Mystical Islamic Poetry 6

Poetry from the 14th to the 16th century As we have worked our way through the major poets of the mystical tradition of Islam, from the beginning of the 9th century, we have also been working our way through the history of the Islamic world, to which it is of course inextricably linked. In our last course, we looked at poets writing in the era immediately after the enormous eruption of the Mongol invasions, which for a period of about hundred years in the late 12th and 13th centuries, caused havoc throughout all areas of the Islamic world apart perhaps from North Africa and the Maghreb. We saw that life in the 14th century, when a very large part of the Islamic world was ruled by Mongol protectorates, was characterised by a remarkable degree of continuity in a cultural sense; the Mongols, having been so terrifying in the early stages of their conquests, settled down to be unexpectedly tolerant rulers who allowed their Islamic subjects to continue much as they had before. The four poets that we shall look at this term span more or less the 15th century, coinciding with what we broadly call the Renaissance in Europe. At his time the Mongol protectorates began to fall apart, leaving something of a ‘power vacuum’, which allowed the emergence of new empires. In the East, the Ottoman Empire grew rapidly in southern Turkey and the Balkans; in 1453 it famously conquered Constantinople and in 1517 it overthrew the Mamluk Empire to take possession of Egypt, Syria and holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The map below, which has been our main guide on recent courses in locating the major Islamic poets, shows the Islamic world as it was in 1600, but the shape of the Ottoman Empire is very much as it was by the end of our period, in 1517. In the East, a new force arose in the area of Afghanistan in the figure of Tamerlane, or Timur, who by the end of the 14th century had established an empire which stretched from Tashkent in present-day Uzbekistan to Baghdad. Like the Mongols, whom he emulated in many ways although he was by birth a Muslim and a Turk, the Timurids were ruthless and brutal conquerors, but after the empire was established, they proceeded to set up courts which became great centres for the development of high culture and science. These were established in the far eastern cities –in Samarkand, Bukhāra and above all in Herat, where Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī, lived and worked for his whole professional life. The Timurid empire was actually quite short-lived – by the beginning of the 16th century (1501), it had been overthrown in Iran by the Safavids, who set up a much longer-lasting empire. But the cultural achievements of the Timurid courts were so outstanding that they exerted an influence far beyond their political importance – to the extent that the standard that they set in literature, intellectual discourse, architecture and the visual arts, as well of course as in poetry, became the defining archetype on which the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughal Empires later

modelled their own glittering courts. Its extent coincides pretty much with the area of the Safavid Empire on the map.

The Mughal Empire was in fact founded by one of the Timurid’s successors, Babur, from Uzbekistan, who defeated the incumbent Dehli Protectorate in about 1526; he was a literary genius himself, whose autobiography, the Babur-nāma, is considered to be one of the greatest works written in the vernacular of the region, Chaghatay Turkish. But during our period, North India was still ruled by the Delhi Sultanate. We are going to look at the work of four poets from different regions: • Hāfiz, from Shirāz in Iran, who died in about 1390, at the very beginning of our period. • Kabir, (d. 1518) from northern India. • Jamī, based in Herat at a Timurid court, who died in 1492. • Finally, a rare female poet, Aʾishah al-Bāʿūniya who came from Southern Syria and spend

most of her adult life in either Damascus or Cairo, in the last days of Mamluk rule; she died in 1517.

We have no poets from the Ottoman tradition this term, but this does not meant that it did not produce any. We will be compensating for their absence this term by having three Ottomans in Mystical Islamic Poetry 7. One of the defining features of Islamic culture in this period is its homogeneity. We used a quote last time from Anne-Marie Schimmel who said:

The content of mystical poetry between Istanbul and Delhi are so similar that one can almost translate a Sindhi poem by Sachel Sarmast into Turkish and take it for an original verse by Yunus Emre.1

This would equally hold true for the 15th century. The mass migrations which at the time of the Mongol invasions had brought people together from diverse areas of the Islamic world, were no longer occurring and life was much more settled. But people still travelled a great deal, with the annual hajj providing a particular incentive to do so, and there was long-range communication and free movement across a vast geographical area (about 4,500 miles) from Delhi to Cairo and beyond, to North Africa and even, during most of this period, to Spain (Granada falling to the Franks in 1492). One of the features of this period was the development of poetry in vernacular languages, particular the various Turkic and Northern Indian tongues, but Persian was still a kind of lingua franca spoken at all the imperial courts of the East, and people were united by a common religious, literary and philosophical/scientific culture. Marshall Hodgson, one of the great historians of the Islamic World whose views are always interesting, 2 has a whole section in his seminal work The Venture of Islam on intellectual development in this post-Mongol period, which he considers to span the years1273-1503. He maintains that this homogeneity had a downside, and characterises this era as one of intense conservatism, in which original thought in the sense that we would understand it in our modern western culture, was largely absent. He cites, in support of this view, the fact that this was the age when the commentary became a major vehicle for intellectual expression, with many major thinkers in philosophy and religion choosing to write expositions on works written by former masters rather than produce their own independent works. This applied to poetry as much as to prose works; we saw last year that Shabistarī’s Gulshān al-Rāz had, within a generation, given rise to more than 30 different metaphysical commentaries, and even commentaries upon the commentaries. The same applied to other poetic works, such as Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Khamriyya (Wine Song) and Tāʾiyya (The Poem of the Way).

                                                                                                               1 Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil, Oxford, 2001, p.51 2  Marshall Hodgson The Venture of Islam, Volume 2, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1974, pp. 437-531.

Hodgson also discusses poetry, pointing out that there were no fundamental innovations in the basic forms of verse, which continued as they had been set by the time of Sa’dī in the 13th century. Just to remind us: there were three basic genres which concern us when looking at the mystical tradition:

• the ghazal – the short lyrical poem • the mathnawī – the long epic poem, so called because the rhyme changes after every set of two lines • the rubaʿi – the quatrain, or four-line verse, often based upon a pun or other type of word-play

Further, it became a particularly common practice in this period to pay explicit homage to a pantheon of past poets, particular those who produced epic poems; ʿAttar, Firdawsī, Sanaʾi, etc. Thus, in our course last winter we saw that Amir Khusrau, at the court of the Delhi Sultanate, produced a set of five epic poems which imitated the khamsa of the Azerı poet, Niẓāmī, written at the beginning of the 13th century. Similarly, Jāmī’s most famous work, written at the end of the 15th century, is a set of seven epic poems, called the haft awrang, which were also explicitly conceived as a homage to Niẓāmī. On the basis of such examples, and many others, Hodgson depicts a society which was in some fundamental way based upon the notion of a golden age in the past rather than upon progress into the future. But there are arguments against this view. One is that great poets like Khusrau or Jamī – rather like their counterparts in Renaissance Europe – did not just blindly imitate these works from the past. Only two of Jamī’s seven epic poems deal with the same stories as Niẓāmi’s, and his most famous work, his re-telling of the story of Yusuf and Zulaika, was not in the orignal khamsa. It could be argued, and many have done so, that in fact the Persian poetic tradition reached its highest degree of perfection in this period with Hafiz and Jamī, who have been called respectively ‘the greatest of the Persian poets’ and the ‘seal of Persian poets’. Another argument against the ‘golden age’ theory is that (particularly if you take the whole period from 1273 onwards) this was time of continuing scientific achievement in areas such as astronomy, mathematics and medicine, with one of the great mathematicians of the Islamic tradition, Jamshīd al-Kashī (d. 1492) working at the Timurid court of Samarkand during the early 15th century,3 and it would be nearly a century before this kind of work ground to a halt. Yet another is that the ideas of Ibn ʿArabī – abbreviated as waḥdat al-wujūd (the unity of being) – which were such a large feature of the commentary tradition were in fact a radical departure from traditional metaphysics and it was in this period that they really became widely discussed and achieved influence. Far from being stultifying, they were highly

                                                                                                               3 See Jim al-Khalili Pathfinders; the golden age of Islamic science, Penguin, London, 2010. It is also true, however, that this was the last great flowering of medieval Islamic science, as the forces of conservatisim which opposed it were already rising.

controversial and had the effect, as Alexander Knysh has intimated, of ‘shaking things up’ in intellectual spheres.4 One could argue that their influence was not unconnected to the extraordinary vigour exhibited by the new empires which were to emerge in Turkey, Iran and India, where many of the greatest artistic and intellectual achievements of the Islamic world were still to come; e.g. the Taj Mahal, the mosques of Sinan, and the great flowering of philosophical thought in Iran represented by the school of Mulla Ṣadra. Similarly, as I hope we shall see, the poets we will look at this term were more than able to express fresh and invigorating insights, albeit within traditional forms. So for these, as well as for several other reasons, I myself would feel that the situation is not as Hodgson portrays, even though there is no doubt that there was a very strong conservative tendency at this time, especially amongst religious leaders and scholars of the traditional sciences; free-thinking people struggled against what we now call religious fundamentalism just as we do today, and as we shall see this evening, this was one of the major themes in the poetry of Hafez. One of the problems in coming to any kind of overview is that, oddly enough, this period has not been well-investigated; western commentators have tended to focus either on the early, pre-Mongol period or the later emergence of modernism, and we do not even have a good account of the major thinkers or works produced in the 14th and 15th centuries. So it has been easy to assume that no significant developments occurred, or to look at it with Eurocentric eyes and compare it unfavourably with what was happening in the West at the same time. There is one area, however, where everyone agrees that there was an enormous development in the 15th century, and that was in the visual arts, and in particular, in painting and book illustration. It was under the Timurids that the art of the Islamic miniature, which was to become the most important visual art form in the Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal empires, was born. The form was not original to the Timurids, but under their patronage and their establishment of institutions called kitābkhāna (book workshops) where craftsman from many different disciplines worked together, the painting traditions of Chinese and Mongol culture encountered the Islamic world and something truly extraordinary was created. This is relevant to us because, in the spirit of homage which I have just mentioned, the great epic poems of Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusrau, Rūmī and eventually Jamī, were amongst the favourite subjects for the painters, and exquisite books, beautifully written, bound and illustrated, were made of the stories of Layla and Majnun, Khusraw and Shīrīn, Yusuf and Zuleyka, etc. And it is in this vividly illustrated form that they were preserved and passed down to future generations, so that they are still known and loved to the present day.

                                                                                                               4 See Alexander Knysh Ibn ʿArabī and the Later Islamic Tradition, New York, 1999.

[In class, there followed a short slide show of 15th century miniatures, but for copyright reasons this cannot be put up on the open access area].

Jane Clark, 22/10/2015