Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  Iraqi went travelling with the other mendicants. He wrote many poems about the beauty of young men and boys, and the homoerotic strain in Persian poetry is especially plain in his work, but his contemporary defenders claimed that he only admired the boys longingly from afar. Eventually he came under the influence of a follower of the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, perhaps the greatest thinker of Islamic mysticism, who had died in 1240.

  Ibn Arabi’s thought, steeped primarily in the Qor’an and the traditions of the hadith, but influenced also by neo-Platonism and the thinking of earlier Sufis, elaborated what appears very like a version of Plato’s theory of forms—that phenomena in the material world are manifestations of original, essential truths in a higher sphere (itself an idea possibly derived from Iranian Mazdaism, as we saw earlier). Therefore true reality, paradoxically, lay in the spiritual, metaphysical world beyond, of which the physical, perceptible world was a mere shadow. Central also to his thinking were ideas of the oneness of God’s creation (wahdat al-wujud), and of the imagination (khiyal). But another very significant concept that Ibn Arabi developed from the formulae of earlier thinkers was the idea of the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). According to this notion the sphere of existence that is not God is divided between the macrocosm (the world beyond Man) and the microcosm, the inner world of Man. These two worlds reflect each other, and through religious contemplation and self-development, Man can ‘polish his soul’ until the two worlds are congruent. Man can improve and perfect himself until he takes on the form of the divine—he then becomes the Perfect Man.46 The Perfect Man is a copy of God, achieved by religious discipline and mystical devotion, who can then become a conduit for the will of God in the world. This idea was to have great significance in later Islamic thinking. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was fascinated by these ideas and wrote one of his earliest books about a later commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam (Seals of Wisdom) of Ibn Arabi.

  Consider also the following extract, about the possibility of a mystic being able to visit the alternative Earth of True Reality:

  Then he meets those Forms who stand and keep watch at the entrances to the ways of approach, God having especially assigned them this task. One of them hastens towards the newcomer, clothes him in a robe suitable to his rank, takes him by the hand, and walks with him over that Earth and they do in it as they will. He lingers to look at the divine works of art; every stone, every tree, every village, every single thing he comes across, he may speak with, if he wishes, as a man converses with a companion… When he has attained his object and thinks of returning to his dwelling place, his companion goes with him and takes him back to the place at which he entered. There she says goodbye to him; she takes off the robe in which she had clothed him and departs from him… 47

  The idea that the world of experience was a mere shadow of the real world of forms beyond had great potential for metaphor in spiritual poetry, and traces of this idea can be seen in many of the Persian poets (they reached their apotheosis with Shabestari, who in his Gulshan-e raz put forward a fully-fledged aesthetic according to which eyebrows, curls or the down on the beloved’s upper lip might represent heavenly or metaphysical concepts).

  Iraqi was devoted to the ideas of Ibn Arabi for the rest of his life, wrote his Divine Flashes in exposition of them, and was buried next to Ibn Arabi in Damascus when he died in 1289. But he never settled down to a conventional life. One story says that when he arrived in Cairo on his travels the sultan honoured him by setting him on his own horse and gave him some splendid clothes; but as he rode through the streets accompanied by many other scholars and dignitaries on foot, Iraqi suddenly snatched off his turban and put it on the saddle in front of him. Seeing him going in such splendour, but bareheaded, the people watching laughed, and when he heard about it the Sultan was displeased because he had made himself look ridiculous. Iraqi explained that he had done it to avoid sin; as he rode along it occurred to him that no one had been so honoured before, and he felt his ego rise up, so he had deliberately humbled himself.48

  Some commentators feel that Iraqi’s poetry was better and livelier before his encounter with the thought of Ibn Arabi, and that it became metaphysically overburdened afterwards. But there is something especially touching about Iraqi and his poetry, especially his early works, and it shows perhaps more clearly than any other Sufi poetry the urge to dispense with the self-regarding piety and the holier-than-thou observance of mere rules pursued by the orthodox; and to shock and provoke the orthodox by blatant flouting of their rules. In this, the impulse driving the Sufis is very close to that behind the teachings of Jesus against the Pharisees (Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!); and Jesus is revered by many Iranian Muslims (not just Sufis) for just this trait: for speaking from the heart of spirituality and avoiding getting caught up in its trappings.

  With Sa’di and Hafez we begin to run out of superlatives. Both have been a huge influence on the thinking of ordinary Iranians, and phrases from their poems are common sayings. It used to be that teachers of the Persian language used Sa’di’s Golestan (Garden of Roses) to teach their pupils, getting them to memorise excerpts in order to help them absorb vocabulary, and to remember grammar and patterns of usage. His works were some of the first to be translated into European languages in the eighteenth century. One passage from the Golestan appears above the entrance to the United Nations in New York:

  Bani-Adam a’za-ye yek-digarand

  Ke dar afarinesh ze yek gawharand

  Chu ‘ozvi be dard avarad ruzegar

  Digar ozvha ra numanat qarar

  All men are fellow-members of one body

  For they were created from one essence

  When fate afflicts one limb with pain

  The other limbs may not stay unmoved

  and continues:

  Tu kaz mehnat-e digaran dighami

  Nashayad ke namat nahand adami

  You who are without sorrow for the suffering of others

  You do not deserve to be called human

  Sa’di was born in Shiraz (a city saved from Mongol destruction by the wise decision of its ruler to submit early to them), probably some time between 1213 and 1219. There are numerous references in his poems to his travels, but some of these stories are dubious. He was back in Shiraz by around 1256, and died there in 1292. He was familiar with Sufism but not openly a devotee of Sufism. His Bustan (The Orchard) is an extended poem of moral tales, encouraging wisdom and virtue, humility and kindness, but also common sense and pragmatism. Some of these features emerge in the following story of Omar and the beggar (Omar was the second caliph, after Abu Bakr; one of the four Righteous Caliphs of Sunni Islam):

  I’ve heard there was a beggar in a narrow place,

  On whose foot Omar placed his own;

  The hapless pauper, knowing not who he was

  (For in anger one knows not enemy from friend),

  Flew at him, saying ‘Are you blind, then?’

  At which the just commander, Omar, said to him:

  Blind I am not, but I did slip

  Unwittingly; pray, remit my sin.’

  How even-handed were the great ones of the Faith

  To deal thus with subordinates.

  Much will be made tomorrow of those who cultivate humility,

  While the heads of mighty men hang low for embarrassment;

  If you’re afraid of the Day of Judgement,

  Remit the slips of those afraid of you;

  Oppress not your subordinates with impunity,

  For over your hand lies a hand likewise.49

  Some have thought that Sa’di’s pragmatism strayed too far in the direction of relativism and amorality, citing for example the well-known dictum from the first story in the Golestan that an expedient falsehood is preferable to a mischievous truth.50 But Sa’di is not the only literary figure to have made such a suggestion—one could draw a similar moral from Ibsen’s Wild Duck without concluding that Ibsen was an amoral relativist. Sa’di’s views are div
erse and sometimes appear contradictory, but that is a reflection of the complexities he addressed. It is right that Sa’di became known for his epigrams, because he had a gift for communicating pithy thoughts in vivid language (whether or not a less rugged age might approve of them):

  Ananke pari-ruy o shekar goftarand

  Hayfast ke ru-ye khub penhan darand

  Fi’l-jomle neqab niz bifayede nist

  Ta zesht bepushand o niku bogzarand

  Those nymph-faced, sugar-speaking ones,

  What a pity they should hide their fair faces.

  But the veil is not worthless either;

  The ugly should put it on, and the beautiful, off.51

  And:

  Ya ru-ye bekonj-e khalvat avar shab o ruz

  Ya atash-e ‘eshq bar kon o khaneh besuz

  Masturi o ‘asheqi beham nayad rast

  Gar pardeh nakhahi ke darad dideh beduz

  Either choose a corner of seclusion day and night

  Or light love’s fire and let the house burn.

  Concealment and love do not get on well.

  If you do not want the veil torn, seal up your eyes52

  Hafez too was born in Shiraz, but a hundred years later, in about 1315. ‘Hafez’ is a pen-name, signifying that he had learned the Qor’an by heart; his real name was Shams al-Din Mohammad Shirazi. But little is known for sure of his life. He died around 1390, when the impact of Timur (Tamerlane) was beginning to be felt: another round of invasions, warfare and mass killings to rival that of the Mongols in ferocity and misery. Arberry believed that one of his last ghazals was prompted by these new disasters:

  Again the times are out of joint; and again

  For wine and the Beloved’s languid glance I am fain.

  The wheel of fortune is a marvellous thing:

  What next proud head to the lowly dust will it bring?

  …

  ‘Tis a famous tale, the deceitfulness of earth;

  The night is pregnant: what will dawn bring to birth?

  Tumult and bloody battle rage in the plain:

  Bring blood-red wine, and fill the cup again.53

  But before the skies darkened again with the smoke of war and massacre, Hafez took the previous patterns of Persian poetry and elevated them to new, unsurpassed heights of expression. In the following ghazal the familiar images of wine and the Beloved ripple, interfere, overlap, reflect each other and thereby transcend the immediate eroticism to point beyond desire to the world of the spirit. It is saying that if love is offered, it must be taken, and drunk to the dregs, because love demands full commitment, nothing less; and it is only then that its true significance can be grasped, that love is the essential gift, the essence of life, given to us before time:

  Her hair was still tangled, her mouth still drunk

  And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse

  Torn open, singing love songs, her wine cup full.

  Her eyes were looking for a fight, her lips

  Ready for jibes. She sat down

  Last night at midnight on my bed.

  She put her lips close to my ear and said

  In a whisper these words: ‘What is this?

  Aren’t you my old lover—Are you asleep?’

  The friend of wisdom who receives

  This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love

  If he doesn’t worship that same wine.

  Oh you prudes, go away. Stop arguing with those

  Who drink the bitter dregs, because it was precisely

  This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.

  Whatever God poured into our cup

  We drank, whether it was the wine

  Of heaven or the wine of drunkenness.

  The laughter of the wine, and the dishevelled curls of the Beloved

  Oh, how many nights of repentance—like those of Hafez

  Have been broken by moments like this? 54

  Poems like this unsettle many Iranians even today.55 Some religious Iranians will say directly that these poems are not really about wine or erotic love at all, that the meaning is entirely on a spiritual level, and that the poets themselves never touched wine. Whether or not that is true (and personally I doubt it), the fact is that the poems only work if the eroticism and the alcoholic intoxication are real—or rather, they work because they are real, because they ring true and speak directly to our own experience, as only great literature can. They seem to remind us of something we had always known, but had forgotten. Otherwise the metaphors would be just a device, and the rebellion against convention no more than a pose. This poetry has more bite, more impact than that. Hafez wrote the following in a period of officious imposition of religious orthodoxy (and some have pointed up its relevance in contemporary Iran):

  Bovad aya ke dar-e maykadeha bogshayand

  Gereh az kar-e forubaste-ye ma bogshayand

  Agar az bahr-e del-e zahed-e khodbin bastand

  Del qavi dar ke az bahr-e khoda bogshayand

  Might they open the doors of the wineshops

  And loosen their hold on our knotted lives?

  If shut to satisfy the ego of the puritan

  Take heart, for they will reopen to please God.56

  In later times Hafez was appreciated and translated by Goethe, among many other Europeans, and was so revered by Persians that his Divan (the book collecting his work in one volume—Divan being the conventional term for such collections of a poet’s work) was used as an oracle, and sometimes is still—people wanting to know their fortune would open it at random in the hope of texts that could be interpreted as optimistic predictions. The only other book used in that way is the Qor’an.

  Ay bad, hadis-e man nahanash migu

  Serr-e del-e man be sad zabanash migu

  Migu na bedansan ke malalash girad

  Migu sokhani o dar miyanash migu

  O wind, tell her my story secretly.

  Tell her my heart’s secret in a hundred tongues.

  Tell her, but not in a way that may offend her.

  Speak to her and between the words tell her my story. 57

  Persians did not stop writing poetry in the fifteenth century. There were many important poets after Hafez; notably Jami, and Bidel later. But by that time a body of literature had been created of unparalleled importance, of almost inconceivable quantity, of great diversity and sublime quality. One could compare this body of literature to a human brain and think of it in the way that some theorists now consider human consciousness: that consciousness is not located in any one part of the brain, but is the consequence of the impossibly complex interaction of millions of different cells and their sparking synapses. Somehow, out of this poetry and the combinations and interactions of the ideas and metaphors contained within them, emerged the Iranian soul.

  Every hundred years or so the reading public in the West discovers another of these Persian poets. In 1800 it was Hafez, in 1900 Omar Khayyam, in 2000 it is Rumi. The choice depends perhaps not so much on the merits or true nature of the poets or their poetry; more on their capacity to be interpreted in accordance with passing literary and cultural fashions in the West, and their expectations. So Hafez was interpreted to fit with the mood of romanticism, Omar Khayyam with the aesthetic movement, and it has been Rumi’s misfortune to be befriended by numb-brained New Agery. Of course, an attentive and imaginative reader can avoid the solipsistic trap, especially if he or she can read even a little Persian, but the mirror of language and translation means that the reader may see only a hazy but consoling reflection of himself and his times, rather than look through the mirror into the true depths of the poetry, which might be more unsettling.

  The religion of love of these Sufi poets from 800 years ago might superficially seem rather distant and archaic. That is belied less by the burgeoning popularity of Rumi and Attar than by the deeper message of these poets. Those Darwinists who, like Richard Dawkins, believe Darwinism ineluctably entails atheism, might be upset by the idea, but what could
be more appropriate to an intellectual world that has abandoned creationism for evolution theory, than a religion of love? Darwinism and evolutionary theory have demonstrated the intense focus of all life on the act of reproduction, the act of love. The spirit of that act and the drive behind it are the spirit of life itself. What could be more fitting than a religion that uses the emotional drive behind that act as a metaphor for a higher spirituality, and its longing as a longing for union with the Godhead—This gift the divine ones gave us before Eternity.

  Timur

  After about 1300 (notably under the ruler Ghazan Khan) the Mongol Il-Khans, becoming Islamised and Persianised, reversed their extractive, destructive, slash-and-burn style of rule. They began to try to reconstruct cities they had destroyed, and the systems of irrigation and agriculture that had been abandoned. They had some success, and Tabriz certainly prospered, as the new capital. Azerbaijan, with its wetter climate, was favoured generally by the conquering horsemen for the better pasture it offered. The great historian Rashid al-Din (a converted Jew) enjoyed the patronage of the Il-Khans and, building on the earlier works of Juvaini and others, wrote a huge and definitive history. The cultural flow was not all one way: Persian miniature painting was permanently influenced by an imported Chinese aesthetic and there were other examples. But Iran under the Il-Khans, for all the signs of regeneration, was a poorer, harsher place than before. With almost a deterministic inevitability the empire of the Il-Khans began to fragment, as local vassal rulers slowly made themselves independent of the centre, as had happened before under the Seljuks and the Abbasids. In Khorasan, around Sabzavar, a rebel movement arose in the mid-fourteenth century called the sarbedari (heads-in-noose), with egalitarian tendencies and co-opting Shi‘a and Sufi elements.58

  Like some later and earlier movements, the sarbedari show the eclectic nature of popular, provincial religion in Iran at this time. Elsewhere, the Shi‘a and the Sufis tended to be in opposition, but the sarbedari seem to have had little difficulty fusing the apparently contradictory tenets of the different beliefs involved, and this creative ferment of popular religion was to prove important later too. The sarbedari are significant in another way—they represent again a spirit of popular resistance to the invaders, independent of contingent dynastic leadership, that we saw after the Arab invasion, which was there at the beginning of the Mongol period,59 and which appears again later in Iranian history. This might prompt questions about nationalism that could easily absorb the rest of this book.60 What we call nationalism today is in my view too specifically a constructed phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be considered without anachronism in the fourteenth century or other earlier periods. But we have seen that there was a sense of Iranianness, beyond local or dynastic loyalty, in the time of the Sassanids and before; it was part of what later inspired the shu’ubiyya, the Samanids and Ferdowsi. Nationalism is the wrong word, but to deny any Iranian identity in this era requires some serious contortions of evidence and logic.