Persian Language, Literature and Culture

New Leaves, Fresh Looks

Kamran Talattof, Kamran Talattof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317576914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

Critical approaches to the study of topics related to Persian literature and Iranian culture have evolved in recent decades. The essays included in this volume collectively demonstrate the most recent creative approaches to the study of the Persian language, literature, and culture, and the way these methodologies have progressed academic debate.

Topics covered include; culture, cognition, history, the social context of literary criticism, the problematics of literary modernity, and the issues of writing literary history. More specifically, authors explore the nuances of these topics; literature and life, poetry and nature, culture and literature, women and literature, freedom of literature, Persian language, power, and censorship, and issues related to translation and translating Persian literature in particular. In dealing with these seminal subjects, contributors acknowledge and contemplate the works of Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and other pioneering critics, analysing how these works have influenced the field of literary and cultural studies.

Contributing a variety of theoretical and inter-disciplinary approaches to this field of study, this book is a valuable addition to the study of Persian poetry and prose, and to literary criticism more broadly.

Part 1

Poetry and poetics

1 Solṭân Valad and the poetical order

Framing the ethos and praxis of poetry in the Mevlevi tradition after Rumi¹

Franklin Lewis

Bahâ’ al-Din Moḥammad-e Valad, better known as Solṭân Valad (623–712 AH/1226–1312 CE), son of the famous Mowlânâ Jalâl al-Din Rumi, played a critical role in expounding his father’s teachings, crafting the public presentation of his family history, promoting and preserving its legacy, and structuring and expanding the operation of the lineage-based Mevlevi order beyond Konya during the four decades following Rumi’s death. Solṭân Valad was the author of a set of discourses, called a Ma’âref (a compilation of talks or statements, perhaps taken down in note form by disciples during his classes or lectures, like the Ma’âref of both Borhân al-Din Moḥaqqeq and Bahâ’ al-Din-e Valad, as well as Rumi’s Fihe mâ fih and Šams al-Din Tabrizi’s Maqâlât);² like his father, he composed a Divân, which in the edition of Aṣġar Rabbâni (Ḥâmed) contains about 13,000 lines, comprising 826 Persian ghazals, 8 Arabic ghazals, and 1 macaronic Persian-Arabic molamma‛, 15 Turkish ghazals, 32 qasidas, 9 qeṭ‛es, 23 mosammaṭs, and 454 robâ‛is.³ Furthermore, again like his father, he composed a trilogy of maṡnavis, namely, the Ebtedâ-nâme (also known as the Valad-nâme, or Maṡnavi-ye Valadi) of approximately 10,000 lines, the Rabâb-nâme (ca. 8,000 lines), and the Entehâ-nâme (ca. 7,000 lines).⁴ While the Divân of Solṭân Valad is perhaps less than half the size of his father’s Divân,⁵ if we tally the three maṡnavis of Solṭân Valad, taken cumulatively they will roughly match in length the renowned Maṡnavi-ye ma‛navi of his father.⁶

Solṭân Valad reaffirmed the strong link established by his father between the practice of poetry and the Mevlevi tradition. The central place of poetry and music in the praxis of the order can be inferred from the writings of Jalâl al-Din Rumi and Solṭân Valad, and, during the latter’s lifetime, there were already individuals appointed to the post of “Maṡnavi reciter” (Maṡnavi-xwân),⁷ so we know that the poems of Mowlânâ Rumi enjoyed a ritual, even quasi-scriptural role in the Mevlevi order.⁸ One might imagine a world in which Mowlânâ Rumi’s poetic effulgence was bracketed as sui generis, an ecstatic activity of the saint, divinely inspired and (quasi-)thaumaturgic, and therefore unique to the order’s founder.⁹ When Ḥosâm al-Din Čelebi formally assumed the leadership of the community after Rumi’s death in 1273 (a capacity in which he had already been serving), he produced no poems of his own, although he had functioned as the muse for Rumi’s Maṡnavi—and neither had Šams-e Tabrizi or Ṣalâḥ al-Din Zarkub left any verse works, so the orientation toward active poetic composition could well have been broken. But Solṭân Valad revived the close connection between the shaykh (or pust-nešin) of the Mevlevi order, and the practice of poetry and music, simultaneously reaffirming the Persophilic orientation of the order which it would retain for some time. At the same time, Solṭân Valad’s Greek and Turkish verse opened the gates to poetry being composed in one or another Anatolian vernacular, as a teaching vehicle within the Mevlevi dervish community.

And yet, despite the immense poetic output of both Mowlânâ Jalâl al-Din Rumi and Solṭân Valad, the latter’s public pronouncements reflect a somewhat conflicted attitude toward poetry, and an anxiety about distinguishing between the poetry of saints and worldly poetry. Apparently, poetry and its performance had not lost the strong tinge of suspicion and immorality that discolored it in the eyes of some of the ulema. Despite all the poetry his father had composed, and its regular use in devotional and ritual contexts, Solṭân Valad still adopts an apologetic or defensive stance and is at pains to argue, in a passage of over fifty lines,¹⁰ that divine inspiration prompts his father’s (and presumably also his own) poetry, that the poetry of saints is a gloss (tafsir, šarḥ) on the Qur’an, as the saints have effaced themselves and act only through God’s inspiration, moving across the page like pens held in the hands of God. In contrast, professional poets are not trying to show God, but to show off (xwod namâ’i-st piše-ye išân); their verse is a scum of smelly garlic (taf-e sir).¹¹

Mevlevi poetry was, then, born from a matrix that accepts the practice of poetry within the dervish community, but remains in theory hostile toward, or at least wary of, the practice of worldly or pecuniary poetry, a position held by Rumi and his father Bahâ’ al-Din-e Valad.¹² There are, however, certain other trends that undercut this ideology, such as the fact that Solṭân Valad—alongside qasidas in praise (madḥ) of Mowlânâ (Q30) and Ḥosâm al-Din (a bahâriye, Q5), his marṡiyes for Ṣalâḥ al-Din Zarkub (Q20) and Ḥosâm al-Din (Q31), and his religious admonitions in verse (Q2, Q12, Q13, Q19) or poems for Ramadan and ‛Id al-Feṭr (Q3)—has also produced panegyrical qasidas, complete with praise (madḥ) and benedictions (do‛â), and sometimes ḥasb-e ḥâl or ṭalab-e ḥosn petitions¹³ for sultans (Q23, dated Rabi‛ I 680/summer 1281; Q17; Gh14; T1) and various officials, including the vazir Ṣâḥeb Faxr al-Din-e ‛Aṭâ (Qt3), Amirzâde Mo‛in al-Din Parvâne (Q22), Amirs (Q32, Q24, Q18, Q16, Q14, Q11, T10, R270), Ṣadr Akmal al-Din Moayyad-e Naxjavâni in Baghdad (Q29); Seljuk royal women, such as the Georgian princess Gorji Xâtun, wife of Mo‛in al-Din Parvâne and former wife of Sultan Ġiâṡ al-Din Khosrow II (Q21), Fâṭeme Xâtun (Q27), and Kumâj Xâtun, the wife of Sultan Rokn al-Din Qelič Arsalân IV (Q26); various men titled “Axi” (Q25, Q28, T7); for the towns and notable people of Konya (Q10, Qt8), Aksaray (Âqsarâ, Q9), Kayseri (Q21), and Kütahya (Qt9); or to welcome travelers (Q6, Q7, Q8), and so on.¹⁴ Thus, the association of the Mevlevi order with Ottoman officials, and the ceremonies of investiture of the Ottoman sultans, can be said to have its roots in, and to be sanctioned by, Solṭân Valad’s practice of panegyrical poetry, as distinct from his father, who avoided it.

Doubtless these panegyrical poems, because composed in service to the mystical purposes of the proto-Mevlevi community, and because the poems’ recipients were seen to be receptive to the spiritual teachings of that community, neither Rumi (during whose lifetime many of these poems were composed) nor Solṭân Valad felt them to be pandering in the manner of those “professional” poets. We might recall here that the word sultan in the title Solṭân Valad (“The Sultan Son,” by which we commonly refer to Bahâ’ al-Din Moḥammad Valad) suggests spiritual dominion; once we acquire the attributes of the saints (owliâ’, abdâlân) we become monarchs of spirituality:

vâ rahi az bandegi solṭân šavi / bogƶari az jesm o kolli jân šavi¹⁵

You’ll redeem yourself from servitude and become Sultan

You’ll pass beyond body and become wholly soul.

Thus, when praising even the Seljuk Sultan, Solṭân Valad is marked not only as the “son” (valad) of his great father, but also the heir of his grandfather’s title and name, Sultan of Clerics, Solṭân al-‛olamâ Bahâ’-e Valad Moḥammad, and finally as the one who presides over the spiritual realm.¹⁶ This dominion comes through divine inspiration, made possible by the effacement of Ṣolṭân Valad’s human will and personality:

andar injâ har če goftam ay pesar / jomle râ elhâm-e ḥaq dân sar-be-sar bi man âmad az man ân niku bebin / jonbeš-e ‛âšeq ze ‛ešq âmad yaqin qâyel injâ ‛ešq âmad ni Valad / dar ḥaqiqat jomle râ bin az aḥad¹⁷

Know, my son, that whatever I’ve said in this book

it is all, cover to cover, divinely inspired

It came through me from beyond me. Look carefully!

The movement of the lover comes, in certain truth, from Love.

The speaker here is Love, not Valad

In reality, consider all this from the one true God

It has been almost universally assumed and repeated that Solṭân Valad’s poetry is derivative, more or less repeating or adumbrating the ideas of his father, but in less inspired and less inspiring (though not necessarily insipid) verse. It has even been suggested that when starting out to write the Ebtedâ-nâme, Solṭân Valad, whose profession was not poetry, had to first learn how to put a maṡnavi together, and that it contains many weak and metrically faulty lines, but that by the second half he was becoming a stronger poet, as he became used to the verse form.¹⁸ However, it has also been remarked that the Rabâb-nâme lacks literary merit,¹⁹ which would suggest that even after composing the ten thousand-odd lines of his first maṡnavi, he still did not have the hang of the form. This trope of the clunkiness of Solṭân Valad’s verse is overstated, mostly a product of contrastively judging him by the towering standard and reputation of his father’s Maṡnavi-ye ma‛navi (which is also an uneven book, it might be pointed out). It is also an impression fostered by the awareness that Solṭân Valad’s poetry was preserved largely by the Mevlevi order and not widely disseminated beyond that, thus remaining peripheral to the central Persophone canon, at least outside of Anatolia.²⁰ The frequent gestures of humility toward Mowlânâ Rumi in Solṭân Valad’s verse, positing his own verse as a means to better understand Mowlânâ, furthermore effectively efface his creative role and competence qua poet to a secondary or instrumental status as celebrant or expositor of his father’s teachings. As he says in the Rabâb-nâme:

bazm-e Mowlânâ-st mâ dar ṭow-ye u / bâde mi-nušim az sâqi-ye hu … gofte šod dar ‛ešq-e u in maṡnavi / tâ barad bahre ze serr-aš ma‛navi²¹

This is the banquet of Mowlânâ; famished for it,

we drink wine from the steward of divine reality …

These couplets [this Maṡnavi] was composed in love of him

that it might gain some of his mystical “true meaning” [ma‛navi]

and once again:

in marâteb ḥâl-e Mowlânâ-ye mâ-st / v-in ma‛âni qâl-e Mowlânâ-ye mâ-st ânče kardam fahm az u goftam hamân / nist biš o kam dar in niku be-dân jân o del râ qeble šod goftâr-e u / zende-im o tâze az axbâr-e u²²

These levels reveal the state of our teacher, Mowlânâ

And these meanings are the sayings of our teacher, Mowlânâ

Exactly what I understood from him, I have said

Mark this well: there is nothing more, nothing less.

His words I made the qibla of my heart and soul

His words and deeds what revive and give me life.

Moreover, the 826 ghazals in his Divân use the taxalloṣ “Valad” with a high degree of regularity²³ in the first mesrâ‛ of the last line, a taxalloṣ (or pen name) which has the virtue of marking the poems with a kind of family cognomen (valad is an element common to the name of Bahâ’ al-Din Moḥammad Solṭân Valad and his grandfather, Solṭân al-‛olamâ Moḥammad Bahâ’ al-Din-e Valad), but more importantly points at the end of each poem to his subordinate status as the son, valad (filius) of Mowlânâ Jalâl al-Din Rumi, who is occasionally also invoked for good measure in the taxalloṣ line as vâled (pater). Solṭân Valad thus repeatedly points to himself as both the spiritual and poetic disciple of his father, and a selection of Solṭân Valad’s poems often appear pinned on to the tail (ƶayl) of premodern manuscripts of the Maṡnavi-ye ma‛navi.²⁴

That is generally where Solṭân Valad has remained: an afterthought trailing Rumi, of no great interest in his own right, but a treasure trove of information on the life and thought of his father, and for the early development of the Mevlevi ...