Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

The Shahnameh has had a significance in Persian culture comparable to that of Shakespeare in English or the Lutheran Bible in German, only perhaps more so—it has been a central text in education and in many homes, second only to Hafez and the Qor’an. It has helped to fix and unify the language, to supply models of morality and conduct, and to uphold a sense of Iranian identity reaching back beyond the Islamic conquest, that might otherwise have faded with the Sassanids.

  The poetry of the Shahnameh, and its themes of heroism on horseback, love, loyalty and betrayal, has much in common with the romances of Medieval Europe, and it is thought-provoking that it first attained fame a few decades before the First Crusade brought an increased level of contact between western Europe and the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. We have already seen how ideas were transferred from east to west without it being possible later to trace their precise route (there is a stronger theory that the troubadour tradition, and thus the immensely fruitful medieval European trope of courtly love, originated at least in part with the Sufis of Arab Spain22). But it may just be a case of parallel development.

  The Ghaznavids did not reverse the Samanid pattern of patronage, and continued to encourage poets writing in Persian; but the later poets were less strict about linguistic purity and more content to use commonplace Arabic loan-words. Further west the Buyid dynasty, originating among Shi‘a Muslims in Tabarestan, had expanded to absorb Mesopotamia and take Baghdad (in 945), ending the independent rule of the Abbasid caliphs and ruling from then on in their name. But the great literary revival continued to be centred in the east.

  Naser-e Khosraw was born near Balkh in 1003, and is believed to have written perhaps 30,000 lines of verse in his lifetime, of which about 11,000 have survived. He was brought up as a Shi‘a, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1050 and later became an Ismaili before returning to Badakhshan to write. Most of his poetry is philosophical and religious –

  Know yourself; for if you know yourself

  You will also know the difference between good and evil.

  First become intimate with your own inner being,

  Then commander of the whole company.

  When you know yourself, you know everything;

  When you know that, you have escaped from all evil

  …

  Be wakeful for once: how long have you been sleeping?

  Look at yourself: you are something wonderful enough.23

  For many years the Abbasid caliphs and the other dynasties had employed Turkish mercenaries, taken as slaves from Central Asia, to fight their wars and police their territories. Turks had in turn become important in the politics of the empire, and on occasion had threatened to take control—the Ghaznavids had succeeded in doing so in the eastern part of the empire. But in the middle of the eleventh century a confederation of Turkic tribes under the leadership of the Seljuk Turks went further. They defeated the Ghaznavids in the north-east, broke into the heartlands of the empire and took Baghdad, before fighting their way further west and in 1071, defeating the Byzantines and occupying most of the interior of Asia Minor. Centuries of contact with the Abbasid regime and its successors had Islamised the Turks and had made them relatively assimilable. The second Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, had a Persian, Hasan Tusi Nizam ol-Mulk (1018-1092), as his chief vizier, and before long the dynasty was ruling according to the Persianate Abbasid model like the others before it. Nizam ol-Mulk wrote a book of guidance for Alp Arslan’s successor called the Siyasat-Nameh (The Book of Government), which along with the slightly earlier Qabus-nameh, for centuries was the model for the Mirror of Princes genre of literature, also influencing European versions of the same kind of thing, down to the time of Machiavelli and his Principe.

  Nizam ol-Mulk was a friend of Omar Khayyam (c.1048-c.1124/1129) and there are some famous stories of dubious veracity about the friend-ship;24 but it is probably true that when Nizam ol-Mulk became vizier he gave some financial help to Omar Khayyam, and possibly some protection too. Among Iranians it is commonplace to say that Omar Khayyam was a more distinguished mathematician and astronomer than a poet. To assess the validity of this is like trying to compare apples with billiard balls. He did work on Euclidian geometry, cubic equations, binomial expansion and quadratic equations that experts in mathematics regard as influential and important. He developed a new calendar for the Seljuk sultan, based on highly accurate observations of the sun, that was at least as accurate as the Gregorian calendar ordained in Europe by the Catholic church in the sixteenth century25; and it seems he was probably the first to demonstrate the theory that the nightly progression of the constellations through the sky was due to the earth spinning round its axis, rather than the movement of the skies around a fixed earth as had been assumed previously.

  Omar Khayyam’s dry scepticism in his poetry makes his voice unique among the other Persian poets, but also reflects a self-confidence drawn perhaps from his pre-eminent position in his other studies, and his knowledge that in them he had surpassed what was known before. His name is famous in the west through the translations of Edward Fitzgerald, and were taken by his readers to represent a spirit of eat, drink and be merry hedonism, which is not quite right. They are free translations, and Fitzgerald’s nineteenth-century idiom (fine though his verses are), with its dashes and exclamation marks, ohs and ahs, to a degree traduces the sober force of the originals:

  ‘How sweet is mortal Sovranty!’—think some:

  Others—‘How blest the Paradise to come!’

  Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the Rest;

  Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

  (Fitzgerald)

  Guyand kasan behesht ba hur khosh ast

  Man miguyam ke ab-e angur khosh ast

  In naqd begir o dast az an nesye bedar

  K’avaz-e dohol shenidan az dur khosh ast

  (Original)

  It is said that paradise, with its houris, is well.

  I say, the juice of the grape is well.

  Take this cash and let go that credit

  Because hearing the sound of the drums, from afar, is well.26

  Translating poetry is notoriously difficult, and some would say that it is a vain endeavour entirely. For example, the word ‘khosh’ has a wide range of related meanings and is found in a series of compound words in Persian so that, with those, it takes up several pages in any dictionary. It means delicious, delightful, sweet, happy, cheerful, pleasant, good and prosperous: one can see different shades of these meanings in each of the three lines in which it appears in this poem. The form of the poem is the quatrain, or ruba’i—the plural is rubaiyat. Other Persian verse forms include the ghazal, the masnavi and the qasida. Most of Omar Khayyam’s surviving poetry is in the ruba’i form, but there has been much doubt as to which of the thousand or more rubaiyat attributed to him were actually his work. It seems likely that the poems of others, that were of a sceptical or irreligious tendency and might have attracted disapproval, were attributed to him in order to have the grace accorded his great name. At the same time, it may be that he set down doubts in his poems that were only part of his thinking about the deity. But one can read in his poems a rugged humanism in the face of the harsh realities of life, and an impatience with easy, consoling answers, that anticipates existentialism. A recognition of the complexity of existence, and the intractability of its problems, and a principled acceptance. His philosophical writing largely revolved around questions of free will, determinism, existence and essence.27

  Niki o badi ke dar nahad-e bashar ast,

  Shadi o ghami ke dar qaza o qadar ast

  Ba charkh makon havale k’andar rah-e aql

  Charkh az tu hezar bar bicharetar ast

  Good and evil, which are in the nature of mankind,

  Joy and sadness, which are in chance and fate;

  Do not attribute them to the machinery of the heavens, because in reason

  That machine is a thousand times more helpless than you28

  There are dozen
s of quatrains that one could bring forward to illustrate the subtlety and intellectual power of this great man, but this cannot be a book about just Omar Khayyam. The following poem belongs to a collection from an early manuscript attributed to Omar Khayyam by Arberry, which since Arberry’s time has been considered doubtful. But it is known from other manuscripts too, and many scholars still include this poem with his best. If it is not by him, it nonetheless presents a defiant personal manifesto close to the spirit he expressed elsewhere:

  Gar man ze mey-e moghaneh mastam, hastam

  Var asheq o rend o botparastam, hastam

  Har kas be khiyal-e khod gamane darad Man khod danam, har anche hastam, hastam.

  If I am drunk on forbidden wine, I am.

  And if a lover and a rogue and a worshipper of false gods, then I am.

  Everyone has doubts to their own mind.

  I know myself; whatever I am, I am.29

  In this poem, as elsewhere, Omar Khayyam uses terms that were commonplace in Sufi poetry and were used as key concepts, often metaphorically. Mey-e moghaneh for example—Magian wine: forbidden wine bought from the Zoroastrians; also rend, meaning a wild young man, a rogue or wastrel. There were others too, notably the kharabat, the house of ruin, the tavern; and the saqi, the young boy who serves the wine and is the object of homoerotic longing. But although some commentators have claimed Omar Khayyam as a Sufi, and notwithstanding he may have had some sympathy for the Sufis, his voice is too much his own, too unique to be set in any religious category; and his scepticism too strong.

  The eleventh century saw the first great upsurge in the unique mystical movement that is Sufism.30 Sufism is a huge and complex phenomenon, with very different aspects at different times and in different places, from eleventh century Asia Minor to North Africa to modern Pakistan and beyond. Its origins are unclear, but Islam sustained a mystical element from the very beginning, as some would say is shown by the revelation of the Qor’an to Mohammad himself, in the wilderness outside Mecca. The essence of Sufism was a seeking after precisely this kind of personal spiritual encounter, and an abandonment of self and all kinds of worldly egotism in the presence of the divine. But in practices and imagery it also partook of the religious turbulence of the centuries after the Islamic conquest, reflecting popular pre-Islamic ideas and influences, including the mystically-inclined movements of neoplatonism and gnosticiscm. These influences, along with a deliberate anarchic and antinomian tendency, set it up from the start in tension with the text-based, scholarly, urban tradition of the ulema and the urban preachers; who solemnly read and re-read the Qor’an and hadith to assert anew the correct definition of Islamic law. There was tension and conflict, and a number of Sufis or mystically-inclined thinkers, like al-Hallaj and Sohravardi for example, were condemned as heretics by the ulema and executed (in 922 and 1191 respectively). It may be that the renewed rise of Sufism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had something to do with a reaction to the increasing concentration of Islamic practice and Islamic study in the madresehs, directly under the eye of the ulema, that was taking place at this time.

  The significance of Sufism within the Islamic lands at this time has sometimes been neglected, but in reality it was all-pervasive. Its cultural influence in Persia is indicated by its effect on Persian poetry, but everywhere there were Sufi khanaqas—lodging-houses for wandering Sufis that also served local people for religious gatherings. In the larger towns there might be many khanaqas (of different Sufi orders), and bazaar guilds and other associations often had Sufi connections. But even small villages might have khanaqas too. There are parallels with the friaries set up for the mendicant orders in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like the friars, the Sufis were intimately involved in the religious lives of ordinary people, and were responsible for missionary activity in the countryside and beyond Persia. Given the low level of literacy at the time and the fact that the population lived overwhelmingly in the countryside, it becomes plain that the Sufis were central to the diffusion of Islam outside the towns and cities. The centre of their activity was in Persia, and especially in Khorasan, but they probably were the prime means by which Persianate culture spread and consolidated its popular influence from the Bosphorus to Delhi and beyond.31

  Many Sufis and in particular many of the Sufi poets, openly scorned what they saw as the self-important egotism of the ulema, provoking and attacking them for their obsession with rules and their vain pride in the observance of them, which forgot the selflessness necessary for true spirituality. It is not difficult to see why some orthodox Muslims, especially Wahhabis and their sympathisers since the eighteenth century, have anathematised and persecuted Sufism. But in the period we are dealing with here, the missionary activity of travelling Sufis, (known also as dervishes) was important, probably crucial, in the conversion of new Muslims, both in the remoter rural parts like Tabarestan, where orthodox Islam had been slow to penetrate, but especially in newly-conquered territories like Anatolia, and among the Turks in their Central Asian homelands in the far north-east.

  The first great theorist of Sufism was Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), another native of Tus in Khorasan (though there were many major Sufi figures much earlier, Junayd for example, who died around 910). The relationship between orthodox Sunnism and Sufism was not one of simple opposition, and Al-Ghazali was primarily an orthodox Sunni of the Shafi’i mazhhab, who wrote works attacking the Mu’tazilis, Avicenna and the introduction of ideas from Greek philosophy. But he also wrote an influential Sufi work called Kimiya-ye sa’adat – The Alchemy of Happiness, and in general he tried to remove the obstacles between orthodoxy and Sufism, presenting the latter as a legitimate aspect of the former. In the early centuries of Sufism, Shi‘a Muslims tended to be more hostile to the Sufi dervishes than the Sunnis.32

  Sana’i was the first great poet with a clear Sufi allegiance, and some have compared his literary style with that of Al-Ghazali. His long poem Hadiqat al-haqiqa (The Garden of Truth—completed in 1131) is a classic of Sufi poetry, but he wrote a large body of poems beyond that, and in them it is easy to see the fusion of the traditions of love-poetry with the impulses of mysticism:

  Since my heart was caught in the snare of love,

  Since my soul became wine in the cup of love,

  Ah, the pains I have known through loverhood

  Since like a hawk I fell in the snare of love!

  Trapped in time, I am turned to a drunken sot

  By the exciting, dreg-draining cup of love.

  Dreading the fierce affliction of loverhood,

  I dare not utter the very name of love;

  And the more amazing is this, since I see

  Every creature on earth is at peace with love.33

  Here too, wine has become a metaphor for love, taking the imagery into another dimension of complexity. Where a conventional, orthodox Muslim might favour abstinence (zohd), in accordance with religious law, Sana’i says that in going beyond law into infidelity (kofr), leaving behind his venal, carnal soul (nafs), the Sufi can find another way to God. The point is that both love and wine can be ways in which a man may forget himself; they are familiar experiences in which the sense of self is changed or obliterated. Such an experience can give a taste of (and therefore provide a metaphor for) the loss of self experienced by the mystic in the face of God—the loss of self that is necessary for genuine religious experience, that is yearned for as the lover longs for the beloved.

  The Seljuk period produced a profusion of poets, and it is not possible to do justice to them all, but Nizami Ganjavi, who composed his Khosraw va Shirin in 1180 and Layla va Majnoun in 1188, is too important to be overlooked. Both these long poems (he wrote many others) retold much older stories; the former a tale from the Sassanid court and the latter of Arab origin. Both are love stories that became hugely popular, but they have deeper resonances, reflecting Nizami’s religious beliefs. Layla and Majnoun fall in love, but then are separated, and Majnoun goes mad (‘Majnoun’ means ‘mad’) and wander
s in the wilderness. He becomes a poet, and writes to Layla through a third party:

  Oh my love, with your breasts like jasmine! Loving you, my life fades, my lips wither, my eyes are full of tears. You cannot imagine how much I am ‘Majnoun’. For you, I have lost myself. But that path can only be taken by those who forget themselves. In love, the faithful have to pay with the blood of their hearts; otherwise their love is not worth a grain of rye. So you are leading me, revealing the true faith of love, even if your faith should remain hidden forever.34

  Without hope in his love (Layla’s father will not let them marry) Majnoun spiritualises it. In going into the desert, losing his selfhood in madness, stepping outside all ordinary conventions and writing poetry, he has effectively become a Sufi.35 So even this overtly profane story has a spiritual dimension that is not immediately apparent. But to have psychological force, the metaphor and the spiritual message first require our sympathy with the lovers’ predicament. The poem is not simply about the Sufi’s approach to God. It is both that and a love story—and therein lies its human appeal. It has been translated into almost every language in the Islamic world, as well as many others beyond it.

  Farid Al-Din Attar, who lived from around 1158 to around 1221 or 1229 in Nishapur, wrote more than 45,000 lines of verse over his lifetime. He established the elements of a theory of a ‘religion of love,’ which strongly influenced all subsequent Sufi poets, and developed the idea of the qalandar, the wild man, outcast, whose only guide is the ethic of that religion:

  Har ke ra dar ‘eshq mohkam shod qadam

  Dar-gozasht az kofr va az islam ham

  Whoever sets foot firmly forward in love

  Will go beyond both Islam and unbelief36

  The classic of Attar’s poetry is the Mantiq al-tayr, The Conference of the Birds, one of the best-known Persian poems of all. Embedded within the charming and wonderfully-told story of the birds questing for the mysterious phoenix, the simorgh, is the story of Shaykh San‘an, which brings out the full meaning of Sufism in its logical extreme, and is deliberately provocative and shocking in the Islamic context. The story was important and influential in the later development of Sufism.