The Mirror of My Heart

by Unknown

  Kasra is a corruption of “Khosrow” and refers to the pre-Islamic king Khosrow I, also known as Anushirvan (“Of Immortal Soul”), who ruled Iran from 531 to 579 ce, and was one of the most successful of the pre-Islamic kings, to the extent that his reign was remembered as a golden age of justice and prosperity. Rabe’eh has made specific the suggestion of pre-Islamic Iran, implied by the lines on wine, by alluding to what was in folk memory the country’s most splendid imperial moment. That it is the imperial aspect of his reign that is emphasized is indicated by the reference to the gold and silver of his crown, to which the color of the garden’s narcissi is compared. Two related tropes common to Persian verse are present here: one is the lost glory of Iran’s imperial past; and the other is that all glory is fleeting, that dynasties die and the sites of their splendor return to nature.

  The last two lines bring the poem back to the present, but not to the immediate circumstances of Rabe’eh’s daily life, which will of course have been Moslem; by referring to Christian nuns, the poem ends by evoking another non-Islamic religion. She is referring to something that is known to her but absent from her own life’s immediate Moslem circumstances, something which she would not have experienced directly, just as she would not have known the Zoroastrian glories of Kasra’s reign; the poem ends by reaching out to two “exotic” realities, one from the past and one from another religious community, that are nevertheless imaginatively present for the poet. And we can say that, if the poem is by Rabe’eh, it also ends with what looks like an approving, or at least certainly not disapproving and perhaps affectionate, smile for her non-Moslem sisters. If the poem is by Rabe’eh, that is, because the last thing it shares with many other short Persian poems is that it has been mistakenly attributed to at least two other poets of the early medieval period, Rudaki and Suzani-ye Samarqandi. Different manuscripts attribute a large number of short Persian poems to different authors and the authorship of many poems, particularly from the earliest periods, remains doubtful; in this case, though, the scholarly consensus is that the poem is by Rabe’eh.

  And so, packed into one short poem, we have: spring, a garden, the breeze at dawn, the most valued medieval perfume (musk), an evocation of a distant land (Tibet), wonder at an ideally beautiful situation, a reference to a tragic Arab love story, blood-red tears, non-judgmental references to two non-Islamic faiths (Manicheism and Christianity) and the evocation of a third (Zoroastrianism), a reference to a glorious pre-Islamic Persian king, the admonition to drink wine, and a kind of flippant contempt for those who would frown on this. The poem is superficially a simple celebration of the coming of spring, and this is a perfectly legitimate way to read it, but it is implicitly and deliberately entangled in a complicated mesh of cultural references that would be obvious to its original audience and to later readers from the same culture but which can be elusive for a reader from another cultural tradition. All of these poetic strategies, tropes, and metaphors constantly recur in Persian poetry as it was written for a thousand years subsequent to Rabe’eh’s poem.

  The Medieval Period

  Persian poetry begins in the tenth century and, as we have seen, Rabe’eh was one of its earliest practitioners. Iran had been conquered by an Arab invasion that brought the then new religion of Islam to the country in the seventh century, and the culture of Iran, including its language, was radically transformed by this conquest. Here an analogy with a somewhat similar Western cultural transformation may perhaps be useful. England was conquered in the eleventh century by the Norman French, and French culture, and the French language, dominated the court and virtually every level of society above the peasantry for the next three centuries. In the fourteenth century, Chaucer is one of the first, and certainly the greatest among his contemporaries, of the poets to write in the new form of English, which was an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon and French. Like Rabe’eh’s verse, his too seems to us simple and direct, and in the nineteenth century Chaucer’s verse was sometimes referred to as being written in the “springtime” of British poetry, with all the connotations of newness, freshness, and innocence the word implies. But Chaucer’s verse, like Rabe’eh’s, is immensely sophisticated beneath its beguilingly charming surface, and it is written very consciously in the shadow of the French culture and language, which had been brought by Britain’s conquerors three centuries before; indeed, Chaucer began his career as a poet with a partial translation of the most popular French long poem of the age, Le Roman de la Rose. Both Chaucer and Rabe’eh wrote at a time when a new indigenous literary culture was emerging from the shadow of a linguistic and cultural conquest that had occurred three centuries before their own time. Both are learned poets who paradoxically seem in many ways much more innocent and untutored than their successors, but this “innocence” is built on an urbane awareness of a complex literary culture to which their own poetry is consciously indebted but from which it is providing as it were a literary way out, with the founding of a new indigenous poetry.

  Like Chaucer’s, Rabe’eh’s is a simplicity that hides a great deal of learning and sophistication. For example, she is, as far as we know, the first Persian poet to write macaronic verse—that is, verse that is written in two languages, usually in alternating lines; in Rabe’eh’s case the alternating lines are in Arabic and Persian. This implies fluency in Arabic, and what we know of her biography seems relevant here. Her family name indicates an Arab origin at a time when the court language of most Persian princedoms (her father was just such a local prince, in Balkh) was in the process of changing from Arabic to Persian, which means that she was almost certainly bilingual. Her father’s name was K’ab and her own name as it appears in early sources is Rabe’eh bint K’ab; her brother’s name was Hareth. All three names are Arabic, and indeed the family claimed descent from Arab immigrants who had established a petty kingdom centered on Balkh in what is now northern Afghanistan.

  Rabe’eh appears at the beginning of the revival of Persian poetry after the “two centuries of silence” (the phrase was coined by the twentieth-century Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkub) that ensued after the Arab/Islamic conquest of the seventh century. Referring to English literature in particular but implying literature in general, the eighteenth-century literary historian Thomas Warton pointed out that after a “dark ages” in which learning and literacy are largely lost, at least in their native linguistic form, “writers are chiefly employed in imparting the ideas of other languages into their own.”* In the case of Rabe’eh’s generation, the “other language” in question was obviously Arabic; the great Italian Persianist Alessandro Bausani wrote of this earliest period in the revival of Persian poetry, “We are in the presence of . . . a linguistic Iranization of Arabic conceptual traditions and lyric conventions.”* The language still used to describe Persian poetry confirms its early debt to Arabic: virtually every word descriptive of poetic rhetoric in Persian (meter, rhyme, metaphor, pun, etc.) is Arabic.

  Let us consider Rabe’eh’s position: she grows up at a provincial court where we can presume she had access to whatever literary learning was available in her time and place, as is attested by her surviving poems; she is bilingual in Arabic and Persian as her macaronic poems indicate; she lives at a moment when Persian poetry is effecting a rebirth by, as Bausani says, “a linguistic Iranization of Arabic conceptual traditions and lyric conventions”; and given the fact that she uses them, her familiarity with the rules and tropes of Arabic versification can be taken for granted. These circumstances render her almost uniquely able to effect the transfer of Arabic poetic conventions to Persian verse. This suggests that Rabe’eh was not merely a woman who happened to write verse at the moment when Persian poetry was being reborn, but that her role in this revival was crucial and perhaps decisive. Her circumstances and achievement indicate that she was someone whose example made possible the revival of Persian poetry, at least in terms of its major non-Persian model. This is not at all to imply that she was the only person who did this,
but she was certainly in a privileged, influential position and well qualified to contribute to this process. We can see her as an instigator, someone who pointed the way in which Persian verse was to develop, rather than as just one of the small number of Persian poets who happened to be writing at this time, and one who happened to be a woman.

  Rabe’eh was a court poet, as were virtually all medieval Persian poets (the exceptions were poets whose main subject was Sufism, although Sufis were sometimes court poets too). But there is a crucial difference between her and almost all of her male counterparts. The men were professional poets, dependent on the largesse of the prince or of the courtiers at the court at which they worked. Rabe’eh was a princess, not a court employee, and as such it’s unlikely that she was paid for her poetry, or if she did receive some kind of emolument or reward for her poems, this wasn’t something she depended on for her livelihood. So she was, in the literal sense, an amateur poet—that is, someone who wrote poetry because she wished to do so, not as a paid profession. Many of the women poets who followed in Rabe’eh’s footsteps, princesses or aristocrats like her, were also “amateur” poets in this sense, members rather than employees of a ruling family. When we do find women poets later on who were employed by noble families, they were virtually never employed as poets; they were usually entertainers of some kind, sometimes courtesans, employed not for their poetry but for other skills and for their personal charms.

  Yet it has to be said that although we find women poets writing in Persian in almost every generation from Rabe’eh on, their number is comparatively small when compared with that of their male contemporaries. It is, however, on a par with the relatively small number of women poets to be found in most cultures during the pre-modern period (perhaps the major exceptions are the cultures of medieval China and Japan, both of which produced a goodly number of women poets), and at certain times for particular cultures—such as English literary culture during the Middle Ages—it considerably exceeds that number.

  Pre-modern Persian poetry can be broadly divided into three different kinds: long narrative poems, short lyric poems, and epigrams. There are no surviving long narrative poems by women from the pre-modern period; so far as women poets are concerned, we are dealing with lyric poetry and epigrams. Persian lyric poetry developed a very specific set of conventions, some of which presupposed both a male author and a male addressee, and these conventions were also tacitly present in the epigrammatic forms. The ambiguity of Persian personal pronouns—“he” and “she” are the same word in Persian—means that it is almost never wholly clear which gender is being addressed or talked about in a love poem (ghazal), and it seems likely that many lyric poems by men were addressed to women, but the fallback assumption was that such poems were written by a mature male to an adolescent male; that is, as far as poetic convention indicated, women were wholly excluded from the world of lyric poetry. Again, a Western parallel may help to illustrate what is going on when a woman writes within this traditionally male form.

  Early medieval Persian poetry is in many ways similar to the early medieval poetry of southern Europe during the same approximate period—that is, the poetry of the troubadours (this is not the place to go into whether the resemblance was more than a coincidence, given the palpable Arabic proximity to, and apparent influence on, both literatures). The approximate lyric equivalent to the ghazal in troubadour poetry was the canso; female troubadours were called trobairitz, and they were, like their female counterparts who wrote in Persian, almost always members of the nobility/aristocracy. The canso was “normally” written by a man to or about a woman, so the particular gender complication (that both poet and addressee were assumed to be male) of the Persian ghazal is absent, but in other respects a female poet writing a canso was in a similar situation to a female Persian poet writing a ghazal. As Linda Paterson has written of the trobairitz:

  Conventions are particularly problematic for women composing cansos or love lyrics. The canso form cannot be straightforwardly adapted to a female voice. By placing the woman in a position of dominance, the troubadour canso reverses the gender hierarchy obtaining in real life: the speaking male subject chooses to renounce in fiction the superiority of status he enjoys in fact, as far as gender if not class is concerned. If a woman adopts a submissive position in poetry she conforms to rather than reverses her real situation . . .*

  All this is true of women’s love poetry in Persian; the added complication that Persian lyric poetry by men is usually assumed to be addressed to a male adolescent does not change the reversal of power dynamics involved, since in a ghazal these male adolescents are conceived of as playing the conventionally female role in a relationship—that is, they are the recipients of admiration, affection, and sexual advances, rather than their initiator. The result is that, when a woman writes a ghazal, she is assuming what is traditionally a man’s role; however, as that fictive man she renounces the culturally expected role of male dominance and assumes the woman’s role of supplication and inferiority; she is a woman pretending to be a man who pretends to adopt what was traditionally the female role of subservience (we find a somewhat parallel situation in Shakespearean comedy, when boy actors pretended to be women who pretended to be boys). Linda Paterson also writes that “some scholars have identified elements of a female rhetoric in trobairitz poetry relating to particularly intense feelings of frustration and deprivation, and a particular concern with real relationships with members of the other sex.”*

  This too seems to be true of certain Persian women poets; even though it is foolhardy to try to extract biographical detail from what are largely conventional poems, love poems by Persian women can often seem more rooted in real circumstances than do the ghazals of many male poets. The vividness and intensity of feeling in some of the love poems of Jahan Malek Khatun (c.1324–c.1382), for example, can at times seem to indicate something deeper and stronger than the largely conventional emotional gestures to be expected in many ghazals by male poets. The fact that most of the Persian women poets were “amateur” poets (unlike male professional poets, they had no reason to write poems other than their own individual inclination to do so) also suggests that much more personal feeling may be expressed in their lyric poetry than seems to be the case in the poetry of many professional (male) poets.

  Before we leave the question of gender, and its ambiguity in love poems by women, it is as well to remember the convention behind the “normative” male ghazal, which is that the poem is, all other things being equal, likely to be about a same-sex relationship, imaginary or real. By the same token, there is nothing to prevent a woman’s ghazals from also being about a same-sex relationship, and given the relatively restricted social life of most Persian-speaking women in the pre-modern period, it seems more than possible that some if not many of the love poems collected in this anthology were written not only by women but also to women (as Sunil Sharma has pointed out,* one obvious candidate is the little poem addressed to “Arezu”—an exclusively female name—by the fifteenth-century poet Zaifi Samarqandi, on this page).*

  The most prolific women poets writing in Persian during the period before 1500, or at least those from whom most poems have survived, are Mahsati (c.1089–1159), Jahan Khatun (c.1324–c.1382), and Mehri (fourteenth/fifteenth century). It is significant that all three of these women were associated with courts whose rulers were descended from central Asian conquerors who had either adopted Islam relatively recently, or only adopted it once they had settled in Iran. Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, Iran was overrun first by the Seljuk Turks, then the Mongols under Genghis Khan, and then the Timurids under Timur the Lame (Tamburlaine). All of these peoples were originally nomadic tribes who descended on Iran from the steppes of central Asia, and for the first generations of their rule in Iran they retained much of their central Asian nomadic culture. Gender roles in nomadic cultures tend to be much less strongly demarcated than in sedentary cultures, and women’s parti
cipation in many aspects of public life is taken for granted in ways that would seem scandalous in traditional sedentary cultures; when the rulers were of nomadic descent, this was true even in Islamic courts, at which we might have expected the women to be secluded from public life as was then the case in much of the rest of the Islamic world. Nomadic peoples did not balk at being ruled by women, and in the Seljuk era (1037–1157) a number of women actively participated in politics, while Mongol women were involved in virtually all aspects of public life, including religious, economic, and military activities. In particular, the Mongols were used to women wielding political power, and at various times in the thirteenth century the Iranian provinces of Kerman and Fars were both ruled by Mongol princesses. Even when female rule was not so unambiguous, the Mongols often married their daughters to members of the local nobility, and in these mixed marriages the Mongol wife tended to have at least as much authority as her native-born husband, if not more. Although it had begun to diminish somewhat, this tradition of relative gender equality, at least at the upper levels of society, continued under the Timurids (mid fourteenth to late fifteenth century).

  Given the openness of these dynasties to women’s participation in court life, it is unsurprising that Mahsati was said to have sought and gained employment as a scribe at the court of the Seljuk king Sanjar (r. 1118–57), that Jahan Khatun, an Inju princess descended from a mixed Mongol-Persian marriage, became well known as a poet in her own lifetime, or that the poet Mehri was an intimate of the Timurid empress Gowhar Shad (who was seen as a virtual co-ruler while her husband was alive and became the empire’s sole ruler after his death in 1447). That the women of the Inju court routinely went unveiled was a mark of their relative social freedom, as was noted by the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta, who also recounts a revealing anecdote concerning a member of Jahan Khatun’s family. During a palace coup one of Jahan’s female relatives (the mother of Jahan Khatun’s uncle, Abu Es’haq) had been seized by her enemies and was being taken through the bazaar; she tore off the veil in which she had been shrouded by her captors, and appealed for help from the local populace, who immediately recognized her, rallied to her defense, and killed the men who were attempting to abduct her. The fact that she was identified so quickly and so easily indicates that not only did this woman appear at court unveiled, but that she also appeared unveiled in such mundane and potentially disreputable surroundings as the public bazaar. The relative freedom and more or less gender equality of at least aristocratic women in Mongol society was paralleled by the Mongols’ religious tolerance, at least during the first century or so of their conquests; historically they were shamanists, but by the time they embarked on their conquest of Asia many were either Christians (especially women for some reason), Moslems, or Buddhists. The Mongol Great Khans enjoyed having the scholars of different religions debate with one another about the true faith,* and the thirteenth-century historian Matthew Paris recorded that when a Mongol ambassador reached the court of England’s King Edward I in 1287, what most surprised and shocked him was that only one religion was allowed there, even though he himself was a Christian and it was his religion that was the favored one.*