprice, so as
to swerve (4:135), many lead astray by their caprices (6:119), him who has taken his caprice to be his
god (45:23). Due to the weight of the Qurnic invective against it, haw remains a largely negative term
Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863).
Muammad ibn Yaqb Frzbd, al-Qms al-Mu, (Bayrt: al-Muassasah al-Arabyah, [197-]).
Muammad ibn Mukarram Ibn Manr, Lisn al-Arab, (Bayrt: Dr Iy al-Turth al-Arab, 1988).
Hanna E. Kassis, A Concordance of the Quran, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 40-41, 509. All verse numbers
are om the Cairo Standard Edition of the Qurn.
Ibid., 1255.
Dante, V.31-33, p. 89.
Kassis, 504.
16
in later literature on love, something akin to the English lust. Ibn al-Jawz (d. 1201) has a full treatise
entitled Dhamm al-haw, The Condemnation of Lust, which combines the rebuke of the preacher with
the advice of the physician: You should know that for your sake, to bring about your safe recovery and
heath, I came down o the hill of dignity in this book to the low point of cheapening myself by speaking
of [some of ] those things. Whatever variations it had, haw never approaches the realm of mysticism
or transcendence; it remains rst and foremost an earthly pleasure, nice to write about, but dangerous for
ones spiritual growth.
One word for love that does not appear in the Qurn at all is ishq, which is reasonable, because it is
the word used to describe pathological love-sickness, as ers had been in ancient Greece. The inuence of
Hellenistic medicine is clear in this regard: ishq was considered a total imbalance of the emotions and a
loss of stability and rational thought. The early philologist and lexicographer al-Ama (d. 831) reports
that the Bedouin would say, Madness has its varieties and ishq is one of them. The relentless desire
of ishq was known to burn the blood, creating an excess of black bile and leading to confusion, blunted
wits, and madness. Love could also transmit heat, evidenced by the hot sighs and ushed extremities
of the lover, and the gaze of the beloved (mashq) could literally boil the blood of the poor soul it was
trained upon. The Galenic diagnosis of love through the humors is found in the works of the Byzantine
physicians Oribasius (4th c.) and Paulus of Aegina (7th c.), who both classi love-sickness as a category
of melancholic illness; some centuries later, the treatises of al-Majs (10th c.), Ibn Sn and Ibn al-Jazzr
(11th c.) arm this opinion. unayn ibn Isq (d. 873), who translated Paulus work into Arabic, also
transmits a late Alexandrian text ascribed to Hippocrates in his Nawdir al-falsifah, in which Aristotle
enumerates the many unfortunate ends that await the lover:
Sometimes he moans heavily, causing his spirit to remain concealed for twenty-four hours. He
continues [in this state] until he is taken for dead, and then he is buried while still alive. Sometimes
he heaves a deep sigh and his soul is stied in his pericardium. The heart then closes in on the soul
Lois Anita Gien, Theory of Profane Love Among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre, (New York: New York University
Press, 1971), New York University Studies in Near Eastern Civilization 3, 28.
Joseph Norment Bell, Avicennas Treatise on Love and the Nonphilosophical Muslim Tradition, Der Islam, 63 (1986):1, 79.
Gien, 64.
Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Layl and Majnn: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nims Epic Romance, (Leiden: Brill,
2003), 20.
Dimitri Gutas, The Malady of Love, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 104 (1984):1, 22.
17
and does not release it until he dies. Sometimes during moments of relaxation he raises his eyes to
look around and he suddenly sees the person he lovesand his soul departs in one stroke.
Dimitri Gutas notes that this text has been paraphrased, alluded to, and cited in the Arabic literary corpus
for almost seven centuries, om the verse of al-Mutanabb (d. 965) to the treatise of al-Sala (d. 1655),
conrming its place in the very fabric of Arabic literature. As ishq develops as a term within the Islamic
milieu, it should be recognized that it will always carry this implication of madness and imbalance in its use.
It is this very duality that allows it to be applied to the Greek understanding of ers, giving it a suppleness
of meaning and manifestation that makes it such a critical tool in the formation of mystical and romantic
verse.
Perhaps due to its absence in the Qurn and adth literature, ishq was probably a more appropriate
term for theorization than ubb or haw. Despite the obvious dangers posed by the concupiscent love
that ishq represented, it nonetheless carried a certain allure as a complex and exceedingly interesting but
mysterious human experience. The super-human acts of strength, endurance, and virtue, the mad self-
destruction of lover and beloved, the total upheaval of body and soul pitted against one another, and all
the amazing highs and lows experienced by the love-stricken were a part of what gave the experience its
appeal as a literary subject. It is, in fact, a challenge, an opportunity to test the mettle of those who
dare to swim in such perilous waters. In her invaluable overview of profane love in Arabic literature, Lois
Anita Gien makes the point that the dark depths of passion are essentially tragic rather than evil; as
long as one conducts oneself honorably such love appears to be a noble adventure of the spirit or at least
a noble form of suering. While this theme is a well-known aspect of the quest narrative in medieval
literature, it can also be found in an early genre of love poetry in the Islamicate world, the udhr poetry
that reached its peak during the Umayyad caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries . This style,
named (perhaps spuriously) aer the Udhr tribe that performed it, essentially consisted of narratives of
unfullled, Platonic love, leading to its present-day meaning of chastity in Arabic.
The plots of Udhr poetry tend to rely on stock characters and conventional senarios, in which the
Gutas, Malady of Love, 43.
Ibid., 54.
Gien, 117.
Ibid., 118.
Seyed-Gohrab, 60.
18
focus is not on the story itself but the psychological intensity of its telling, and the themes of pleasure in
pain (istidhb al-alam) and transcendence through intense feeling (al-tasm bi-al-ifah) are at the fore.
The basic story is some variation of the following: the poet falls in love with a girl, but is rejected by
the maidens father, who seeks to marry her to another man. Distraught, the lover runs into the desert
in a total renunciation of the world. He grows famished, his clothes are rent, and he spurns all human
contact. Eventually, he dies and becomes a kind of martyr to love; his gravesite may even become a place
of pilgrimage. Probably the most famous example of this genre is the famous Layl and Majnn cycle,
attributed to Qays ibn al-Mulawwa and later appropriated and retold by Nim, who adds numerous
Persian elements and threads the disparate episodes of the Arabic sources into an extended narrative, the
third of his Pa Ga. In some of the Arabic versions, Qays and Layl come om two rival families and
know each other as children, but when they grow up, Layl is taken away om him (ujibat anhu), and
in separation, their longing grows all the more intense. By chance they meet again, and, emboldened by
his desire, Qays goes to Layls father to request her hand in marriage, but is turned down for the sake of
avoiding scandal. When Layl gets married to another man, the grief-stricken Qays refuses food and drink
and wanders aimlessly into the desert, where he eventually pines away, despite the eorts of his family to
save him.
The debate over the origins and motives of this poetry extends om the Abbasid period onwards
and makes for very interesting reading. In his al-Aghn, Ab Faraj al-Afahn (d. 967) observes that
nobody could prove they had actually seen Qays ibn al-Mulawwa, nor that there was a consistent record
documenting his origins. A contemporary scholar, Ibrhm Abd al-Ramn, attributes the birthplace
of Udhr poetry not to the Arabian peninsula, but to Iraq, where he sees the Udhr renunciation of the
world and denouncement of human endeavors as a consequence of the revived intertribal hostilities that
broke out aer the death of the Prophet. Others ascribe the style to a kind of clash of civilizations felt
by the newly-settled Bedouin in the amr (garrison towns) of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, or to an emotional
crisis brought upon by the imposition of strict Islamic sexual codes on their formerly licentious lifestyle.
Seyed-Gohrab, 66.
Ibid., 53.
Muammad Ghunaym Hill, Layl wa-Majnn f adabayn al-Arab wa-al-Fris, (Bayrt: Dr al-Awdah, 1980), 42-43.
Bal, al-Shir al-udhr.
Ibid.
19
Udhr poetry is strikingly anti-social, self-destructive, and preoccupied with death, leading Renate Jacobi
to see it as a wholesale rejection of the status quo. One of the most well-known commentators on the
subject is Taha Hussein, who prefers to see this genre as a collective response by the Arabs of the z and
Najd to their increasing marginalization at the hands of the Umayyads. As the Bedouin withdrew om
political life, they turned to gures like those of Majnn, in which the ustration, despair, and deprivation
they felt could be expressed through the metaphor of an unattainable love.


.
.

These people turned away from their wars and their pre-Islamic means of pleasure as they withdrew
from an active life in Islam into themselves. They devoted themselves to this and derived from
it a tone, not devoid of sadness, yet a tone of self-denial and mysticism. I know that the word
mysticism here does not carry the meaning of what I want; let us say that they turned towards
something of the highest example in moral life.
Husseins uneasy reference to mysticism (taawwuf ) brings us to an important issue within the topic
of Udhr love, which is its similarity with Su accounts of love developed later on. Similar characteristics
between the two genres include asceticism, isolation om society, a relentless xation upon the beloved,
and especially the performance of fan, in which the intensity of passion and longing for union is actively
harnessed and amplied to the point that the lover initiates his own annihilation, like a moth consumed by
the ame. These elements make it tempting to suggest a direct lineage om Udhr imagery to Su mystical
narratives and even the courtly literature of the Abbasid period. Such interpretations are not devoid of
complications, of course. Jacobi points out that much of the courtly avor of Udhr writing was in fact
back-projected onto an idealized Bedouin past by Abbasid poets, and Muammad Ghunaym Hill argues
that even though the loves of the Udhr and the Su are expressed in similar ways with similar outcomes,
Renate Jacobi, Udhr, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2
nd
ed. (2010) URL: http://www.brillonline.nl/.
Taha Hussein, al-Majmah al-kmilah li-muallaft al-duktr Th usayn, (Bayrt: Dr al-Kitb al-lam, 1980), volume
2, 194. Translation mine. This and following original translations om Arabic and Persian are included with the original text, in
case I have made any errors.
Jacobi, Udhr.
20
they are based on diering motives and concepts. Although transcendence is possible in Udhr poetry, it
is attained through an intense devotion to a specic individual that cannot be transferred to another object.
The early Susm of people like Amad al-Bar (d. 728), in contrast, is rooted in a now-familiar process
of reection (kr) and self-examination (musabah), consolidated with the state of islm, total submission
to Gods will. Not being bound to a specic object, love can be sublimated om one object of desire
to another, for the inspiration of that love remains eternally embedded in the abstract qualities of beauty,
virtue, and so on. As Muammad Bal summarizes:

.
The Udhr nature consists of a sentiment overowing with yearning for the being of the beloved in
her positional and temporal dimension. However, the Su nature is that of knowledge, consisting
of the esoteric aspects of philosophical ideas, connected, in their essence, with the mystical vision; thus
it addresses a being absolutely removed from that which is limited to and constrained within space
and time [al-maddyah].
The Su approach to love might be well viewed through the example of Rbiah al-Adawyah (d. 801),
a contemporary of Amad al-Bar and a revered model of early Su mysticism. Her life represents a
turning point in mystical terminology within Islam, for while previous Sus had preferred to use words
like yearning (shawq) and iendship (khullah) to describe their feelings towards God, she was the rst major
Muslim mystic to describe her relationship with God in terms of intense, personal ubb and maabbah.
Rbiahs appropriation of ubb as a feeling one could have towards God is rooted in a Qurnic concept that
describes the kind of love one can bear towards ones better half, a state grounded in repose or residing,
in Arabic, sakan. Among the verses that suggest this idea is Srat al-Rm, verse 21:
Hill, 172.
Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Studies in Oriental Culture 5,
235.
Bal, al-Shir al-udhr.
Fakhry, 236, and Seyed-Gohrab, 19.
21

And among his signs is this, that he created for you mates from among yourselves, so that you may
dwell in tranquillity with them, and that he has put love and mercy between you; signs are in this
for those who consider.
In this verse, we see how for every person, God has created a mate or partner (zawj, pl. azwj) in
which one can reside in tranquility (li-taskun ilayh). In another passage, Srat al-Zumar verse 5, we
nd a recurrence of Aristophanes idea that every human soul has a half with which it was once united:
He created you out of one soul, om which he then created its mate (Khalaqakum min nafs widah
thumma jaala minh zawjah). Rbiahs innovation is to use this term towards God, rendering him the
partner in which she can reside, something she eectively conrms in this saying attributed to her: I have
ceased to exist and have passed out of self. I have become one with God and am altogether His. This is
done not through devotion to another soul situated in time and space, but rather to the eternal concepts
of beauty and majesty (jaml and jall) which provide her residence. The ultimate result is the end of her
existence, just as it is with the Udhr lover, but it is a mystical transcendence thatdespite the suggestion
that her soul was formed out of the same substance as Gods essence, an idea that Augustine, for example,
considered outrageouswas palatable enough for al-Ghazl to accept as being compatible within Sunni
orthodoxy.
Although there is a clear understanding of the destructive power of lovephysiologically, psycho-
logically, and spirituallyin all these genres of prose and poetry, the experience of sublime beauty and
out-of-body transcendence are possible through through the lovers ishq, the seless and noble rending of
the corporeal self in return for spiritual purication. The infatuated gentleman is prescribed by physicians
like al-Rz to continuous fasting, carrying heavy burdens, undertaking lengthy journeys and the like.
Qurn, 30:2 Translation mine, based o of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Quran: Text, Translation & Commentary, (Elmhurst,
New York: Tahrike Tarsile Quran, 1987).
Qurn, 39:
Margaret Smith, Rbiah al-Adawiyya al-aysiyya, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2
nd
ed. (2010) URL: http://www.
brillonline.nl/.
Unsur al-Mal ibn Iskandar Kay Ks, A Mirror for Princes: The Qbs Nma, trans. by Reuben Levy (Cresset Press,
1951), 72.
22
The Udhr lover, once isolated om society, adopts an ascetic lifestyle akin to the practice of early Chris-
tian monks and other holy men; he fasts, avoids eating meat, abstains om sleep, and consecrates his entire
being to the image of his beloved. The Su mystic would do similarly. Such singular focus on the object
of devotion disciplines the lower soul (nafs) and allows the unhindered ascent of the higher soul (r)as
Jall al-Dn Rm (d. 1273) would later say, the body is like a reed whose nafs has been hollowed out,
allowing the r of the Deity to blow through it unhindered. Nor were these practices unacceptable for
orthodox Muslims; while the Prophet himself rejected the most extreme forms of asceticism, traditionists
recorded a number of adth in praise of fasting and vegetarianism and their benecial inuence on the
spirit.
Parallel to the development of love in Udhr and Su thought was the renaissance in Hellenistic philos-
ophy through Arabic translation, an event that would leave an enormous impact on the poets who attended
the courts of Muslim, and later Christian, royalty. The importance of this movement cannot be overstated;
it lasted for two hundred years, united the old Byzantine and Sasanian elites with their new Arab coun-
terparts, and resulted in the critical editing and translation of nearly all secular Greek writing available in
late Antiquity into Arabic. The eects of this translation movement are equally signicant for both the
Islamicate and Christianate cultural spheres. Studies by Dimitri Gutas and Majid Fakhry have shown a
remarkable overlap in specic theological positions between the Alexandrian theologian John Philoponos
(d. 570) and his Muslim counterparts al-Kind (d. 873) and Ibn Sn (d. 1037): in the rst instance, both
thinkers break om the dominant intellectual current of Neoplatonism to argue for creation ex nihilo,
and in the latter, Philoponos and Ibn Sn argue for the separation of body and the rational soul along
parallel tracks. In subsequent generations following the translation movement, the literary eorescence
of both ninth-century Byzantium and twelh-century Europe can also be tied to this eort.
Jall al-Dn Rm, The Masnavi, Book Two, trans. by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford University Press, 2007), Oxfords World
Classics, 31.
Seyed-Gohrab, 91-94.
Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbsid Society
(2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries), (London: Routledge, 1998), 1-6.
The above terminology is used so as not to ignore Jewish philosophy and mysticism, which plays a key role and is regrettably
underrepresented in the present study.
Fakhry, 77.
Dimitri Gutas, Philoponos and Avicenna on the Separability of the Intellect: A Case of Orthodox Christian-Muslim Agree-
ment, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 31 (1986):1-2, 128.
23
While the medicinal and physiological diagnosis of love-sickness as a disease had been common in
Arab, Byzantine, and Persian lands before Islam and the early centuries aer its arrival, the integration of
certain philosophical concepts about love into Islamic thought took some time and was not always ee
of contention. Al-Kind, for example, was wary of the emanative character of Neoplatonist ers, arguing
that nothing outside God himself can be supposed to possess innity. Almost a century later, the great
philosopher and polymath al-Farb (d. 950) wrote some of the most erudite expositions of Plato and
Aristotle in the world at the time and, in a manner reminiscent of Boethius, sought to harmonize the
two using Neoplatonist methods. Starting om an Aristotelian understanding of the Unmoved Mover
as intelectus intelligens intellectum, thought thinking itself, he argues for the origin of existence through
the pure and overowing perfection of the Supreme Being, to which all existence longs to be reunited.
Through this work, al-Farb incorporates the Neoplatonist tradition into Islamic thought and paves the
way for Ibn Sn, whose eschatology is clearly at work in both the Haft Paykar and the Divine Comedy,
guiding the distinction between guided and misguided love.
Ibn Sn (d. 1037) is one of the great philosophers and polymaths of the Islamic heritage, probably only
rivaled by Ibn Rushd for his impact on medieval European philosophy. His Risla f al-ishq, Treatise on
Love, is a graceful exposition of ishq within Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonist models. Similar to
Aristotle and Boethius, Ibn Sn describes love as a universal force that pervades all extant being; it is the
very state of existing that causes it to be lled with loveor conversely, it is the state of being lled with
love that causes existence: It is obvious that all beings determined by a design possess a natural desire and
an inborn love, and it follows of necessity that in such beings love is the cause of their existence that
which has arrived at the extreme of defect has been carried to absolute non-being. The engine of love,
as we saw in the Symposium, is physical beauty, which provides the access to heavenly Beauty. This theme
occurs in Augustine, who says that if one merely gazes out over the world and allows himself to be struck
by its inherent beauty and harmony, the sheer grandeur of Gods design will be felt and the soul will be
Fakhry, 75.
Ibid., 118.
Olga Lizzini, La questione delle fonti arabo-islamiche della Divina Commedia: qualche riessione sulla losoa (e su Avi-
cenna in particolare), in: Claudio Gabrio Antoni, editor, Echi letterari della cultura araba nella lirica provenzale e nella Commedia
di Dante, (Udine: Universit degli Studi di Udine, 2006), 60.
Emil L. Fackenheim, A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina, Mediaeval Studies, 7 (1945), 212.
24
inspired to return to its natural state of loving the Creator. Ibn Sns approach to this idea is as follows:
No being is ever ee om some connection with a perfection, and this connection with it is accompanied
by an innate love and desire for that which may unite it with its perfection. Thus, even inanimate objects
like dust or immaterial forces like light and gravity are all manifestations of Love, in that what gives them
their existence and movement is their longing to be reunited with the Pure Good om which they came.
Ibn Sn also oers an interesting elaboration of Platos division of the spirit into appetitive (nutritive),
spirited (emotional), and rational components by classiing ve categories of love that correspond with the
various stages of elevation: the love of the simple and inanimate, the love of the vegetative faculty, the love
of the animal faculty, the love of the noble-minded and gallant (uraf and tyn) for external beauty,
and the love of divine souls. All of these loves are derived om of the divine substance of God and are
all intrinsically good; the way a being loves or the faculty that it employs in its loving, however, will reect
the neness of the creature and the nobility of its spirit. Matter, the base form, will remain in existence
out of love for the cause of its being and its desire to remain in existence. Besides avoiding non-existence,
this form has nothing noble or praiseworthy in its love; Ibn Sn compares it to a low-born woman who
covers her defects with her sleeve if her veil is removed, a colorful if misogynist way to put it. Vegetables
are capable of nutritive love, which is expressed by seeking sustenance, growth, and reproduction, thus
continuing their existence. This corresponds with Platos appetitive property of the soul and would apply
to the common ers that is so poorly regarded by moralists of all stripes. In addition to natural love,
animals are also capable of voluntary love, due to their eedom of will and action. Thus a donkey, to quote
Ibn Sns example, will forsake the pasture if a wolf appears. It is capable of discerning two goods, the
rst a tasty meal, the second continued life, and can choose the better of the two. Emotions such as fear,
anger, lust, and courage are forces that guide animals to voluntarily move towards the greater good.
It should be noted, if it is not already clear, that these categorizations of love are not exclusive to a
particular category of being, but rather build o of each other with cumulative eect; plants are both matter
and living, so they love both through their existence and their growth, reproduction, and development.
R.A. Markus, Augustine: God and nature, in: A.H. Armstrong, editor, The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early
Medieval Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Fackenheim, 212.
Bell, 76.
Fackenheim, 215.
25
Humankind is capable of all three kinds of love described above and two more, although Ibn Sn believes
that most of our time is spent in the rst two states, existing, consuming, and reproducing. Although
his philosophy is committed to the idea that humankind is capable of fullling incredible potential, it is
evident that Ibn Sn has a dim view towards the bulk of humanity, equating the majority of our activity
to that of weeds. Even the exceptional individual who exhibits bravery and courage has only risen to the
emotional state of a lionagain, nothing to sneer at, but as humans, it is inappropriate and insulting to
neglect our capacity for rational thought, given that it is Gods unique gi to us that elevates us above the
animal kingdom. Love, aer all, is about loyalty and honoring the obligations you hold unto your beloved.
Just as animals have an emotional faculty that allows them to make decisions that vegetables cannot, so too
do humans have a rational faculty that allows and obliges them to bring their love to a higher and nobler
level than what animals could perceive or pursue:
If a man loves a beautiful form with animal desire, he deserves reproof, even condemnation and the
charge of sin, as, for instance, those who commit unnatural adultery and in general people who go
astray. But whenever he loves a pleasing form with an intellectual consideration, in the manner
we have explained, then this is to be considered as an approximation to nobility and an increase in
goodness. For he covets something whereby he will come nearer to the inuence of That which is the
First Source of inuence and the Pure Object of love, and more similar to the exalted and noble
beings. And this will dispose him to grace, generosity and kindness.
Although this philosophy hearkens back to Platos dualistic concept of the ideal image and the fun-
damentally awed or imperfect nature of materiality, it is closer to Aristotle in its outlook by creating a
teleology for all things and acknowledging the positive role matter plays in enabling divine love to be man-
ifest. This is due to the harmonious cooperation between the accumulated faculties of the higher forms:
the appetitive faculty of the animal assists the vegetative one; the rational faculty of the soul assists
the animal faculty in its aims. Like a servant obeying the orders of his master, the lower faculties can
be employed for positive endsas long as they arent allowed to call the shots. A similar reconciliation
of materiality and goodness is also prominent in Augustine, who writes, sin is not a desire for naturally
evil things, but an abandonment of better things evil is to use a good evilly. Ibn Sn explains how
Fackenheim, 221.
Ibid., 218.
Mann, 45.
26
the normally reprehensible perversion of sex for pleasure can thus be redeemed by allowing the intellect
to redirect the appetitive faculty om its primary aim, i.e., the attainment of pleasure, towards the most
excellent act of preservation of the species through procreation. Similarly, the love of beauty and the
desire to kiss and embrace it are not in themselves blameworthy, so long as they are fortied with a
high moral rectitude. An appreciation of the physical form can be a very positive thing, if it inspires
the soul to the Neoplatonic turning-inwards that will cause it to be aware of the Absolute Good. Thus
it is possible that one can desire, love, fear for, and converse with the object of desire, the mashuq, all
with the guidance of divine love; as Von Grunebaum explains, The moral duty for Avicenna is no longer
the suppression of the lower parts but rather their integration in the souls struggle toward perfection.
This rigorous approach to a holistic appraisal of love creates a space in which an extraordinarily complex
and rich expression of love can thrive. Far om being a simple sublimation of earthly love onto a divine
target, this lovea fascinating integration of old concepts and new, of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, of
ers, agap, and ubb udhr, of sakan and fan is a force simultaneously concupiscent and pure, allowing
for a multiplicity of objects while remaining unied in its overall direction.
While specically written om the perspective of a philosopher, Ibn Sns view was not at all incom-
patible with the intellectual and spiritual endeavors of those in other disciplines: poets, mystics, political
thinkers, theologians, and the (udab ), the men of letters and high society. As Joseph Bell observes, the
uncorrupted state of rational cognizance in the reception of Divine Truth is philosophically equal to the
Su concept of Divine Union (ittid); Muammad al-Ghazl, known as the Renewer (mujaddad) of
Islam, describes light emanating om God with much the same language Ibn Sn uses in his discourse
on love. In a treatise on ethics, Nar al-Dn al-s argues that the need for political justice arises om
the loss of love in the world, for if Love were to accrue between individuals, there would be no need for
equity and impartiality. In short, love came to take a crucial role in matters as diverse as personal com-
portment, religious devotion, political stability, the cosmic order, medicine, and the mystical experience.
Fackenheim, 222.
G. E. Von Grunebaum, Avicennas Risla f l-Iq and Courtly Love, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 11 October (1952):4,
233.
Ibid., 237.
Bell, 88.
Seyed-Gohrab, 177.
Julie Scott Meisami, Kings and Lovers: Ethical Dimensions of Medieval Persian Romance, Edebiyt: The Journal of Middle
Eastern Literatures, 1 (1987):1, 18.
27
In contrast to the perceived gap between the hard and so sciences of today, the thinkers of the medieval
Islamicate milieu had a holistic approach to all schools of knowledge, based on the assumption that there
is a discernible, eternal truth that could be detected between the lines of any science or discovered within
any phenomenon of the natural world. Love is the agent of this truth, the force that orders the universe
and guides it towards its proper destination. In this schema, it is morally incumbent for people to use their
elevated powers of discernment to distinguish between the proper and improper forms of love and choose
the path of virtue. The distinction is not always easy; this is why we need a guide.
Mirrors for self-scrutiny : Le miror aus amoreus
Alongside the more high-brow works of the philosophers and theoreticians we have examined thus far,
there exists a massive corpus of work concentrated on the more practical aspects of lovewhat to do if
you fall in love with a pretty boy or lovely lady, how do you keep the ames of passion alive, the remedies
for a broken heart, the pitfalls of jealousy and schadenfreude. In Europe, much of this genre owes a great
debt to Ovid, whose Ars armatoria was studied and reworked by authors om Andreas Capellanus to
Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, and Marlowe. In Iraq, Persia and Egypt, it is unlikely that Ovid was so
well known, but there are indications that the Greco-Latin heritage of the Eastern Empire was familiar
to Muslim authors. Dick Davis has an interesting study in which he juxtaposes the literary motifs and
devices of Greek Hellenistic and Persian romances, suggesting that an intermittent mutual borrowing
and mingling of Greek and Persian literary cultures existed for several hundred years [om the time of
Xenophon into the Sasanian period]. A.M. Piemontese locates Persian narrative elements within the
Arthur cycle, citing parallels such as the gures of Artus with Chusrus, Gahmuret with Gayomars, the Grail
with Jm-i Jamshd the cup of Keyd in the Shhnmah, and even Excalibur (Calibor) with the Arabo-Persian
qalibur (sword-cutter). Other interesting parallels can be found in the popular stories and fabliaux of
the period, such as the Pear Tree Episode, which occurs both in Chaucers Merchants Tale and Boccaccios
Dick Davis, Pantheas Children: Hellenistic Novels and Medieval Persian Romances, (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press,
2002), Biennial Yarsharter Lecture Series 3, 1.
Angelo Michele Piemontese, Tracce del romanzo di Art in testi narrativi persiani, in: G. Carbonaro, E. Creazzo and N.L.
Tornesello, editors, Medioevo romanzo e orientale : Macrotesti fra Oriente e Occidente, (Napoli: Rubbettino, 2003), Medioevo
romanzo e orientale, 295-96, 303, 311.
28
Pyrrhus and Lydia (Decameron, Day 7, Tale 9) as well as in the Manav-yi manav of Jall al-Dn Rm
and the Kitb al-adhkiy of Ibn al-Jawz, or the Chaste Wife tale that appears in the tale of the Man of
Law, John Gowers Confessio amantis, Ars Ilh-nmah and al-Kulayns (d. ca. 940) Kitb al-kf.
Given the presence of these connections, it is only appropriate to include both Latin and Arabic authors
in our discussion of courtly love.
One of the most famous writers of classical Arabic prose, Ab Uthmn ibn Bar al-Ji (d. 868 or
869), was notoriously fond of puncturing the bounds of propriety of the ahl al-khaw, be they Neoplatonist
philosophers or Su ascetics. Among his many works are two tracts on love, the Rislah f al-ishq wa-al-
nis, Treatise on Passionate Love and Women, and the Rislat al-qiyn, Treatise on Singing Girls. In
the latter piece, he oers a denition of ishq that would be repeated many times in later work: Ishq is
the name for what exceeds that which is called ubb and every ubb is not called ishq, for ishq is the name
for what exceeds that degree, just as stinginess is the extreme of economy or prodigality is the extreme of
liberality. He was not particularly concerned with the higher echelons of love, however; his work tends
to forge an explicit link between ishq and women, while disparaging sexual relationships between men in
works like Tafl al-ban al al-ahr, The Superiority of the Belly Over the Back. Although he is rarely
quoted directly, being as a whole outside the realm of polite society, the above-mentioned citation oen
appears in later works on love.
Muammad ibn Dd (d. 910), the transmitter of the aforementioned Alexandrian text attributed to
Galen, also produced a treatise on profane love by the name of Kitb al-zahrah, The Book of the Flower.
Deeply informed by the traditions of Hellenism and Sasanian Persia, he sets himself the daunting task of
redeeming haw in the eyes of the reading public; through the retelling of beautiful poems and moving
anecdotes, he hopes to persuade the reader that love can be a positive force in life. In one story, he recounts
the words of a man who lies dying of love-sickness for his (male) iend, but refuses to go to him for fear
of the sin he would commit. He relates a adth of the Prophet that says, He who loves passionately and
conceals his secret and remains chaste and patient, God will forgive him and make him enter Paradise;
Franklin Lewis, One Chaste Muslim Maiden and a Persian in a Pear Tree: Earlier Islamicate Analogues for Two Tales of
Chaucer, in: Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, editor, Metaphors and Imagery: Studies in Classical Persian Poetry, (Brill, under review).
Gien, 85.
29
that very night, he dies. In general, Ibn Dad seems to believe that love presents its victim with an
opportunity to prove his moral integrity, like Andreas Capellanus, who will later write, He who does not
exploit an available opportunity to sin is more pleasing to God than he who is not aorded the chance to
go wrong.
Another important author of this period is Muammad ibn Amad al-Washsh (d. 936), whose Kitb
al-muwashsh played a signicant role in introducing the concept of idealized Udhr love to Arabic belles-
lettres, changing its focus om an intense emotional state to a code of genteel behavior between lovers.
His writing bears many of the same characteristics that distinguish the revived genre of ars amatoria
literature in Europe a century later. The book sets out to delineate what the young man of high society
should know, chiey revolving around three virtues, polite behavior (adab), manly honor (murwah), and
gentility (arf ). Throughout these virtues, the conventions of love, in an idealized and civilized adaptation
of pure Udhr chastity, underlie or color the most mundane relationships and social activities. A
similar, somewhat pragmatic attitude towards courtly love emerges in the Qbs-nmah, a mirror for
princes composed by the Ziyrid scion Kay Ks ibn Iskandar in 1082 for his son. Along with counsel on
the acquisition of wealth, the game of polo, agriculture and knight-errantry, Kay Ks has a number of
chapters on romantic passion, in which he advises his son, resist falling in love and guard against becoming
a lover, for a lovers life is beset with unhappiness. Ifor rather, as Kay Ks admits, whenhis son
does fall in love, he advises him to indulge once or twice to ease the sting of longing, then let the beloved
go and wait for the malady to run its course. The principle of going with the lesser of two evils seems to
be at work: When you do it, let it be in accordance with appetite and not as a matter of course, so that
it may have as little ill eect as possible. Thus the maddening eects of infatuation and obsession are
relieved and a healthier, more socially acceptable love takes its place.
An important author in this chain is the famous Ibn azm of Crdoba (d. 1064), an ambitious courtier
Gien, 11.
P. G. Walsh, Andreas Capellanus on Love, (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1982), Duckworth Classical, Medieval, and
Renaissance Editions, 287.
Jacobi, Udhr.
Peter L. Allen, The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the Romance of the Rose, (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1992), University of Pennsylvania Press Middle Ages Series, 48.
Gien, 14.
Kay Ks, 70.
Ibid., 77.
30
who lived in the nal days of the Umayyad caliphate of Andalus and had the good sense to retire om
political activity aer his fourth imprisonment. Living in exile in Jtiva, he turned his energy to the
pen, composing a number of works on theology, religious law, science, and a unique experiment in elegant
literature, awq al-ammah, The Ring of the Dove. This work, remarkable for its streamlined, personal
style, runs the gamut of the various stages (awl) that await the one who falls in love, om the rst
encounter with the beloved, to allusion, hinting, irting, and other love games, the use of the go-between,
the ecstasy of union, the pain of indelity, breaking o, and reconciling oneself with the eventuality of
death. In the chapter on union, Ibn azm invokes the theory of Aristophanes, claiming that love is the
longing of the soul to be fused with the soul of the beloved, and that upon fulllment one would experience
the perfect realization of hopes and the complete fulllment of ones dreams. However, he absolutely
condemns any love outside the pure love for God at the end of his work, a move that mirrors that of Ovid
and Andreas Capellanus.
Both Ibn azm and his predecessor Ibn Dd were jurists of the hir school, a literalist reading of
scripture that tended towards social conservatism and was directly at odds with the Mutazil rationalism
of al-Ji. Despite this, they are both quite bold in their approach to their topicas we have seen above,
Ibn Dd makes the unusual move of defending and rehabilitating haw, while Ibn azm spares no detail
in describing all the ways lovers violate the rules of society and religion in their quest for union. Yet, the
condemnation of such actions and the love that causes them is never far away. This is also the case with
Andreas Capellanus De amore. The simultaneous presentation of amor curialis with amor concupiscentiae
found in these works presents an interesting puzzle for modern readers: how much is meant to be taken
literally, and how much is tongue-in-cheek? This has been a problem under much scrutiny in medieval
European scholarship. D.W. Robertson, a specialist in medieval English, and C.S. Singleton, a Dante
scholar, have both written articles that suggest that many of the denitive examples of courtly love, like
Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucers The Knights Tale, Le roman de la rose, and Andreas De amore are all works
that play with and problematize these idealized tropes and should be read humorously and ironically. P.G.
Walsh also believes that the author of De amore is daringly and humorously discussing in stylized play ideas
Al Amad Ibn azm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, trans. by A.J. Arberry (London:
Luzac, 1994), 118.
F. X. Newman, editor, The Meaning of Courtly Love, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1969).
31
of love and marriage which have no status in the real world of twelh-century society, but which challenge
and criticise the prevailing mores of sex and marriage imposed by feudal law and Christian precept. The
same could very well be applied to Ibn azm, although I would like to suggest an alternative reading for
these texts. Given the fact that, as we saw in Ibn Sn, love in its entirety simutaneously contains elements
both redemptive and damning, both base and sublime, it is also possible to take these authors at their word.
It is entirely natural to praise love and condemn it in the same work, for as a middleman, a go-between,
neither of the mortal realm nor of the divine (recalling the words of Socrates), the goodness or evil of love
is entirely dependent on contextwho it strikes and for whom, when, for how long, and how everyone
involved handles themselves during the ordeal.
The wealth of Islamic sources available to us are an invaluable source for reading Andreas Capellanus
De amore. Walsh points out that while the author may have been somewhat familiar with the works of
Plato through the De dogmate Platonis, a well-known summa of the Latin world, it is the concepts of Ibn
Sn and the style of Ibn azm that are most striking in his work. Maria Rosa Menocal conrms this
point; in her book The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, she provides a vivid illustration of the
widespread presence of Arabic writing in Paris, Toledo, Cluny, and the court at Troyes, where Andreas
is supposed to have resided. The close ties between the Norman courts of Sicily, France, and England,
especially manifest in the gures of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, who
traveled to Spain to collect the Qurn and other Arabic sources in 1142, made the rapid dissemination of
Arabic texts in translation possible. At the same time, Andalusian scholars and intellectuals were moving
northwards, notably Petrus Alfonsi, a Jewish convert to Christianity who attended the court of Henry I
for some years and taught in northern France. By the early 1200s, the works of Ibn Sn (Avicenna), Ibn
Rushd (Averros), Ms ibn Maymn (Maimonedes), and many others were centerpieces of the curricula
of philosophy and science at the universities of London, Paris, and Bologna. A comparison of the awq
al-ammah with the De amore could thus be very instructive in clariing the many readings possible
within these handbooks on love.
Walsh, 6.
Ibid., 21.
F. Lewis, 3.
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1987), University of Pennsylvania Press Middle Ages Series, 57.
32
Just as Ibn azm writes, You charged memay God exalt you !to compose for you an essay de-
scribing Love I have accordingly hastened to fulll your desire ; though but for the wish to comply
with your commission I would never have undertaken it at all, the De amore opens thus: My revered
iend Walter, my most sedulous and insistent aection for you compels me to publish for you in my own
words and to instruct you by my own hand how the condition of love can be maintained inviolate between
lovers So though dwelling on such topics seems hardly advisable, and though the man of sense shows
impropriety in making time for such hunting as this, the aection that binds us makes me utterly un-
able to oppose your request. Any classicist would recognize this formula, for Ovid himself brings this
epistolary ame tale to use. It is an important element of the composition, far beyond simply providing
an excuse for the author to broach a subject that may stretch the bounds of propriety; it immediately sets
up the groundwork for duplex sententia, a double meaning in which the paradox of teaching something
that should not be taught is le to the discretion of the reader to puzzle out. The ending of the De amore
similarly mirrors that of the awq al-hammah: aer writing at length of the impossibility of love within
marriage, the importance of secret-keeping and falsiing ones emotions, and the necessity of jealousy and
mistrust to keep the ames of love alive, Andreas concludes his work with a ery denouncement of all
who engage in such relations outside the divine sanctity of marriage: How wretched, mad, and assuredly
ina-bestial is the man who for momentary pleasure of esh surrenders the joys of eternity, and seeks to
enslave himself to the ames of everlasting Hell! On the surface, there seems to be no justication for
writing this treaty, if the arts prescribed within it are to be avoided at all costsyet, as a work of literature,
it perhaps provides keys to other kinds of wisdom, beyond the knowledge of how to break some hearts or
your own.
One topic that preoccupies classic and medieval thinkers alike, by means of an example, is that of
eloquence versus truth. Cato and Cicero both write that skill in words without truth is merely foolish
talktrue eloquence is that which promotes and is inspired by high virtue and moral righteousness.
For Muslims, the miracle of the Qurn lies within its ijz, its inimitable eloquence. Augustine, on the
other hand, struggles with the problem of identiing truth within rhetoric and warns against being misled
Ibn azm, 17.
Walsh, 31.
Ibid., 287.
Jerrold E. Seigel, Ideals of Eloquence and Silence in Petrarch, Journal on the History of Ideas, 26 (1965):2, 147.
33
by the persuasive power of elegant speech, an issue that Petrarch, the consumate humanist and lover of
eloquence, also admits as problematic in his Secretum. In the same vein, a manual on the dissimulations,
pretences, and posturing of love can also be an instruction book on the art of critical reading (assidua
lectio). One of the major themes in the De amore, for example, is the deceptiveness and treachery of
women. Although they are not all necessarily bad (although the trend seems to be in that direction), the
task of distinguishing the virtuous om the corrupt requires a strong ability to interpret and decode that
not all men possess (although the trend seems to be in that direction, too). Andreas repeatedly warns
Walter, his pupil, to be on guard against women who wear too much make-up (I.9), women who are
looking for money (I.3), women who grant favors a little too willingly (I.1), women who dont give
favors at all (I.4), women who want to be loved yet refuse to love (II.19), and women who lie about being
in love (I.319): The man says: Though the words you utter seem to beguile mens ears, if the truth is
sought they are covered with a cloak of sophistry. As the deceivers and abusers of speech par excellence
in Andreas world, women are the best suited to train the young knight how to steel himself against attery
and false blandishments, maintaining a rm grip on reason to protect himself om dissimulation.
Critical discernment should not be restricted to ones dealings with women. Although women are
lustful, gluttonous, intemperate in their speech, easily swayed by their vanity, and so forth, there are many
positive examples of female virtue to be found, and their predisposition and vulnerability to deceit is limited
to their physical desires and aspirations. The clergy, on the other hand, who receive a special chapter in
the work, are somehow deviously excused for their carnal lusts:
The cleric must detach himself as a foreigner from all the processes of love However, there is
scarcely a man who ever lived without sinning in the esh, and the life of the clergy is naturally
exposed to the temptation of the body more than are all others because of their considerable and
uninterrupted leisure.
Something very odd is going on here. The cleric must be a foreigner to all kinds of lovebut, boys
William Mallard, Language and Love: Introducing Augustines Religious Thought Through the Confession Story, (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 43.
Francesco Petrarca; Carol E. Quillen, editor, The Secret, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003), 72-75.
Allen, 63.
Walsh, 131.
Ibid., 211.
34
will be boys. In comparison to women, the clerics actually come o as the more treacherous; everyone
knows that women can be lustful, but clerics, we see, can be hypocrites, using their outward piety to mask
sins far greater than those of the esh. As Andreas tells Walter, even the text itself of the De amore
must be approached om a critical standpoint: There are many other points which I could make to you
about the diminution of love, but I leave them entirely to your diligence to seek out. Thus, embedded
in the text, there is a second level of deception that requires a certain amount of assiduo before one can
even become aware of it. As the mind expands in its ability to analyze and decipher, it uncovers deceptions
that are far more serious than the relatively supercial games that lovers play. Let us remember that Dante
places the lovers in the highest level of Hell, just aer Limbo, for they are essentially good people who let
themselves get carried away by their desire, while the audulent, those who have intentionally abused their
gi of reason, reside deep within the Malebolge. Dante himself faints in horror upon hearing the sad story
of Francesca and Paolo (caddi come corpo morto cade), whereas he takes it upon himself to attack the
head of Bocca degli Abati as he lies ozen in ice, striking it with his foot and tearing out its hair! The
love literature of Ibn azm and Andreas Capellanus does not need to be understood as either descriptive or
prescriptive of social practice, but rather as a literary endeavor that is acted out within the imagination of
the reader, oering wisdom through the act of critical reading and interpretation. If extra-marital aairs,
lying, carnal pleasure, and the rest have no moral value in Christian or Muslim society, at least a controlled
space can be carved out for them within literature.
Quest for Romance :
A similar use of multiple meanings and double entendre is present in the courtly romance of Islamicate
literature. During the ninth and tenth centuries and the height of the Abbasid caliphate, the premier genre
of Arabic poetry was the ode (qadah), which always begins with an erotic prelude (nab) in memory of an
absent beloved. The nab is followed by a journey narrative (rilah) and then either tribal boasting (fakhr)
or a panegyric (mad) in praise of the patron. The poets of the Abbasid court developed a distinctive style
Allen, 67.
Walsh, II.3, p. 233.
Dante, V.142, p. 92.
Ibid., XXXII.76-100, p. 503.
35
of poetry prized for its subtlety and nuance called bad, innovative, and the elegant display of metaphors,
symbols, and puns was a measure by which one could assert his literary achievements. As the caliphate
disintegrated into a succession of smaller local dynasties, the composition of panegyric odes in a highly
metaphoric language remained a constant element at the court, and ambitious amirs and sultans, hoping to
leave their mark on history, would compete with one another in recruiting the best poets of the day to sing
their praises. In the courts of the Samanids, Seuks, Ghaznavids, Ilkhans, and others, poetry played a vital
role in establishing the righteousness and virtue of its patron dynasty and granting it the moral legitimacy
to rule.
Because of his close association with ethics and chivalrous behavior, the poet took on the role of
moral preceptor and stimulator of virtue, oering his patron the means of obtaining al-Ghazls double
treasure, good repute in this life and salvation in the next. In this relationship, the patrons act of
generosity provides tangible proof of his virtue, while his dependents furnish him with the means of
demonstrating this virtue so that he may become an exemplar for all his subjects. It is the poets place as
the articulator of morality and wisdom, combined with the metaphorical prowess of bad panegyrics, that
led to the ourishing of the romance in the eleventh and twelh centuries. The passionate words for the
beloved in the nab and the lo praise for the patron in the mad are oen set up as parallel structures,
incorporating the same language and extolling the same virtues. Loyalty, in particular, is emphasized; a
sense of loyalty and fealty between the servant/lover and the master/beloved would ensure proper behavior
on both parties and bring just reward to all those who honored their obligations. Due to this parallelism,
the message of a romance resonates far beyond the literal story of two lovers and their adventuresit could,
by association, be a political treatise on the virtuous conduct between a lord and his subjects, or it could
be a religious allegory on the obligations between the Lord and His followers.
The fusion of love-philosophy with notions of virtue, power, and justice is evident in the development of
what Meisami calls the lover-king in romantic literature, in which the private aspect of a kings personal
love is directly reected in the public manifestation of prosperity and stability in his kingdom. As Ibn
Sn says, love is not a guaranteed beacon for guidance unless it is approached om a noble disposition
Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, (Princeton, : Princeton University Press, 1987), 45.
Ibid., Chapters 1 and 2 in particular.
36
within the soul; thus the protagonists conduct as lover reveals his tness, or untness, for kingship.
To demonstrate this fusion, Meisami points to an early romance composed by Fakhr al-Dn Gurgn in
1054 , Vs and Rmn, in which two kings (and brothers), Mawbad and Rmn, compete for the love
of Vs. Mawbad is the very image of a powerful, lusty king, dominated by excessive passion that gives
him over to hastiness, cruelty, and irrational behavior. Rmn, the quintessential courtly lover, prefers to
weep, pine, and write poetry to his absent beloved. Although their behavior takes dierent forms, they
are both acting om the same base faculty and have made the same fatal aw: they have in fact mistaken
their concupiscence, their animal desire for physical possession and self-aggrandizement, for divine love.
Other poets, such as Firdaws in the Shhnmah (c. 1010) or Nim in Khusraw and Shrn, the second
of his Pa Ga, combine the two gures of king and lover into one person. Nims King Khusraw
is gripped by a lustful desire for Shrn that drives him to commit a number of atrocities and iustices,
most strikingly the killing of the innocent Farhd. Eventually, the good example and wise counsel of the
virtuous Shrn nally guides Khusraw to justice and rectitude, thus fullling the promise of spiritual love.
The conation of the two gures into a single individual creates a kind of Everyman that allows the poem
to move outside the literal issues discussed in the text and address a universal audience: Thus Khosrow o
Shirin is not merely about love, or kingship, but also about mans ability to interpret both the evidence of
his senses and the moral issues with which he must grapple. The Haft Paykar, directly composed
aer Khusraw and Shirn, is Nims most complex work, integrating the persona of the lover-king into a
comprehensive world order guided by Love.
The Haft Paykar is an extremely tight composition, eliciting comparisons with works like the Decameron
or the Divine Comedy for its seemingly limitless wealth of intertextual references, structural patterns, and
number-color symbolism. It is essentially a literary schematization of love, an elaborate allegory that
takes into account the astrology, geography, and medical knowledge of the time to show how love works
in this natural system. The central narrative of the poem, and the topic of its title, is that of the seven
stories, told in seven pavilions, or domes, over the span of a weekbut equally important is the ame story
Meisami, Court Poetry, 182.
Idem, Kings and Lovers, 6.
Ibid., 13.
The word paykar itself has multiple meanings, complimenting the multi-layered nature of the text. It can mean face or
portrait, indicating the seven beautiful princesses; it can also mean form or structure, which may point to the seven pavilion-
domes, the seven climes, or the seven stations of transcendence that Bahram Gu r traverses.
37
that surrounds these tales. The protagonist is Bahrm Gr, so called for the onager (gr) that he likes
to hunt. His adventures are so numerous, it would be dicult to summarize them in a few lines, but the
basic thread is his rise to the throne of Persia and his many exploits once becoming king. The crowning
achievement of this period is his acquiring no less than seven brides and erecting an exquisite pavilion for
each one of themthe time-honored emblems of virile power. Having accomplished so much, he takes
the year o to take his pleasure with his wives, who regale him with stories of love in all its forms: noble,
failed, lustful, and spiritual. Once emerging om the pavilions, he nds his kingdom in disarray, with
a corrupt vizier usurping power, a war with China on the horizon, and a populace living under tyranny.
Fortied with his new understanding of love, Bahrm manages to set things right and restores justice to
the realm, before nally setting o on a hunt one day, entering a cave (long cited as a locus of mystical
ascendence), and disappearing forever.
Meisamis analysis of this structure focuses on Nims portrayal of love as a guiding force for justice.
She distinguishes the rst period of his rule as a supercial, temporary state, a kingship of will; upon
his reemergence om the pavilions, Bahrm establishes a spiritually pure, virtuous reign, or kingship by
law. The sharp contrast between the two sections places a correspondingly heavy emphasis on the
stories of the Seven Princesses, who supply Bahrm with the wisdom he needs to correct the imbalances
of his reign. These stores, then, are no mere fables, as Nim writes, but a treasure-house of wisdom,
provided for the benet of his king and patron. Taken as a whole, the seven pavilions function as a
microcosm in which the audience (Bahrm explicitly, the reader by implication) will learn the secrets of
divine love and reach the mature, rational stage of being that ensures just rule and the establishment of
order upon the world.
It could alternatively be argued that the seven stories are an interruption in the central tale of Bahram Gu r and provide a
means for his transition om concupiscence to virtue. This seems to be the interpretation Meisami prefers (see Meisami, Kings
and Lovers, 17), but either way, the three sections of the poem all bear equal weight in terms of their importance.
Idem, Introduction to the Haft Paykar, in: The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance, (Oxford University Press, 1995),
xxxiii.
Some food for thought: C.S. Lewis, who is very familiar with this tradition of love and whose own writings on love I have
occasionally referred to, brings this same structure to use in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the four children
emerge om the wood, remove the usurper om the throne and restore legitimate kingship, and nally, as grown adults, vanish
in the same wood on a hunt. There is probably no strong connection, but it is interesting to see these same motifs reappear in
modern literature.
Idem, Kings and Lovers, 17.
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 29, p. 267.
38
At the time of Nim, the world was traditionally divided into seven zones, stretching om the equator
to the pole. This was a practice that has its roots in Babylonian geography, with the city in the center,
surrounded by seven islands, or climes. Roman mapmakers worked o of this concept, placing Rome and
the Mediterranean at the center of the world with Europe and Aica on either side and Asia stretching out
to the east. The Muslim geographers al-Ward, al-Istakhr, al-Balkh, and Ibn Hawqal moved the geo-
graphical center to Jerusalem or Mecca, in accordance with their focus on the holy places of Islam, but the
concept of seven climes remained intact. In Nims version, they are represented as follows: India, China,
Khwrazm (Central Asia), Siqlb (Slovenia, Russia, and the Far North), the Maghrib (Egypt and North
Aica), Rm (Greece, by extension Europe), and Persia. Surrounding Earth are seven celestial bodies,
which correspond with both the seven climes and the seven days of the week: by proximity to Earth, they
are the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each planet is also associated with one
of the seven colors of the spectrum, thus the color of the dome for each day of Bahrms visit corresponds
with the color of the ascendant celestial body. The days have a number of secondary characteristics as well;
drawing om the tradition of Greek and Roman myth, each celestial body carries the characteristics of the
deity associated with it. Thus, Tuesday (Tiw being the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to Mars) is a passionate
day, a good day for love and war. Friday, the day of Venus (Freya or Frigg in Norse mythology), is also
auspicious for love, but in contrast to her sanguine counterpart Mars, the love Venus oers is the white
love of devotion and fealty, or agap. The fact that Friday is also the holy day of Islam strengthens the
connection between pure, seless love and religion.
The numerological signicance of this sequence has been the object of much scrutiny. In his essay
Color and Number in the Ha Paykar, Georg Krotko tracks a progression om the physical four ele-
ments of the body to the three aspects of the mind. Within these two worlds, there is a parallel structure
of theme and outcome; thus stories 1 and 4 end in loss and mourning, 2 and 5 in a lovers tryst, 3 and 6 in
marriage. He also detects a linear emphasis upon the feminine, masculine, and spiritual trines as the sto-
ries progress. Meisami sees a certain balance in alternation between concupiscence and irascibility, which
are the two forms of animal desire exhibited by Mawbad and Rmn. This corresponds perfectly with
Gerog Krotko, Color and Number in the Ha Paykar, in: R.M. Savory and D.A. Agius, editors, Logos Islamikos: Studia
Islamica in honorem Georgii Michaelis Wickens, (Toronto: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 107.
Ibid., 110.
Meisami, Introduction, xxv.
39
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Seyed-Gohrabs observation that Saturn, the Moon, Mars, and Venus were typically seen as the instigators
of love. Two contemporaries of Nim, the Najm al-Dn Kubr and Shihb al-Dn Suhraward, have
their own schemas of a seven-tiered path of ascension, using a color symbolism approximate or parallel to
that of the Ha Paykar. In every case, the sequence of stories representing the Kings discovery of love
begins and ends with concupiscence, rst that of the black variety and then the whiteand tellingly, the
black love of Saturday, as magnicent as it is, does not endure and ultimately leaves the hero in despair,
while the white love of Friday resolves with all parties happy and fullled.
This brings us to a second structural aspect of the Haft Paykar, its use of color. The four primary colors
of red, green, blue, and yellow represent the physical universe in all its aspects. This encompasses Galens
four humors, Aristotles four elements, the four seasons, the four physical sciences (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, music), the four directions, the four stages of life, and the four castes (cras, chieains, rulers,
prophets). Because these are the elements that compose reality, they must be kept in equilibrium in order
to preserve health and stability. A body with unbalanced humors will fall ill; a climate with unbalanced
seasons will lead to physical defects in its inhabitants. This is applicable even in political thought: the
role of the king is to balance power between the four types of men in his kingdom and prevent any one
of them om getting out of line. Thus the king as physician is a widespread motif, articulated by Niam
al-Mulk, al-Ghazal , and Ibn Qutaybah, who writes, There can be no government without menNo men
without moneyNo money without cultivation/prosperityand no prosperity without justice and good
administration. The three remaining neutral colors, black, white, and brown, are associated with the
ethereal properties of the spirit, corresponding with Platos three aspects of vegetable, animal, and rational.
The three arts of speech, grammar, rhetoric, and poetry, are the three sciences that rene and elevate the
soul opening it for higher things. Three is the number of the Universal Soul, the number of the Christian
Trinity, and the sacred trine of masculinity, femininity, and spirituality. The color black is said to be the
color of mystical gnosis, an understanding of reality based on its deep (bin) structure. Brown, the color
Seyed-Gohrab, 6.
Meisami, Introduction, xxxi.
Peter Chelkowski, Mirrors of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1975), 113.
Meisami, Introduction, xxix.
Abd Allh ibn Muslim Ibn Qutaybah; F. S. Bodenheimer and L. Kopf , editors, The natural history section from a 9
th
century
Book of Useful Knowledge, the Uyn al-akhbr of Ibn Qutayba, (Paris: Acadmie internationale dhistoire des sciences, 1949), 40.
Ibid., Chapter 4.
41
of the body, is seen in the tale of the Sandalwood Dome to represent healing and restorationthe hero
of that particular story is cured of blindness, and then cures the maladies of others. White, as the color of
purity, is the emblem of lawfulness and propriety and brings closure to the seven tales.

Figure 2: A balanced world for spiritual growth

The Story of the Black Dome
Having journeyed across a millennium and a half, om Nishapur to London, it is now time to return to
our tale of the Black Dome as we ask the question, why does the King wear black, and what does it have
to do with love? As she concludes her story, the Princess of the Black Dome recites these verses in praise
of her color:
The moon in blackness shines forth bright,
king-like, neath parasol of night.
There is no better hue than black;
sh-bones less prized than shs back.
42
Black hairs a sign of youth, and down
of black the youthful face adorns.
The eyes black pupil views the world,
and robes of black are never soiled.
The moonif nights ne silks werent black
would a t bridal chamber lack.
Seven colors neath the seven thrones:
no color beyond black is known.
There are many images to be interpreted within these lines; for example, the eyes black pupil views the
world, or, in Persian, bih siyh baar jahn bnad, which could be more literally translated as with/in
blackness, the gaze sees the world. This nod to the pupil of the eye may also be an allusion to mans
unique capacity of discernment, the ability to see that which is hidden. The same allusion is present in
the image of the whiteness (truth, purity) of the moon, made visible by the black shroud that surrounds
it. Black is eternal, by virtue that the black robe is never stained. Finally, black is the most distant color.
Saturn was the farthest known planet in Nims day, and beyond the celestial bodies, only black remains.
This is seen in the nal line, which perhaps is best re-visited in the original Persian: haft rang ast zr
haft aurang / nist bltar az siyh rang, seven colors beneath seven thrones [heavens]; there is no color
higher than blackness. If whiteness is the color of chastity, virtue, and loyalty, blackness is the color of
perception, gnosis, inner meaning, and the eternal nature of Truth.
Black is also the most dangerous color. As it falls within the sphere of concupiscent desire, it retains
all the properties of love-as-malady inherent in the words ishq and ers. Furthermore, it is a color of
the soul, not of the bodyunlike the lusty nature of red, which is conned to physical wants and needs,
black indicates a kind of desire that will lead the lover ever further into the abyss, plumbing it for secret
knowledge and understanding. If successfully pursued, the rewards can be great, but it is a little like walking
a tightropeone false move, one small distraction, and the lover will risk losing everything he has gained.
There is no doubt that a Su reading of this story is possible, for by Nims time the mystical language
of ardent desire for union with God had been well-established. It is possible, even commendable, that the
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 514-519, p. 132.
The beauty of this line is that it is ambivalent whether blackness (siyah) and vision (basar) are linked as a compound phrase
or not. It could just as easily be in the blackness of vision, one sees the world. The double entendre of this and similar passages
is an excellent example of the poems multi-layered nature.
Also a Persian proverb.
43
initiate (murd, literally wanter) should desire his goal with the same insatiable hunger of a lover for his
beloved, for it is this very state that gives him the heroic capacity to overcome all obstacles and temptations;
yet such longing must be vigilantly kept in check by discipline, concentration, and a will of iron, if it is not
to be diverted onto an object of lesser value and bring about the fall of the lover.
From this perspective, our unhappy King was doomed om the outset, for it is clear that he is used to
getting what he wants and does not take no for an answer. Although he is conned to the limits of his
kingdom, he manages to satis his curiosity by building an elegant guest-house for travelers, who regale
him with tales of their journeys and adventures, both good and ill. One day, a stranger comes to the court,
dressed entirely in black. As per usual, the King inquires into his aairs, and is shocked when his inquiries
around the reason for the strangers costume are rebued:
Leave o this talk, he said; for none
knows where the Smurgh can be found.
None knows the secret of this black,
save he who wears it on his back.
This mysterious warning is enough to hint that there is more to this secret than meets the eye; as
a mythological creature of annihilation and rebirth (not unlike the Western phoenix), the smurgh is a
prominent symbol of mystical transcendence and union with the Divine Essence. The King, unfortunately,
fails to heed this warning, and in fact his desire to know is only further inamed by such reticence. Casting
o all pretenses of decorum and control, his pleas grow past all measure before the stranger nally relents
and informs him that the answer to his question lies in China, before abruptly taking his leave, closing
the door upon my [the Kings] need. His desire unfullled, the King becomes utterly obsessed with
this riddle, and eventually he abandons his kingdom and sets o in search of the mysterious village. The
warning signs are increasing; now the state is forced to suer for his greed. The King will repeat this same
motion in greater and greater iterations until his story spins out of control.
The undertaking of a quest, one of the great tropes of romantic poetry, is intrinsically linked with
love and desire. The English word quest is itself related to the Persian root khwst, meaning to seek
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 57 and 60, pp. 108-109.
Ibid., l. 70, p. 109.
44
or want. During and before Nims time, the literary milieu across the continent was rich with quest
narrativesthe famous quest for the Grail in Arthurian legend, Beowulf, the classic epics of Homer and
Virgil, the troubadour poetry of the western Mediterranean lands. In all of these stories, the object of
desire oen plays second ddle to the search itself. It is the quest that denes the heros life and gives it
value. The best quests were those which were impossible and doomed to failureif it was an easy quest,
what would a great hero prove by completing it? Yet, in exerting every resource available and putting forth
the most valiant of eorts, the hero could be victorious even in failure. This is the transcendent element
of the quest; the Holy Grail might have been able to grant eternal life to the one who grasped it, yet those
who died in its search in fact attained that very goal, by virtue of their great feats and renown, passed down
in song.
While the questthe search for desires fulllmentcan call the hero to feats of chivalry and virtue,
both the desire and the intentions must be pure for that to happen. Our Kings object of desire is far om
lo; like Rmn, all he really wants is to satis his own lust for knowledge, and like Bahmn, he will
neglect all his kingly duties in pursuit of this self-centered goal. Additionally, unlike the typical knight-
errant or Udhr lover, who renounce the world in order to puri their love, the King travels in ne robes
with gems a-plenty to ease the hardship of the road. When he arrives to the town, he nds that, just
like the stranger at his court, no one is willing to speak about their black raiment. He therefore uses his
wealth to lure an unsuspecting butcher, ch gv-i qurbn like an ox to the slaughter, as he says, into
divulging his secret. The butcher leads the King to a ruined land far om the village and procures for
him a basket with the instructions to sit in it and let fate run its course. When the King takes his seat,
he is whisked skyward to a beautiful land of sweet-scented owers and running rivers, where every night
the fey-like Queen Turktz and her entourage arrive to feast and make merry amongst the gardens. The
King, whose name is coincidentally Turktz, is received with boundless hospitality; he is made to sit at
the banquet table, given sweet wine to drink and rich food to eat, and every night has his choice of the
Queens lovely handmaidens to accompany him to bed.
Although one would expect the King to be pretty happy with the outcome of his journey, he remains
cursed by his greed; despite his blessings in excess, the King nds himself nevertheless discontented and
Bakhtiyr, 134.
45
restless: varaq az arf-i khurram shustam / k-az ziydat ziydyat jastam, I washed joy o of [my] page
/ for in abundance, I sought even more. The one thing that remains outside his grasp, is, of course,
the Queen herself. She humors his desire to a certain extent, allowing him to embrace and kiss her, but
warns him, Beyond this nothing is allowed / true lovers should show gratitude. As with the mysterious
black-garbed stranger in the beginning of the story, the King is unable to constrain himself, and the more
his advances towards her are rejected, the hotter his desire for her burns. The Queen, for her part, attempts
to bring him around to reason, telling him:
For he whos with contentment pleased
will ever nd a life of ease;
But he who makes desire his friend
will be a beggar in the end.
And the following night, she oers him the promise of a greater reward in return for his patience now:
Put o this fancy for a night,
and you will gain eternal light
On this one craving shut your door,
and laugh with joy forever more.
These verses may well remind us of Boethius, who nds himself in the Consolatio outside the bounds
of reason, questioning in his rage and despair the justice of creation, or even moreso of Dante, who nds
himself per una selva oscura / ch la diritta via era smaritta, in a dark forest, for the way ahead had been
lost; it is only with the arrival of reason, embodied as Philosophy or as Virgil, that the author can
extricate himself om his plight and comprehend for himself the inherent justice of Gods ultimate plan.
Similarly, if the King were to follow the Queens advice, he would nd the way to eternal light opened to
him. Instead, the Kings desire gets the better of him, and he loses all rational self-restraint. He begs and
pleads with the Queen to give him what he wants, that he must have her that night or he will go mad. At
Bakhtiyr, 145.
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 284, p. 120.
Ibid., ll. 345-46, p. 123.
Ibid., ll. 362 and 364, p. 124.
Dante, I.2-3, p. 26.
46
this, Turktz nally gives in and instructs him to close his eyes. Drunk with anticipation, the King does
as he is bid; but when he opens his eyes again, he nds himself alone in the basket that had only thirty
days ago carried him to Paradise: No man or woman near; alone, / my sole companion sighs and groans;
/ Without lights radiance, like a shade. He is hereupon discovered and embraced by the butcher, who
says to him:
A hundred years I might have told
this tale; youd not have grasped its truth.
You went and saw what was concealed;
to whom could it have been revealed?
I too from that hot passion burned,
and dressed in black at being wronged.
In sorrow, the King too dons robes of black and returns to his kingdom, a broken, yet wiser, man.
From start to nish, the Kings journey to Heaven and back is a powerful metaphor for the Su and
Neoplatonist experience of transcendence, the province of black. From the Su perspective, the Kings
quest is very much in line with the renunciation of the world in an attempt to achieve proximity to the
Beloved. He renounces all (well, most) of his worldly possessions and sets out on what we could call a
pilgrimage to nd the object of his desirein this case, the answer to his question. As he gets closer
to his goal, his journey physically lis him into the air and takes him to another world, a world veiled to
the ordinary eye. The answer to the Kings question, Why do you wear black? can only be answered by
going through the same experience, or to borrow a Su term, the same taste (dhawq). As al-Ghazl says,
dhawq is the means through which one attains a greater intimacy with the object of attention: what a
dierence between being acquainted with the denition of drunkenness and being drunk! Yet wine,
while it can elevate the spirit to realms inaccessible to the ordinary mind, is dangerously seductive and
can easily confuse the mystic into losing sight of his ultimate destination, thus the necessity for the strict
discipline and obedience to the guide (shaykh or pr) if one hopes to stay oriented on the right pathhence
its prohibition for all but the elect (according to the philosophers). The King says as much, blaming his
failure on his immaturity and inexperience:
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 495-96, p. 131.
Ibid., ll. 501-503, p. 131.
William Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazl, (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1953), 55.
47
That I, who am the King of Black,
like black clouds now bewail my lack:
That my desire, so nearly gained,
was, through my rawness, unattained.
Without a guide, such a journey is doomed to end in failure, because it was begun and pursued in a state
of ers, in which the Kings selsh intentions could only goad him into pressing further without allowing
reason to guide his actions. In many ways, the tale is a replica of the Orpheus myth, for although the
bards overwhelming love for Eurydice can bring him down to the underworld and transgress the bounds
of mortality, he cannot, in the end, keep himself om looking back to satis his desire for certainty, and
thus fails to save her. Nonetheless, a certain fellowship is realized through these experiences, even in failure,
as expressed by the embrace between the King and butcher, an interaction that would be impossible in
normal social conventions; because of their shared experience and understanding (what is called marifah in
Su circles), these social distinctions become irrelevant and they can interact with one another as equals.
The Kings female slave, who hears his story and also dons robes of black, can be understood in this same
sense. In the end, the kings eorts were not all in vain; indeed, the bitterness of his loss taught him wisdom
no amount of prosperity and opulence could have provided. He returns to his realm and administers it with
the grave dignity and sagacity of an ideal monarch. He becomes a member of the elite, the ahl al-khaw,
those who have probed the secrets of the world and experienced proximity to the Beloved. The price of
such wisdom, of course, is to be doomed to sorrow and mourning for the rest of his days. The Kings
handmaiden seems aware of this state, the futility of the quest, and the life-changing eect it has on the
pilgrim, even before she hears a word of the Kings story. The black robes speak for themselves:
O best of rulers, who supports
all those who sorrow: who on earth
Has power to attempt the task
of scraping Heaven with an axe,
Seeking to know a hidden tale?
you know it, you alone can tell.
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 509-10, p. 132.
Ibid., ll. 48-50, p. 108.
48
The Story of the White Dome
As is to be expected, the Story of the White Dome is in many ways an inversion of the Story of the Black
Dome. Gone is the metaphor of the quest; gone is the question that drives our hero mad seeking its
answer. Paradise is where we live, and beauty emerges om within.
Let us recap. Our hero, a young, chaste, and accomplished man, A Jesus at his studies, and / a
Joseph who the feast illumed, keeps a garden away om the city, protected om the evil eye and outside
corruption by four high walls, with towers that touch the moon. One day, at the time of noonday prayer,
he comes back to nd that a gang of beautiful maidens have invaded his immaculate home and locked him
out of it! These are strange times indeed. One wonders what the King of the Black Dome would say,
having journeyed to the ends of the earth to trespass upon the realm of the houris, only to come back home
and nd that they had in turn taken up residence inside his own palace! However, the youth in this story
is very unlike the King; he is compared to the prophets Jesus and Joseph, the latter especially a paragon of
chastity in the face of temptation. He is virtuous and pious, and it seems to all intents and purposes that
he has already found Paradise and is wise enough to keep it secluded and protected om worldly impurity.
It is a testament to the subversive power of love that he doesnt have the women all thrown out on the
spot; unfortunately, his gaze is allowed to wander upon the most forbidden of all uit: a bathing scene.
Gracefully to the pool they came,
and loosed their owered wrappers bands.
They doed their robes, removed their veils,
entered the water, fair as pearls;
Splashed water on their silvery forms;
in black concealed their silver. Moons
And sh played in the pool; enamed
the world with ardent passion.
A while they played, their hands clasped tight,
mocking the jasmine with their white;
A while they scattered pearls about,
and launched fair rounded fruits like boats.
This is the trump card Eros may wield against the virtuous. Actaeon, brave and valiant a hero as he
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 25, pp. 217-18.
Ibid., ll. 107-110 and 113-114, p. 222.
49
was, did not stand a chance against the bathing scene; as for our Joseph, whatever defenses his virtue could
have mustered are instantly razed, and he is le helpless in the grip of love-sickness: His blood, aboil in
every vein, / made all his limbs cry out in pain. The physical pain he feels upon seeing this image of
beauty is a common trope of romantic literature, both within Christian and Muslim contexts. For example,
in Ars Maniq al-ayr, The Conference of the Birds (c. 1177), the pious Shaykh Samn is inspired
by a dream to journey to Rome, where he sees a Christian girl of such beauty, long decades of piety and
virtue are instantly incinerated: all that he was, was no longer / om the re of melancholy his heart
turned to smoke (harchi bdash sar bih sar nbd shud / zi tish sd dilash chn dd shud). A similar
fate awaits the unfortunate Palamon of Chaucers Knights Tale, who, gazing om his prison cell in the top
of the tower, cast his eye upon Emelya, / And therwithal he bleynte and cride, A! His cousin, Arcite, is
sure that Palamon is simply upset at being in prison and tells him to bear it like a man. Palamon retorts,
This prison caused me nat for to crye,
But I was hurt right now thurghout myn ye
Into myn herte, that wol my bane be.
The fairness of that lady that that I see
Yond in the gardyn romen to and fro
Is cause of al my criying and my wo.
And sure enough, when Arcite takes his turn to look, he is hurt as muche as he, or moore. The
outcome of such a state in both of these stories is inevitably tragic: Palamon and Arcite will ght each
other to the death, and Shaykh Samn will burn the Qurn, intoxicate himself with wine, and become a
swineherd for the sake of his pretty Christian girl. This is an outcome already decided om the outset;
as readers, we all know someone caught in such a hopeless state can hardly be rebuked for seeking union
with his beloved. The poetic voice of Nim himself interjects and conrms this expectation, lamenting
the loss of such a ne youth to the cruel barbs of love, Such unbelief! alas for faith! If tradition and
experience is any guide, it will only be a matter of time before the chaste youth and the innocent girl will
exchange their priceless virtue for sin.
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 122, p. 223.
Fard al-Dn Ar; Muammad Riz Shaf Kadkan, editor, Maniq al-ayr-i Ar, (Tihrn: Sukhan, 1387 [2008 or
2009]), l. 1236, p. 287. Translation mine.
Georey Chaucer; Larry D. Benson, editor, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition. (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Miin Co.,
1987), ll. 1078, 1095-1100, 1116, p. 40.
Nim, Haft Paykar, l. 136, p. 223.
50
And so it seems, for the girl is more than willing to accommodate the youths desires; and yet, somehow,
the inevitable is repeatedly delayed by bizarre accidents of nature. There seems to be an intervening force
at work, warning, interrupting, slowing things down, almost like a parent seizing her son by the shoulder
as he brushes by with the car keys, demanding, And where do you think youre going? The children, of
course, do not understand, nor do they appreciate their parents meddling. They cry, they lament, and even
their would-be go-betweens lose patience with this seeming ineptitude and start to beat the girl! It is only
at the brink of this disaster, this most urgent of warnings in which the natural iendship between iends
and lovers begins to disintegrate, that the youth nally comes to his senses and realizes that something is
at work. The calamities have removed the aws om his defective reason; now he understands that
he who for the unlawful yearns is baseborn. These words would have made Ibn Sn proud, for the
youth has realized how the prioritization of lust over law debases his origins and standing as a human and
as a gentleman (arf, as we saw in the Rislah). The animal desire that had guided their eorts up till
now was the cause of their upset and disorder: The eyes of [a] hundred beasts were on / us two; thus we
became undone. Only by returning to reason are the youth and his beloved pulled back om the brink
and saved for marriage, which they promptly carry out. Natural and holy law restored, the story resolves
happily, contrary to our initial expectations.
Yet what saved these two om disaster? As we have seen time and time again, love is so strong, it can
reduce any hero to slavery or make an indel out of any saint. Even the youth holds himself outside any
blame for the incident, saying, With such a per-visaged bride / no true man could her love avoid. The
girl, too, is above reproach: gawhar-i zi har gunah pk-ast / har gunh ki hast az n khk-ast, Her essence
is pure of every sin / What sin there is, is om this dust. It is the khk, the dust or clay of their
physical bodies that cannot resist corruption. By all rights, they should have been doomed, despite their
best intentionsit is only the direct intervention of God through the world that has reversed the calamity
and restored reason to its proper place:
In this world, those who clever are
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 290 and 293, pp. 231-32.
Ibid., l. 298, p. 232.
Ibid., l. 294, p. 232.
Bakhtiyr, 275.
51
and quick, are slaves before the pure.
Gods grace, eternal and divine,
save us from being harmed by sin.
This is a key thought, for it can illustrate how agap remains a crucial element in the Islamic context as
it is within Christian theology, and how the act of grace, i.e., divine intervention, can take place even
without Jesus as a necessary mediator, as he is in Christianity. The Persian lines read, kr m r inyat-i
azal / az kha ddah bd bkhalal; the word Nim uses for God is in itself interesting, for it is not
the more common Arabic Allh or Persian Khud, but rather azal, which means that which has existed
for all eternity, the opposite of abad, the innite future projection of time. Gods grace is described
as inyatgi, bounty, or favor. Thus it is that God, in this nal story, exhibits the same concerned,
proactive, and compassionate love for humanity that distinguishes his nature in scripture. God moves. He
is not the impassive, external font of goodness that is only able to direct his thoughts upon himself, as the
Neoplatonists believe, and it is only through his intervention that the two lovers are brought together in
happiness and safeguarded om sin. The King of the Black Dome, no matter far outside he goes in his
quest for love, is ultimately doomed to failure, whereas it is almost as if the lovers merely let God come to
them, in the paradise on Earth that they already inhabit. Just as Ibn azm and Andreas Capellanus create
literary spaces in their work that takes us outside the bounds of normal human habitation and experience,
yet, in an about-face, bring us back into the fold of religion, Nim seems to do the same here, placing
white, as the colorless purity of Gods love, on a Friday, the day of religion, in which union, both earthly
and divine, is made possible through the restoration and implementation of sacred law. In both cases,
fullment is made possible through the act of submission (islm) to divine love, a theme that receives
much attention in Nims Layl and Majnn. The rearmation of the centrality of gi-love agap or
inyat, aer the failure of ishq to achieve union, is a fascinating example of a motival turn-around, such
as we see in other classic collections of stories. One would be hard-pressed to believe, if he or she had
only read the rst half of these works, that the saucy Decameron would conclude with the grim, almost
horriing tale of patient Griselda, or Chaucers Tales with the Parsons sobering homily. The carnival of
love is drawing to an end; it is time for law to reassert itself.
Nim, Haft Paykar, ll. 288-89, p. 231.
Bakhtiyr, 276.
Seyed-Gohrab, 49.
52
As in the work of Andreas Capellanus, the ultimate triumph of faith over love is a problematic issue
and not easily explained as a simple case of one being better than the other. The holistic integrity of
Nims project should be beyond dispute by this pointthere is clearly some way in which the two
stories complement each other and present as a unit a more complete picture of what the author has in
mind. Possibly the most interesting gure of the Story of the White Dome is not the virtuous youth, who
more or less plays out his part as we all expect him to, but the girl, who in herself seems to embody some
of these contradictions:



He said, what is your name? She said, Bakht.
He said, where is your place? She said, the throne.
He said, what is your source? She said, light.
He said, the Evil Eye? She said, far away.
He said, what kind is your veil? She said, a musical instrument.
He said, what is your mode? She said, coquetry.
Another chapter could be written on these lines. Bakht, the girls name, is the word for Fortune. Her
source is light, her place is the throne, and the presence of evil is far away om her. Yet she has her secrets,
which she hides in music and songa brilliant play on the word pardah, which means both veil and a
et, such as on a setar or guitar. Her shivah, style or disposition, or, continuing the punning on musical
language, mode, is playful coquetry. She is essentially good (as the story conrms for us at its conclusion),
yet she is not an open book, and will even hide herself om the inquisitive guest. When approached in
the right way, all that is hers will be available to the young man, but if not, none of it will be. This story,
despite its apparent elevation of marriage and holy law at its conclusion, does not seem to write out the
importanceand possibly even the necessityof music, games, and coquetry. It is these things that make
This translation is a product of three sources, Nim, Haft Paykar, 224 for the English (although I modied the translation
somewhat), Bakhtiyr, 270, and Nim Gaav, Afsnahh-yi haft gunbad : rivyat-i Amad Shml, (Tihrn: Nigh, 1379
[2000 or 2001]), 274, which provide the same text but with certain lines omitted. I veried the poetry on the useful website
Kitbkhnah-yi zd-i frs (http://rira.ir/), which holds the full text of many Persian classics.
53
her beauty all the more enticing, giving the young man the determination and strength of will he needs to
overcome all the mishaps before him and arrive at the truth. Although the stories of the Black and White
Domes are placed at opposite ends of the Haft Paykar sequence and in seeming opposition to each other, it
seems likely that, taken together, they encompass an understanding of love that allows for ambiguity and
riskiness, in which black and white, external desire and inherent goodness, ers and agap, ishq and ubb,
all have a part to play in bringing about union with God, justice in the world, and inner contentment and
salvation.
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