Abdal Hakim Murad – Abd alRahman Jami Paradigms of Leadership
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We're continuing with this series of paradigms of
leadership.
The idea being to,
first of all, interrogate the concept of leadership
itself. Is this an Islamic
concept? Are we supposed to seek it out?
Or does it just descend upon us as
an unwanted mantle from heaven, a responsibility,
as well as a privilege?
And we've seen the enormous range of human
types, male and female, scholarly, non scholarly,
warrior, servitor of the poor,
mystic,
philosopher
that our civilization has produced.
One of the vindications
of the integrity and the power of the
Mohammedan
revelation,
is the extraordinary
proliferation of civilizations and narratives which it has
produced.
Some of the moderns
like to assume that Islam can be no
more than a kind of dull legalism,
a literal understanding
of ancient
canons
of scripture.
But what we've seen in this journey has
been that, in fact,
Islam, the religion, produces Islam, the culture.
And Islam, the culture, produces great civilizations.
Civilizations
far from perfect, no civilization ever is.
But nonetheless,
it's important to remember this continuity. And philosophers
such as Roger Scruton have pointed out that
every culture historically is grounded in religion
at some point.
And every civilization is grounded in a culture.
And the challenge that we face in our
modernity is, of course, with the absence of
religion,
what kind of culture do we have other
than the endless
Python esque deconstructing of a culture that we
used to have? What are we putting in
the place of the old Abrahamic
religious assurances,
other than deconstruction
and fanaticism for doctrines to do with the
body?
It's by no means clear that we still
have a civilization as classically understood.
One of the responsibilities of Muslims, as they
spread their wings in these lands of the
West, where we are generally
much freer to practice and to think
and to understand and to resource our heritage
than Muslims in the increasingly
culturally locked down lands of the Muslim world,
is to explore ways in which the current
civilizational
crisis of the Western world
can be not exacerbated,
as the anti immigration
pundits would have it, but rather healed
by the presence of a community,
a leaven in the dough as it were,
a catalytic
congregation
which still does have the capacity to root
itself in religion. The basis of scrutincies
of all culture and hence of all successful
sustainable civilizations.
That is, it seems to me, the calling
of Muslims who live in the West,
where the indigenous narrative has withered because the
roots have died or been hacked away
by generations of unthinking
secularity.
The idea being that religion,
far from offering us freedom from the self,
actually offers us some kind
of alienation
and slavehood.
And replacing that with a triumphant, virile Islamic
narrative, which we may hope will be the
healing for the current sickness of Europe and
America, now so salient and evident.
So the civilizational principle is something that is
axiomatic to Islam.
And very often the best way of introducing
Islam to those who know nothing of it
or who know inaccurate things about it, is
not to hand them pamphlets, but rather to
take them by the hand and to visit
with them the great museums of the world.
The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum,
others just in London, Leighton House, other places
offer extraordinary showcases
of the creative genius of the Islamic spirit.
And because beauty is unarguable,
things are beautiful and they affect the soul,
beauty has a capacity to enable us to
transcend
nafs and move towards ruh, even if we
don't have a proper religious framework with which
to articulate that. And as a result from
that experience of beauty, we can move on,
since their defenses are lowered to some extent,
to explaining to them the civilizational,
cultural, and spiritual roots that made that beauty
possible.
And, alhamdulillah,
very often people do come to Islam through
the path of understanding Islamic literatures
and Islamic art.
So if this is to be an important
way forward,
as we,
proclaim our identity as healers in the West
and as renewers of the civilizational
principle,
rather than just
an ethnic problem,
We need to make sure that we are
fully in touch with and proud of our
own great civilizational
heritage.
The holy prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam planted
a seed.
And the seed
did not just produce 1 tree,
where we consider the whole family of Islamists
a tree, but perhaps a tree with so
many different and diverse branches and fruits of
different kinds.
There has never been a spiritual principle in
world history that has produced so much diversity
and so much spiritual depth and richness.
And we need to be aware of this,
because in the land of Dawa, it is
a very important
and unarguable
basis for the case that we need to
make.
So in the course of our visit to
these various paradigms, we have seen that there
are figures who are heroic figures, who are
brilliant scholars, figures who
create the ethico legal basis for the brilliance
of Islamic civilization and the sustainability of its
social,
vision.
But also,
individuals who
allow, as it were, the spirit to be
channeled through the creative aspects of the human
mind
and accumulative
wealth of
literary features, in order to produce
the world's greatest ever literature.
We've reflected on the fact that the most
popular poet now, even in Trump's America, is
our very own Mulla Jalaluddin
Rumi.
That is an example of the power and
the transformative reach
of our literature.
And evidently, that is the place we need
to start
in order to bring our healing message, rahmatum
rashifa,
to cultures that are now increasingly in pain,
because of the confiscation
or the erasure of their own identities.
So we need to be aware
of the fecundity
of the
seed that was planted
and to enjoy for ourselves the fruits that
were given because there is so much beauty.
And we are the people who belong in
those places.
Western tourists
wander around
the Mythkita in Cordoba
in amazement that its evident maturity and profundity
and sheer beauty
and the alchemical transformation which it brings to
the hearts, even of the most callow and
absent minded
photographing tourist. But the Muslim, when he or
she visits that space,
in addition to that transformation, has also a
sense of appurtenance of belonging.
So we enjoy this great privilege that we
are heirs to this wonderful civilizational
narrative.
So the individual that I wish to visit
respectfully,
whose hospitality we are seeking today,
is another of those extraordinary fruits and blossoms
from the tree of Muhammadan
civilization,
which grew particularly in Central Asia.
We looked a few months ago at the
figure of Khwaja Obeidullah Ahrar,
Adasilhan Sirrahu.
We've mentioned Mawlana Nurumi and many others.
But we need to, consider
that narrative
because it seems to be that narrative of
all of the narratives of Islam that has
been able to put down roots amongst educated
readers in the West.
It is one thing to visit the Blue
Mosque in Istanbul
and to have a spiritual high for 10
minutes. That is easy, but to sit down
with a divan
of one of the great Persian poets requires
a higher degree
of cultural commitment
and interest.
But these writers
are those who
focus on
principles that are eminently universal.
If they didn't,
if they were of no interest to our
current day pains and concerns,
the books would remain untranslated
or gathering dust in the shelves of university
libraries. But instead, they have, as it were,
gone viral
and become a major cultural meme in our
otherwise very profane
and divided and heartless civilization.
It is,
worth bearing in mind,
the fact that the seed that was planted
by the holy Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
was one which
upheld
diversity,
in so far as the constituent cultures of
the rainbow
coalition of Muslim civilizations that we see in
the great ages of our faith. The triumphant
times, not the defensive times,
was an incorporation
of and a transformation of the various languages
which constituted the Ummah.
We've already had occasion to reflect on the
paradox
of the fact that the hand of Islam
touches
other languages,
and instead of seeing them wither away, they
enter their golden age.
This is the case certainly with the languages
of the Turkic
speaking area, which had very little literature before
Islam appeared.
It's certainly the case with the languages
of, Sahelian Africa.
Fulfulde,
Hauser,
Wolof,
the dialect of the Tawarik. It's the case
with Swahili,
which was more or less a language created
by the Muslims.
Certainly, the case of the Malay Nusantara.
Certainly, the case with so many regions.
That instead of imposing a kind of imperial
Arabness,
Islam allows the particularities
of the constituent
sub nations of the Ummah
to fluoresce.
And to, in a strange sense, find their
voice rather than lose it.
And perhaps nowhere is that process of alchemical
transformation more
palpably and undeniably,
miraculously evident, than in the case of the
the Farsi language.
And this is significant because the
most substantial
other
ethnicity
that early Islam encountered was not so much
the Greek speakers of the Byzantine Empire, but
was very much the peoples to the east.
When the capital of
the despotic Persian Imperium,
Ctesiphon Al Mada'in,
was liberated and the armies of Omer Ibn
Khattab,
Omerd bin Uthman,
and later
moved into Iran, liberating the peasantry from the
sterile grasp of the
of the aristocracy there.
We find,
the presence of the Ajam, the non Arab,
represented and figured particularly as the Persian.
And because the Holy Quran affirms
that of Allah's signs is ikhtilaforalcinetikum
waalwanikum,
the difference of your tongues and colors.
We find early Islam admirably able, certain Umayyad
Arabacentric chauvinisms apart,
to incorporate and embrace
and allow those people to
find an indigenous voice which they had failed
to find before. The
golden touch of Islam
transformed them into gold.
So we find,
that our greatest literature
is not the Arabic literature, but is probably
the Persian literature.
We have in Arabic so many great poems,
but by and large,
they do not represent seeds that can be
successfully sown in the lands of the West.
Whereas the Persian poets,
Hafez,
Nizami,
Attar,
Sonahi,
particularly Rumi,
do seem to have very considerable traction.
There are complex psychological reasons for this, which
we don't really have the time or perhaps
the capacity
to
penetrate. But, nonetheless,
we notice that the non Arabism, or even
we could say the anti Arabism
of the prophetic moment, the appointment of Bilal,
the presence of Salmani Farisi, the presence of
Sohayb and Sinan the Byzantine amongst the first
ranks of the Sahaba.
The fact that the Holy Prophet
married Sayyidina Bilal to an aristocratic
And the Persians respond to this very quickly
and become the great embraces of,
and enriches intellectually of, the Islamic
tradition.
It's an irony that the great early Arabic
grammarians,
like Sibaway, were actually of Persian origin.
And we note that the Holy Prophet
in a Hadith that's narrated by Imam Basar,
and which Imam al Haythamikh considers to be
a sound Hadith,
said, If knowledge were as far away as
the Pleiades, these distant 7 sisters stars,
people from Persia would attain to it.
Not just a general, sort of, praise and
respect for the Persian people in this sound
hadith,
but also
taken, at least by our Hanafi brothers, to
be a specific foretelling
of the appearance of Imam Abu Hanifa,
not a man bin Thabit. Radilah O'an, the
eponymous founder of the largest of all of
the ethico legal schools of classical Islamic civilization,
a
Persian,
not an Arab, even though this is an
early period. Most of the Persians at this
time are still not
Muslim.
So this
this embrace, despite the initial shock of the
conquest and the overthrowing of the
the the the Shah
and his,
aristocracy,
is one of the the the vindications of
Islamic civilization and a proof of its universality.
So, the figure
that I want to talk about today is,
in a sense, somebody who comes
at the end of the most productive age
of that extraordinary efflorescence of Persian literature,
which begins with Rudaki, the first really Persian
poet
of any denomination because poetry before the Islamic
era was
very mediocre and
constrained largely either to Avestan hymn making
or the discussion of certain Zoroastrian rituals or
rather sterile proclamations
of the glories of various ancient kings.
But with the appearance of Islam, we find,
as it were, the democratization
of culture.
Because the hierarchies of the Zoroastrian
and Masdean order were overthrown.
And the democratization,
of course, of all of the arts, because
the great
art of
the ancients in Iran had been basically temples
and mausoleums
and various forms of glorifying the monarch.
Whereas the appearance of the Masjid, the mosque
where everybody could equally enter and worship together,
was the place where the great creative architectural
genius
of the land was subsequently expressed. So
a popularization, a democratization,
and the indigenization
of Islam in the language is a very
important part of this.
So there is Nizami,
there is,
Atar, there is Sanai,
Rudaki,
and the earlier poets, all of whom had
a particular
perspective
on the world and on the issues of
the poet, and who accumulated
a range of tropes and standard images.
Some of them, like the Leila and Majnan
image borrowed from,
Arabian sources.
Others, such as the legend of Khosrow and
Shirin,
borrowed from pre Islamic Iranian sources. But all
of them brought together in a way that
was
incorporated
and cumulative,
rather than competitive
and displacing.
Right at the end of that period,
we find
Mullah Abdulrahman Jami,
who dies in
1492.
That's a very significant
year, isn't it? The loss of Granada far
to the west, the crossing of the Atlantic,
the the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of
the Americas, the beginning of modernity in a
certain way is when the last of the
great golden age Persian poet
breathes his last.
And this is the individual that I wish
to speak about today. And because there's not
really much point talking about the life and
times of a poet without really diving into
his literary output,
we will be looking particularly towards the end
at 1 or 2 of his longer poems,
just to to breathe some of the the
fragrance of his verse despite the inevitable impoverishments
and displacements that occur when
a work is transposed and translated and moved
into the aesthetic
and
semantic
landscape of a very different
kind of
language and linguistic
universe. But
the transposition can work.
And we've already had occasion to reflect on
the enormous transformative power of Islamic civilization on,
Western culture.
And very often, the usual orientalist narrative is
that, oh, the Muslims
transmitted
Greek philosophy and science to the West.
Well, they did more than that because Avicenna
did more than just copy things out, but
massively,
augmented,
those arguments. And the same with Ibn Rushd's
reception of
Aristotle. They were not just porters and postmen,
they were
inhabitors and enrichers of that tradition as well.
But we tend to spend a little less
time
reflecting on more subtle and spiritual
upliftments
that came to the West and have been
significant in constitution
constituting its historical civilizational norms.
There are
the 3 waves of love,
perhaps one way in which these more subtle
aesthetic spiritual
transformations have made their way from the world
of Islam to the Western world.
The first being the transformation
of the kind of love poetry
which we saw when we were dealing with
Saydah Sukhayna bint al Hussein,
one of our earlier lecturers. And we noticed
how early Islam represented this extraordinary
efflorescence
of love poetry.
And how William Chittick and others see Islam
as quintessentially the religion of love.
And how that, through the troubadours and the
traditions of courtly love,
came from Muslim Spain and Provence into Europe
and triggered the idea of the romantic as
part of the
the the legendary,
imaginary of
Western Europe.
And then the second wave of love comes
about,
when the
from the time of the renaissance onwards,
when
Sufi texts and Persian texts in particular are
rendered into European languages.
And Europeans
start to appreciate
the possibility of a form of religion that
is not about flagellant monks
and a denial of the world, but an
embracing of the world and a kind of
sacramental
love.
So that celibacy and the renunciation of the
world is not the only path to God,
but there is a way of reaching God
by going through the world rather than around
it.
And the 3rd wave, which is still incipient,
which represents
the extraordinary meme of the poetry particularly of
Mawlana Rumi in the Western world.
And the refreshing of a tired and materialistic
civilization
with Nessa'im Al Muhammeda with the fresh winds
of love. But it's the second wave that
is
represented by Mulla Abdul Rahman Jami.
Some of whose poems have gone into European
languages, although
they operate, it's fair to say, in a
minor key when compared to the extraordinary
palpitations
that, the soul of Rumi has brought to
the western heart.
So,
Molana Abdulrahman
Jami,
known
in the Muslim poetic world as Khathamesh Sho'ara,
the seal of the poets.
A term which means not just, kind of,
the best, the one who is summative, who
brings everything together and does it in a
way that is more masterful than his predecessors.
But also a somewhat wistful acknowledgment
of the fact that, only 7 or 8
years after his death,
everything is going to change in his Persian
world.
And you have the Safavid revolution from 1502
onwards,
Shah Ismail Safavid with his very strange incarnationist,
sense of Shi'ism and the steady liquidation
of the Sunni,
consensus and balance in the traditional Iranian world.
Granted that Mulladyami spends most of his creative
life in,
in Herat, which is nowadays in Afghanistan
and continues to have a very large Sunni
population. Some way from the Safavid capital, which
is far to the West in Tabriz.
But
still, it is interesting to reflect on the
fact that, this extraordinary
silsila or chain of brilliant Persian poet,
Once the country falls into the grip of
the Safavids, seems to kind of come quite
precipitously to an end.
A number of explanations have been offered of
this and offered.
And we might want to speculate, but that's
a little bit outside our purview today.
So let's acquaint ourselves, first of all, with
the events of his
of his,
life.
Jeremy is,
as we said, fairly late in this cycle.
It's 400 years after Rudaki begins the tradition
of Persian
sacred poetry.
And he is in the time of the
Mongols,
the Timurids
in particular.
Not the terrifying mass murdering Mongols of Genghis
Khan and Timur and so forth. But the
Mongols who to some extent have had their
wildness tamed
by the spirit of Islam when Sufis such
as Sayfadin Yahya ba Kharazi
converted them to Islam.
One of the great transformations in in the
history of the religion and indeed of of
world history.
One with enormous ramifications
for the history of of
Russia,
for the history of
Europe, for everybody's history really.
Russian history begins with the 13/20, the battle
of Kulykovo,
which is when the Mongol Muslims of the
Golden Horde are defeated, and Russia really begins.
So Jami is coming towards,
the end of this period, and he's born,
as you might guess from his name, in
a place called Jarm,
which is a small town in Khorasan.
There's 2 big areas that are kind of
close to each other, which are enormously productive.
Perhaps more productive culturally and in a scholarly
way, than anywhere else in the Islamic world,
for centuries.
There is Khorasan,
which is roughly that area,
you know, a few 100 miles either side
of the place where the the border between,
the old Soviet Central Asia, Tajikistan, meets with
Afghanistan and Iran.
The place where those borders meet, that's Khorasan.
Further to the north,
beyond
the,
Siridaria river, you have Transoxiana,
Mawara and Nahar,
which is a very different kind of area
with Samarkand and Bukhara and Shash and those
places.
Kind of fading out to the far north
where you've just got the steppe and then
Siberia.
And that's, as it were, the end of
civilization.
Nobody would wish
to travel beyond that.
So Mulla Jammy is a Khorasani.
Sometimes you find him called Dashti because his
father was from a place, somewhat further to
the west called Dash. But usually, Wallah Abdul
Rahman Jami,
is how
we know him. And indeed, he does give
us a poem.
Quite often we get biographical snippets
in his enormous gigantic oceanic,
poetic
output. So he says,
I was born in Jarm
and the drops that fall from my pen
are gulpings from the chalice of Sheikh al
Islam.
What he means here is that in the
place called Jarmi is actually named after, somebody
called Sheikh Ahmedino Miri Jarmi,
who was buried in the town of Jarm
about 2 centuries earlier.
Jean de Pyl, he was called the raging
elephant. That was the name of this this
saint because of his strength and he's left
1 or 2 works of poetry, but his
tomb was there. And
it seems that, Mulla Jambi had a particular
attraction to
the fragrance that the sheikh had left. Certainly,
the jalama darjarida
y ashar in the register of poetry, my
pen name is Jami
with both meanings. In other words,
well, it's kind of three meanings really because
Jarm is the place where he's from, so
he's Jarmi.
But also there's Sheikh Al Islam Jarm who's
who's located there, so he has that attachment.
But also Jam in the Persian language means
like a chalice, a grail, a cup from
which you drink the wine of love. And
so that's
the kind of play on words that that
he would like.
Yep. So,
he is from this town. We know
a lot about his life, partly because he
does talk about himself and partly because his
disciple, Abdul Ghaffarillari
and others,
write about him quite extensively. He's very much
at the center of the literary
milieu in his world, and
his his biography is pretty well known compared
to some of the other paradigms of leadership
that we have
investigated.
And towards the end of his life he
writes,
in poetry of course, his autobiography,
'Rash hay bal bisharhe hal',
the sprinklings of the mind'.
Where he talks about his family.
And there's an interesting feature of him, and
perhaps an indication of his Sufi nature, that,
even though he quite often participates in social
gatherings,
where people
are endlessly reciting lists of their ancestors and
their family trees, particularly their ahnal bet.
It doesn't really do that. But he does
say in this poem, that his ancestor
was a Persian man called Hormuz,
who in the time of Omar
Ibn Khattab, so this is really early, converts
to Islam
in Mesopotamia in Iraq. So he must have
been one of the very first Persians to
convert to Islam.
And his hormon had a son called Tawus.
And his son Tawus has 2 sons,
Thabit and Abdullah.
Thabit is important because he becomes the father
of Abu Hanifa.
'Abdullah becomes important because he's the grandfather
of Muhammad al Shaibani, who is Abu Hanifa's
leading pupil.
So there's this strongly fiqh based orientation. And
again, it's a reminder of how important these
Persian converts, these Muwali, were in the formulation
of early Islam.
So a descendant of Muhammad al Sheibani
settles in Khorasan,
and
Jamia's father was a certain Nizam ad Din,
who is
the local judge, the Qadi
of this place, John.
His father has an influence on him. He's
brought up with firk and with tafsir
and with
literature,
in a Persian speaking environment.
But the big influence on him, at least
according to all the biographers,
is that at the age of 5
he meets, the great Khawaja Muhammad Parsa,
who we met in the context of the
life of Ubaidullah Ahrar.
He dies in 14/20
and he's going through the town of Jarm,
on his way to Hajj.
Not only was the Hajj in those days
a place where people talked, and shared poetry,
and shared ideas, which it isn't now.
You just go to Starbucks, do your Tawaf
and go back home again. That's the Hajj
nowadays. But back then, Mecca was a city
of many madrasas, points of view, and the
Haram was full of scholars with their own
circle. And it was a possibility for somebody
from what's now Afghanistan to meet somebody from
Cordoba,
the only chance they had. And this is
one reason,
for
the the remarkable unity of traditional Islam. There
was no pope to hold things together, but
there was the Hajj
where people would actually meet and exchange ideas
and find out who's writing what. In the
days before
the Internet, this was
enormously important in securing the coherence of the
civilization despite its colossal
geographic
extent. So Khwaja Muhammad Parsa,
of the Nakshbandi
family,
a great wali,
loved universally.
All the people in the town come up
to greet him and seek his blessings as
he's passing through on the Hajj. Jamia's father,
Sayyidina Zayed, and Zomedine puts him on his
shoulder, as fathers do.
And,
Parsa
offers him 2 things.
He offers him
a sweet,
he's a child, he's 5, but also a
glance,
lachha,
just a look. And this lafza, this look
of the saint, like the prophetic glance, has
the capacity to make a fundamental alchemical
change in the heart of the person who
is blessed by it. And this begins
what really is his lifelong journey, which is
very emphatically within the nakshbandiya.
He's not one of those Tar Heelka people
who have different affiliations.
He's nakshbandiya through and through. He's one of
the great writers,
maybe the greatest poet of the Nokshbandi,
this great central asian Bukhara tradition.
So, at the age of about 13, his
family up sticks and leave Jam and go
to Herat, which is slightly to the east.
It's now in Afghanistan,
of course.
Maybe because he was obviously very promising, they
wanted to improve the boy's education.
And he joins the Nizomir college in Herat.
And then another madrassa called madrassay Dilcas,
is always looking for the best teachers because
he's so quick already.
Studies with somebody called, Mulla Junaid or Saldi,
and has a very strong Arabic focus.
It's important to remember that even though he's
one of the great Persian poets, he also
really knows his Arabic. And when he bursts
into Arabic, sometimes in his divans, it's really
good Arabic. And indeed he writes a book
on Arabic grammar as we'll see.
He is taught Kalam
by one of the disciples
of Imam Ataftazani,
one of the great Kalam authors of the
age.
And later on this is going to bear
fruit
and we'll have reason to discuss
Jammy's
complicated
and complex
relationship
to Kalam.
This is always one of the creative tensions
in Islamic civilization, the way of the heart
and way of the mind.
The way of the heart is very much
the nakshbandi thing. Nakshband means carving on the
heart. That's where religion reposes, experience,
dalq.
But the mind also,
has the right to understand and it is
in the mind and in the realm of
logic that one can refute error. Both of
these things have to be
represented in the civilization. But generally, certainly from
his earliest days, from the time of his
meeting with the gaze of Khaja Mohammed Parsa
Amal in Germany
is on the the heart side of things.
But he also studies firqh, and he studies
tafsir, and he studies hadith very thoroughly, as
you'd expect. And he's really
kind of one of those geniuses of our
civilization. So we're told that,
he'd do his homework,
some things are timeless,
just by
asking one of the boys he was walking
to school with to show him the book
that they were studying. And as they walked
along, he just looked at what the book
was and when he got to the class,
he would be the one who'd dominate the
complete
completely the discussion in the madrasa,
Because he
just saw the the purpose of the discussion.
Not just what is the information conveyed by
the book, but what is the reason for
this this discussion.
So he studies even some things that we'd
call secular studies. There's somebody in Herat, in
the region of the town, Kolkadizade,
Rumi,
who comes from the Ottoman court. And there's
a very strong connection, as you can understand,
with the Nakhshbandi connection. The
Khoras Khorasan is really the spiritual homeland of
the Ottomans. Just the Turks have come to
Europe from Central Asia. So also the Nokbandi
sheikhs, and of course, Mulla Rumi goes from
Balkh and settles in in Konya.
The Ottoman axis, the Ottoman pedigrees to the
east one, and to the Arab lands in
the south. So Kaldi Zadeh is this great
astronomer of the age
and is associated with, somebody called Ulugh Beg
later on, who's the governor of Samarkand.
And to this day, if you go to
Samarkand, and I've seen it, one of the
tourist sites there is the observatory of Ulugh
Beg.
And Ullukbeg himself, despite being a prince,
actually was kind of preoccupied
with astronomy and made some very significant
contributions to,
the Zige, the Almanac, and the celestial
tables.
So he goes to Samarkand,
which is the capital of the Timurid empire,
one of the few towns that the Mongols
had not completely
flattened.
And
associates with with Ulorpegg,
well, Caldesad is looking after this observatory, and
there's various debates. And Molajami is already clearly
the great scholar of of the time.
Then after about 15 years, he goes back
to Herat. Okay. He's in his twenties now.
Why does he go back?
Well,
it seems that there was some kind of
unfortunate
love story at work here,
that he was in love with some unnamed
person in the city of Samarkand,
inappropriately,
and had free dreams of his sheikh Sa'd
ad Din Kashkari, who's one of the great
early
Naqshbandi
saints, who is his moshid
at the time,
who tells him,
never mind these dispensable companions.
Travel to the one, the true God, who
is the only indispensable
companion. Now this becomes a kind of repentance,
a sort of Ghazalian moment,
where he becomes not just a kind of
formalist religious
athlete,
but somebody who is
seeking God.
This is through the dream,
Kashkhe.
So he goes to Herat, back to Herat,
and associates himself with with the line of
the Khwaja Ghan, which is the great Nakshbandi
golden chain of teachers.
Kashkari is in the line of,
Mullana Allah ad Din Attar,
who was a disciple of Baha'i ad Din
Nakhband himself. So Herat is
really
one of the capitals of of the Nagrandi
movement. And the Nagrandi has become
partly because of the portability of the tariqa,
which doesn't have too many complex rituals or
structures,
to go with it, but partly also because
Central Asia is the center of the world
until
Columbus.
So they're able to become a very important
presence in
China, the main taliqa in China,
an important presence in India,
everywhere. This is kind of the the heart
of the Muslim world is is Khorasan and
Mawura and Nahr at the time. So he's
now involving himself more seriously
with these individuals.
And
Kashkari's
teacher,
Molochamos,
seems to have influenced some of his rather
eccentric styles. And one of the enlivening things
that Sufism does for the Omba is to
produce people who are Sharia compliant, but somewhat
strange or unexpected.
So Kasseri,
whose job it was to give a talk
before and after each one of the 5
daily prayers in the main mosque of Herat,
would sometimes during his talk fall silent
and it would look as if he'd fallen
asleep, but he hadn't.
It was in a state of ralaba. He
was overcome by his awareness of the the
divine power,
and ghaf and rajat.
So he that's why he's called Khamosh. Khamosh
means silent. Khamosh bashtoazrenjigoft.
So Kashkari's janvish sheikh, but really quite unlike
him.
And it's Kashkari who really puts him through
the necessary
ordeals
that are required of people to transcend
mere youthful exuberance and ego.
So there are periods of silence, periods of
fasting, periods of austerity, periods of retreat, khalwa.
And as he goes through this process,
in a fairly characteristic Uch Bandi, Central Asian
way,
he says, Kalam and logic are all very
well, but they're not really a decisive path
to God. The decisive path to God is
for your heart to be opened to the
divine nearness.
And a lot of the olema in Herat
are not really happy hearing their prize discipline,
Kalam,
kind of, not abolished, but downgraded by Mon
Ajami.
And he gets
unpopular in a certain sense. 4 4 years
later,
Kashwari dies,
buried in Herat.
And 30 years later or something, that's where
Mollunjabi is to be buried as well. So
he's his great, great teacher.
And later on, Mulla Jami goes on to
marry Kashfi's granddaughter.
It's quite common in the tariqa world for
the daughter or the granddaughter to marry somebody
who is then regarded as being
the one who carries the torch for the
tariqa.
And she becomes his only wife.
We know that he has 4 children,
3 of whom die
pretty young.
And some of his most heartfelt poetry, actually,
some of the elegiac masterpieces of the Persian
language, are laments that he produces,
ratat
for
the death of his his babies.
One of them, Sofia Dean, who died after
only a few days, I think,
produced a,
Elegy, which is really one of the masterpieces
of Persian poetry. He's still a tearjerker to
this day. The only one of his boys
who survives is Bia ad Din,
who goes on to become pretty
close to him. And for whom he wrote
at least one book, al Fawa'id Al Tiyya'i
benefits,
which is a commentary on,
Ibn al Hajjib's great Arabic grammar work.
So thanks, dad, for this big grammar book.
That's
what he does for his son. He's making
sure that he gets a
proper education.
Also present in this nakshbandi world,
is
Khwaja Obeidullah
Ahrar,
whom we've already met, who is in Samarkand.
Khoaja Akharaar had had the famous dream when
he was
a child of the holy prophet who asked
him to carry him. Uhra carried the holy
prophet up a mountain
and was told at the end of this
that you will be strong.
And Uhra is one of the Naksh Bandhis
who really uphold the traditional
Nakshbandi
attitude to the state.
Remember they're in this world of the Mongols,
maybe superficially Islamized,
maybe very brutal.
Always when the Sultan dies, there's a catastrophic
civil war between the sons who are all
trying to kill each other. They're pretty
rough.
And the nachamundi
tradition is always,
you engage with politics in order to counsel
the king to support the destitute and the
poor, and that should be an important feature
of every Nakshbandi Khotba.
So
Agharar
becomes a friend of Jammy, visits his home.
Jammy is living outside the city of Herat
in a kind of distant rural suburb,
Hayabanejo.
And there's no
disciple pupil relationship here instead it's Irshad ve
Istirshad.
They are guiding each other and seeking guidance
from each other. It's a particular kind of
spiritual fellowship where the conversation is all about
deen, where they're just learning
what they don't have from the other person.
But they also discuss worldly things.
The Noche Bandhis also have a famous interest
in irrigation.
So they discuss ways of improving the irrigation
system of the Herat area.
This is Central Asia. Okay. So snow in
the winter,
complete parched,
rainless summers.
Irrigation is really important because summer is when
the crops grow and are harvested.
So to this day,
the people of the Herat region and other
parts of Afghanistan,
Persian speakers,
still make reference to Mullah Jamies book on
irrigation technique
because it's so effective and so based on
his understanding of what was what was appropriate
in that area. And there's canals and irrigation
systems dug in the region of Mazar Sherif
Herat Balkh,
which are from that that that Nokshbandi,
concern to make the desert
bloom. He is writing
poetry,
which is a mixture
of Nakshbandi
austere councils
and the effusive
love based
tradition,
that is now time honored in the Farsi
literary tradition. So one of the first that
he writes is toffit al aharar toffee aharar,
A gift to Mulla'u Baidullah Ahrar, which is
a Nasnavi,
which is a essentially a spiritual,
an extended spiritual epic.
So he's associating with these people.
He's also very close
to somebody
who leaves an even bigger impact on the
literature,
which is,
Ali Shir Nevayi.
So think about the map of the region.
This is kind of the interface between different
cultural zones. China is not so far away.
To the south, there's India and there's the
Persian speaking world.
Over the river, there is basically a Turkic
speaking world.
There's places that are now Uzbekistan
and Kazakhstan
and
and so forth, Kyrgyzia.
The Turks are
a major factor in the political life of
the Ummah because the
Mongol elites are now speaking this language, Chagatai
Turkish.
And Alisher Neva'i
is, of the citizens of Herat, from the
literary elite, the one who is really trying
to make Turkish into a literary language for
the first time.
So I've already mentioned how Islam transforms and
uplifts and enriches languages.
Nawawi
is one of the great figures in this
process that enables these traditions of Islamic
ghazal writings, the Masnavi,
the meters, the arold, the rhyming system of
classical Islamic verse, to find a home in
the Turkic
language. They call it Turki. It's quite different
to modern Turkish, and different also to Ottoman
Turkish. So he's a Chagatai poet,
but a very major one.
And they're very close. So Nawawi writes a
kind of biography of of of Jamir Hamzatul
Mutahayarin.
They're so, sort of, immersed in poetry, that
it's as easy for them to write poetry
as it is to write prose. It doesn't
really require any additional effort.
Navai also adds to the cultural
synthesis
and richness of the city of Herat,
the so called Timurid Renaissance that is happening,
by writing a very unusual book called Muhaqqamat
and Louvain,
arbitration between the two languages.
There's a discussion in which is better Turkish
or Persian.
Those are the 2 big languages of the
region.
And he gives some very complex and interesting
discussions.
But of course, as you can imagine, he
says actually the Turkish language is a bit
better than the Farsi language. And they come
out at the top in this sort of
wrestling match between the two great linguistic
traditions.
So in this book, Khamzatul Mutahayarin,
the Khamzah, the 5 fold versification
of the bewildered. That's how you translate it.
He explains how he made friends with Jami.
It seems they both used to go to
a famous
bookshop,
a good bookshop in Herat.
And in those days bookshops were not just
places where there's some girl at the cash
register, and you've looked the thing up in
Amazon beforehand, and it's very kind of supermarket
like. Bookshop was a major cultural centre.
So, Mulla Jami had visited the bookshop,
and the owner had said, you know, I've
got something really amazing in this beautiful copy
of the Munna Jat of Khwaja.
'Abdulla Ansari,
centuries earlier, had been the great Sufi writer
and poet,
in Persian,
some Arabic as well, of the city of
head artist, Sadmeidan,
is wonderful. This is the Munejed,
intimate conversations. There's a translation in English. It
says Munejed. It says
conversations with God.
Jammy is amazed
and makes the bookseller very impatient because he
reads the whole book in the shop, and
then it goes off in a spiritual state.
A few days later, along comes Ali Shizhnevar
I. And the bookseller said, I didn't sell
it to that other guy, maybe I can
do a deal here.
Ali Shuzniv Ali looks at the book and
does exactly the same thing.
Reads it page by page and then goes
off to the state. And so the bookseller
said, well, this other guy did it, and
that's how the 2,
come together. And this friendships is really very
important. They're best friends
on both sides and
trigger each other's poetic
compositions in very
major ways. So,
because of their conversations
a number of Jamini's great works,
including interestingly
his Shawahidun Dubuwa,
proofs of prophecy,
which is all about the holy prophet
who he was, Who his lineage was? Why
he had to come? What are the proofs
that he was an authentic prophet?
One of the great works in Islamic literature
on that subject is actually
triggered by his friendship with Nawawi and some
of the discussions that they'd had on this
on the subject. And also, probably even more
influentially,
one of Jami's 3 or 4 most widely
read books today, Nafaha'atul Uns,
the exhalations of intimacy',
which is a kind of encyclopedia of Muslim
saints.
Based on the Tabakat o Sofia of Abdul
Rahman Solami, an Arabic work from centuries earlier,
but with a lot of additional information
and very systematically
organized.
And this becomes
one of the great sources of information that
we have. And he includes also, which is
a bit unconventional,
people who are still alive
while the book was being
composed. And it's the most useful information
source of information we have for the history
of the early Nakshbandiya.
His disciple, Abdul Ghaffarullari,
after Jami dies, adds one further chapter which
is of course the life of Mulla Jami,
which is one of our big sources of
information. Showing him very much in his, kind
of, holy dimension as the perfect Nakshi
sage.
After Jami dies also,
Alisher Nivani,
just with respect perhaps to his dead friend,
translates it into his language, Chagatai Turkish. And
this is
nasai mulmawadda,
the breezes
of love.
And then it goes into the hands of
somebody called Lami Aichelebi into Ottoman Turkish.
And it becomes one of the classics
in the Ottoman empire,
for spiritual seekers.
And this seems to be one of the
aspects of their friendship.
Jami for instance, once wrote a diversified
commentary
on 40 famous Hadiths, Chil Hadiths.
Shows it to his friend Nawawi, on one
of his visits. Nawawi really likes it and
translates it, also in verse, into Turkish.
Now, one of the interesting signs of the
universality of Islam is that even though the
original meters, the Uruld,
the Qafir
of ancient Arabic, which is pre Islamic. It's
the odes of the Jahili poets, Imra al
Qais and so forth, which are important to
Islamic civilization but but broadened particularly in Muslim
Spain,
is that
it really does presuppose the long and the
short vowels
of the Arabic language.
But then it becomes the basis for Persian
poetry.
And as we know, Persian poetry is this
literary miracle,
and very
natural and flowing Persian it is too. And
Turkish, which is even more different with 8
vowels minimum and all kinds of other
things that it that has to do in
the positioning of the verb also
turns into a great,
vehicle for the the Turkish
heritage. But translating
Farsi verse into good Turkish verse is not
not a straightforward thing because the syntax is
completely different.
The place of the verb, for instance, the
word order,
case endings, it's different.
So the this seems to be a kind
of idyllic friendship.
Jammy is receiving quite a lot of cash
at the time because people love his poetry
and they make
benefactions to him. He's living in this suburb.
He has people like Naval I coming to
visit him, Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar,
the kind
of religious elite the great scholars are
meeting in his house.
But it's it's still the Timurid Empire.
These are the descendants of Genghis Khan. These
are boys who are brought up to the
arts of war. These are polo playing
samurai
warrior types
without much mercy.
There is the Timurid fratricidal tradition, which traditional
Muslims seemed outrageous. Whenever the sultan dies, the
sons all try and kill each other. Which
becomes a problem later on in the Ottoman
Empire as well and has various, not very
satisfactory, ways of resolving it.
But in the year 14/70,
somebody called Hussain Baykara takes over as ruler
of the region.
And he becomes another person who is in
this literary circle.
Hossein Baikara
and those great buildings which he created in
Central Asia, which are still there,
is not really particularly into religion so much,
but he does love poetry.
Just as Ulrich Baek was preoccupied
with astronomical tables,
Bayekara's
thing is poetry and getting poets around him.
And Jami's purpose always is the nachbandi thing
that you don't flee from the rulers so
much
as try and get into their affections and
wherever you can provide some kind of advice
so that they will mend their ways.
So they're very tactful poems attributed to Mulla
Jami about how Sultans really shouldn't drink, that
sort of thing.
So, this is what something this is something
that Jami says. Closeness
to kings, as is well known to the
intelligent and enlightened, is the best means to
attaining goals of dunya and din,
for the perfection of inner and outer happiness.
It makes possible help for the unfortunate and
eases intercession on behalf of the wretched.
The rulers
know that the prayers of the saints are
important and know that the love of the
saints is important to the masses. And therefore,
when the saint comes to the ruler and
says, you should let that person out of
prison,
or you shouldn't have punished him for giving
that hotbar, Or we should do something about
those starving people at the city gate. The
ruler is likely to take that seriously and
will clap his hand and a bag of
gold will be directed to those ends. And
this is historically one of the important aspects
of the nachabandi. And also the xenia, which
is a tariqa that's also active in Herat
at the time, and Zainuddin Khafi, who was
active at the time.
So,
important to recognize this in terms of the
paradigm of leadership idea,
that there can be a justification
for sitting around with the Sultan,
if by being his boon companion you can
then put in a good word for the
needy.
So here, for instance,
Jammy
writes this letter
about kind of
street
gangs.
If it be appropriate, convey the following to
His Majesty,
the generous and just, mofsaliadil,
that perchance he may give some thought to
the state of the Muslims.
A gang of ruffians and reprobates recruited from
foot soldiers, farriers and so forth, have gained
complete control of the city and much blood
has been shed without anyone calling them to
account.
Last night, a group of them entered a
mazar where the poor reside and inflicted multiple
sword blows on one of them, so that
he is now on his deathbed.
It's true that a message has gone out
that merchants are not to be harassed, and
some of them have begun to trickle back
into the city,
and so on.
No limits are observed,
great sums are extorted on the slightest pretext.
From all this nothing but ill repute will
accrue to those in attendance on His Majesty.
May Allah prolong his justice and beneficence.
In short, nobody gives any thought to the
state of the Muslims. Everyone is after his
own gain.
So that's one of Jami's letters, and this
incidentally is in the best book that we
have on Mulla Jami, which is by Hamid
Algar.
Jami, makers of Islamic civilization,
which I can strongly recommend. So that's
an example of
what these chiefs saw as being the point
of hanging out and swapping verses with these
Sultans.
That once you have become their close friends,
you can then actually do something
for the
state of the city.
So
But at the same time,
while he's hanging out with the Sultan,
he is not really doing much teaching.
And he's not really a kind of sheikh
in the traditional
understanding of a sheikh with lots of disciples
around him. In fact, his own temperament is
very much to prefer
solitude.
And even if he's with the crowd, it's
the nachbandi
osu principle of khalwatar
arjuman,
solitude in the crowd.
So, here's another poem in
Algar's
really useful book.
It's not academic at all. It's quite accessible.
So
this is
from his
Masnavi Susilat ad Dahab.
Make of your home a place of seclusion,
sit facing the wall of retreat,
bind your heart solely to God, sever your
mind from all thought of men,
stand vigilantly at the gate of your heart,
let none of your breaths be taken in
vain.
If to ward off temptation by the evil
inclined self, lafsir Amara,
companion be needed,
take choice books as your intimate friend, for
they are the best of companions in this
age.
Lay hold of a Quran, well copied and
clear, accurate in all ways, like the mind
of the wise.
Study the authentic Hadith of the Prophet, those
that derive from his exalted conduct and character.
Acquire copies of Buhari and Muslim, free of
all defect and error.
Read too the well known commentaries on the
Quran,
those far removed from distortion and innovation.
Then also text on the principles and ordinances
of the Sharia,
whatever be worthy and most suitable.
And on the arts of language, on grammar
and syntax, the finest that has ever been
written.
Read too the treatises of the people of
unveiling and witnessing,
the dicta of those who have tasted the
reality of being.
Whatever appeals to reason and understanding
discloses itself to the intelligent mind.
And from the Diwans of eloquent poets, the
speech of the masters of verse,
'Whatever expands your straightened breast, whether it be
Kossidas,
Masnavis or Ghazals.'
Once you have gathered all these requisites, then
avert your heart from all commerce
with men.
So that's a good indication of how he
saw himself, somebody whose friends were largely
books,
but going out into the world
in order to benefit the world. Very nakshbandi.
So he has a book,
Sarashte Thaliqih Hhajagan.
It's quite short,
which means, 'essence of the path of the
Khwajidagan',
which
focuses on the principle of
daval mihozur
malhaqq,
constant presence with the absolute, with the true
God.
That the basis of the spiritual practice is
this muraqabah, this awareness of Allah's
constant presence.
And this is the path which leads on,
not just to an awareness, but to a
witnessing,
Musa Heda.
And the book explains that we achieve this
through 3
techniques. Firstly,
a Vikram that is silent.
One of the advantages of the usual Nagar
Bandi practice of silent Vikram, is that nobody
notices.
So silent that people can't even see your
finger moving or anything. You're just kind of
sitting around and daydreaming,
but you're in a state of dhikr.
Secondly, tavajo,
which means an orientation towards the heart. Be
constantly aware in the totality of your physical
spiritual being, of the centrality of the heart.
And make sure that the heart is
alert and center of things.
Number 3, Rabita,
constant attachment to the spiritual guide.
Again that's a very Nakshbandi
idea, which is that one is constantly thinking
of one's teaching teacher.
Perhaps in communication with one's teacher in ways
that might bewilder us through dreams and so
forth. Perhaps even a sense of a constant
attachment to the teacher after the teacher has
gone through the curtain of death and is
in the world of the Barossa. And it
gets into very
mysterious and enigmatic
conditions here. But that's very important for the
Nakshbandis that the spiritual guide should be in
one's company.
So that's his Sarashteya.
But he also writes a book, short book
called Suhanani Khaja Parsa, which is basically an
anthology
of words of Mohammed I Parsa, who as
we remember is the one who inspired Mulla
Jami when he was only 5 years old.
Principles
enunciated in this book, his spiritual advice. What
is to be the style of the man
of God?
Very important is concern for the poor.
Remember, Paha'i nakshband's initiation is service to the
poor. It can be quite intense sometimes.
Number 2, counseling the rulers. Don't just let
them get away with, but speak out.
Another interesting feature of his spirituality
is a kind of lack of interest in
Kalamat's
miraculous
deeds performed at the hands of the saints.
He says that the best one is this
jedapa, this sudden sense of attraction
to the presence of God that you experience
in moments of holiness and dhikr.
In this book, Suhanan, but also elsewhere,
he indicates that
despite the preference for silent dhikr,
one should not be with some of the
strict nakshbandis, who say that's the only form
of dhikr. But they can also be
a vocal dhikr,
which can affect what we call sukua mutuhayala,
which is the imagination within us. That there
is a certain spiritual benefit that comes about
when we are actually resonating of sanna'a, which
is a classical Sufi circle where people are
singing. Of San'a, which is classical Sufi circle
where people are singing and there's inshad or
recitations. Sometimes he would go to those
those gatherings.
Now, we mentioned that even though he's clearly
in the the line of the the Nakshbandis,
he isn't really considered to be a teaching
sheikh. He's with his books, he's with his
poems, he's with his friends, but it's not
with the usual,
sort of, crowd of young,
adoring disciples.
Uhra'al heard this,
and this is unusual for an Akshayandi Sheikhs
not not to accept disciples. So, Uhraal famously
comes up with the words of 'Abdukhali Khujdevani.
He's one of the great early
figures in the line of the Nakhshbandiya and
the town of Khojdevani in Uzbekistan is still
built around his mazaar, which is amazingly beautiful
place. 'Abdukhaliqhushdevani.'
Close the door of sheikhood,
open the door of friendship.
Close the door of halwat, retreat.
Open the door of sohbet,
companionship.
That's a particular style.
So it doesn't really have spiritual descendants in
the usual sense of a sisila.
Although occasionally in the sources we find
references to a tariqa jamija,
a tariqa that comes from Wallajami, but it's
a very faint thing.
Present particularly, it seems, in Makkal Madinah, in
the Hejaz,
in the Ottoman period.
And indeed he goes to the Hejaz in
the year 14/72.
He does his Hajj
and, as was common then, he visits many
cities
to benefit from the Mazars, to benefit from
the Madrasas,
to meet the leading scholars and judges of
those cities. And he does write a book
at the end of it, Risaleem and Aalsiki
Hajj, a book on the rituals of the
Hajj, which is basically kind of filk guide
to how to perform your Hajj
correctly. On his way, various things happen.
And in Baghdad,
which was
even though the Mongols in 13th century had
flattened it, was growing again.
And was,
as it always has been in its history,
a meeting point and a flash point of
different denominations and sects.
So,
he goes
to Karbala
in the Sunni tradition,
and one of his great
poems is a great ode,
to Imam Hussain,
which is popular amongst Sunnis and Shi'a to
this day. It's a very heartfelt and beautiful
thing.
But in Baghdad, he gets involved in sectarian
polemic. And we need to
recall the role of the Najbandis in particular.
The Najbandis,
their line is from Abu Bakr, unlike
the other tariqas who are generally from
Imam Ali.
And
this,
Abu Bakr affiliation
makes some of the Najmbandis
kind of really critical of the Shia.
And this, in places which are
denominationally
mixed,
can be
playing with fire.
So, one of his works, which is the
first in the seven great poems, which make
up his Haft Aorang, the 7 Thrones', which
we'll talk about. Sil silai idahab,
the golden chain.
Sounds very
Naqshbandi.
He in this
sisila,
he praises at least the first 8 Imams
of the the Shia.
And
interestingly, he presents this as a kind of
secondary nakshbandi lineage.
The main Nakshbandi lineage is from Abu Bakr
Siddiq
down to Khwajbahad Din Nakshband.
But there's another secondary lineage, you say, for
the Nakshbandi,
which is indeed
from Imam
Ali, Imam al Hassan, Imam al Hussain, Imam
Ali bin al Abidine,
and so forth.
And that's the point of this,
not quite conciliatory, but inclusive understanding of
Sunnism.
Now,
a couple of Shi'i scholars from Baghdad,
start to raise questions about this
Because he uses the words Ravafaz,
despite his love for the Ahlulbayt.
He's saying that there are these Rawafid,
people who don't return the compliment,
and aren't able to include
the first Khunafa, and these are the refusers,
the Roafid.
And this is exactly
the playing with fire thing that people are
nervous about. So these Shi'i scholars go grumbling
to the Sunni governor of the town,
saying he's calling us kafir.
And this is obviously something that has to
be resolved. So the Hanafi chief justice and
the Shefari chief justice get together with Mulla
Jammi and the accusers in a madrassa.
Kind
of, not tribunal, but inquiry.
And it's important. So even though people can't
get into this madrassa, everybody's climbing on the
walls and looking down to see what who's
right? This has becomes simplistically a kind of
Sunni
Shi'i thing. And then they produce a copy
of the Silesilei Daha'ba and they read it
in Islam for the Ahl al Beit.
And it becomes clear that the accusers have
been reading it in the wrong order and
have misrepresented
it.
So,
Mulla Jami is acquitted.
Now Jami is so full of love for
the Atha Beit and Imam
Hussain that he says, in Herat,
I thought I was afraid people would accuse
me of being a Shia.
But I never thought that in Baghdad, the
Shia would attack me.
And this goes on because the Shia are
present also in Central Asia. This is the
eve of the Safavid revolution, remember.
And a certain Abu Hassan
Karbalayi
goes to the governor of Herat,
asking Sultan Baykara, saying, we all love the
Ahlul Bayt, Let's have the names of the
12 Imams read out in every khutba.
Ahlul Bayt. Let's do this.
So Bayekara asked Mulla Jami, what should we
do about this? This is sensitive.
And he says, we already do this because
the khatib always calls down blessings
upon the Ali Muhammad,
the family of Muhammad. So they're already included.
So Bayhkaraat
rules like this. So here we see that
despite the kind of strongly Sunni centric, Abu
Bakr loving nature of the nakshbandiya,
that there is the inclusion
of this kind of Philo Ali
dimension,
which
becomes
important particularly with with Jami's friend and relative
by marriage,
Mulloth Hussainvar Isaac Karsifi, who is another of
the great stars in the firmament
of the Timurid renaissance in Herat at the
time, who writes the greatest of all
accounts of, the sufferings of the Ahlulbayt and
the,
battle of Karbala,
Rolza,
Ashurhadat, the Garden of the Martyrs.
This is what's interesting about this is,
first of all, the insistence of the Sunni
olema on inclusion.
While they're
unhappy about attacks on Abu Bakr. But also
you see the Sunni governors of these cities
really worried about sectarian dispute and trying to
find a resolution, so that the Sunnis and
the Shia can live together in peace.
This is upended, of course, with the Shia
revolution
and the attack on Sunni Islam in
the the new,
Safavid
empire in Iran and parts of Central Asia.
And, of course, in more recent times, that
sort of Wahhabi idea that the Shia are
not really Muslims at all, have also caused,
detonations in a number of these
these places. But you see, the traditional Sunni
position is to try and bring about reconciliation.
You point a tribunal, you try and settle
the thing.
So he's not really very happy about Baghdad,
and his poem about Baghdad is a little
bit, kind of, denunciatory. But then he goes
on his way to Medina,
to Najaf,
and spends some time very close to the
tomb of Imam Ali. And there he deals
with the olema of all kinds, and it
seems to have been a very peaceful,
beautiful time.
3 weeks later he's in Medina.
Here you find his very strong prophetic devotion.
He's well known as an author of Nat
poetry.
Even today in India, some of the Jami
poems that the Persian, knowing Olamath, still love
to celebrate places like Hyderabad and Lucknow.
They're from Mulla Jami.
He does the Hajj, he comes back again
via Medina.
And then he goes, not through Iraq, back
to Central Asia, but up to Damascus.
In Damascus, he seems to be involved mainly
in Hadith scholarship, and gets an Ijazah from
major scholars of the city.
Then another political problem comes in that Sultan
Mehmed the conqueror in Istanbul,
who has this big new city and he
wants to fill it with
scholars,
sends him
yeah. Sends a delegation to meet him.
The delegation has, you know, a 1,000 gold
coins.
And the promise of a 100,000 if he
only agreed
to change his travel plans and go and
settle in Istanbul to be another jewel in
the crown of the new Ottoman
realm. And Jammy
doesn't want to do this.
He likes Sultan Mehmed Fatiha and they have
a correspondence.
And, of course, some Ottoman olemer, a president
in Central Asia, as with with Qadhi Zadeh,
the astronomer, as we saw.
So his policy is, he doesn't want to
annoy the Sultan, but he makes sure that
he accelerates his journey so that he's one
step ahead of this delegation.
And finally, he gets over the border. He
gets to Tabriz, capital of Iran, and meets,
Sultan Uzun Hassan, who is head of the
Ako yonlu, the white sheep turkmen. So the
main dynasty controlling Iran and making it a
kind of inclusive Sunni Shi'i
environment at the time. And in the year
14/74,
after
about 18 months of travels, he's back in
Herat.
Of course, these are his outward movements.
What we remember him for primarily is,
the poetry. And sometime around
now, he's writing his Baharestan,
his abode of spring,
which, seems to be dedicated to Sultan Hussain
Baykharah, but also has something to do with
with his son because it's kind of instructive
work. 'Raldotl Ahiar' or 'Tohfadl Abrar', it's called.
And the Baharestan, which is still very popular,
is,
explicitly inspired
by Sa'di's Golestan,
the rose garden.
And is a kind of didactic
poem full of stories to improve the young,
divided into 8 gardens, rather like the Golestan.
Garden number 1, words of the saints.
Number 2, wisdom of the sages.
Number 3, justice and government.
Number 4, generosity and nobility.
Number 5, love.
Number 6, jokes.
Number 7, how to write good poetry, with
lots of examples.
Number 8,
animal stories and fables.
So his fame as a poet continues to
accumulate. He's writing his divan or his various
divans,
But, these are expanding. And there's different recensions
dedicated to different rulers. And it's only towards
the end of his life that he finally
tries to create a definitive version of his
his own poetic works.
Another interesting event with possible sectarian ramifications happens
in 14/80,
when there is the discovery of the tomb
of Imam Ali, or some relic of Imam
Ali, at this town that becomes known as
Mazar al Sharif
in Afghanistan.
Lots of the scholars have dreams,
there are various auspicious signs to indicate that
this is indeed present. And this becomes a
flashpoint, but also because it's under the Sunni
dynasty, an example of how the great love
of the Ahlul Bayt amongst the Sunni leadership
is actually tending to diffuse
these,
Sunni Shi'i tensions and show that
they're real, but they're not really necessary.
So, he continues to write poetry and basically
we have 3 divans, and he gives each
of them a title. And the the first
one is much longer than than the later
later 2.
The first one he calls, Thatihati
Shabab,
the opening of youth.
And the idea is that these are 3
divans arranged according to at which point in
his life he composed them.
And then the second divan is Vasita delakt,
the middle of the course of life.
And the third one, 'khathimatul hayat', the ceiling
or the end of
life.
So this is 'divan, ghazals', and so forth,
in that poetic form. These again are some
of the great jewels of Persian literature and
full of
interesting contemporary and autobiographical
allusions. They're not stereotypical
by any means, despite the view of some
orientalists.
But more famous than this, and the great
masterpiece,
his great gift to Islamic literature
and the melter and the delighter of so
many hearts historically to this day, is his
book Haft aorang.
Haft aorang means the 7 thrones',
because it's a huge piece of work but
it's divided into
7 Mathnavis.
Rumi has his Mathnavi, here's 7 Mathnavis,
which are rhyming couplets.
So the first half and the second half
of each line will rhyme.
Haft aorang, 7 Thrones, but it's also a
name in Persian for the 7 big stars
of the great bear, so it's kind of
a constellation.
And this is a book which was so
cherished
and honoured that some of the most beautiful
illuminated Islamic manuscripts are actually of the Haft
Awarang.
Some of the treasures in the British Library
and the Library of Congress,
this incredible jewel like thing with illustrations and
gold leaf,
dazzling.
So a couple of years ago, I was
at a conference at the University of Tartu,
the Gustavian University of Tartu, which is in
Estonia,
just a few miles from the Russian
Russian border.
But it's it's a major university and
had
a significant 400 year history, largely at the
hands of local Livonian German scholars. But they
were orientalists though.
And because it was part of the Russian
Empire, Estonia, for for centuries,
they accumulated
various oriental manuscripts, many of which were gifts
from Persian
ambassadors
and rulers.
So they take you into this library.
And the city of Tartu, because it's kind
of the boundary really between the Lutheran world
and the Orthodox world, has been smashed and
destroyed so many times.
The famous
battle with the Teutonic Knights,
which was the easternmost expansion of medieval
German crusades,
is very close.
The Skov is really
not so far away. It's very close to
Russia, but it's very
Germanic
in its field.
And
smashed,
destroyed,
Sovietized,
Nazified,
de Judaized,
bombed by the Red Army, smashed. It's kind
of been through every conceivable catastrophe because it's
right at the boundaries between Western Europe and
the Russian thing.
Somehow, these manuscripts survived.
And they take you into the library and
they open up these
amazing boxes. And, of course, you have to
put on white gloves and it's all very
strict because these are really precious things worth
1,000,000.
And the jewel in their crown is
this miracle book, the Haft Aorang of Mulla
Jamy.
And each page you turn of the thing,
as it were, comes to light.
And you can see the incredible brilliance of
the
manuscript writing and the beautiful
Tariq script. And
it's
one of the most beautiful books in the
world. And, underline that it survived there.
It was a gift from a a Persian
ruler to the court of the tsaras at
Petersburg and
ended up after many adventures
in the university library at Tartu.
So
this is a very special book for the
Muslims, the 7 Thrones.
So the each of these Masnavis is on
a very different kind of subject and he
worked over it and reworked it
many times until he produced
the final version.
The first is the sil silat I dahab,
the golden chain, which we all have mentioned
in terms of the polemic in Baghdad,
which seems to build on this idea
that there is an Athil Beit initiation
for the Nakshbandiya.
But it really is a kind of
psychological,
treatment of love and types of love.
Remember Chittick's view that if you look at
the literature of Islam, you can see Islam
is a religion of love. That's the best
way of describing it.
So the psychology of love, what is it
to fall in love? What is the difference
between profane and
and and and holy love?
What is the meaning of beauty? That's in
the sizziletic dahaab.
The second one,
also a love story, which is the Salaman
and Absal.
Now this was translated into English in the
mid 19th century,
Salaman and Absal, by Edward Fitzgerald,
who also went on to do the translation
for Omar Khayyam, that went on to become
a Victorian and Edwardian literary sensation, part of
this, one of these waves of love.
Solemnata Absal, the origin of the story is
mysterious. It's already there in Ibn Sina.
But essentially it's about how one passes from
a false
amatory affection to a true one,
which means
no longer loving the world,
but loving
the divine in the world and the source
of the world and what the world indicates.
And the story of Salman and Absal basically
is this prince,
who falls in love with his beautiful nursemaid.
They, kind of, have a relationship.
But the nursemaid
is suitable for our infancy,
but indicates really dunya.
We kind of drink from the teats of
dunya and the nursemaid is kind to us
and gives us all kinds of nice things.
And so we love dunya. But actually there's
a great conflagration
where it turns out that Absal is just
made of straw and she suddenly burns up.
So this is indicative of Salaman's spiritual progress
as he recognizes the combustibility of the world
and its passions. And then he goes on
to find his true beloved.
Number 3, he calls Tafat al Ahrar, which
as the title indicates that Ahrar's gift, is
dedicated to his friend Khwaja Obeidullah Ahrar,
which is 20 discourses on religious topics with
stories like formal formal,
discussions.
And this is, again, a major Nagar Bandi
monument.
Number 4,
Subhatol
Abrar,
the prayer bead of the virtuous,
which is made up of 40 eks,
like a knot.
Each about a particular principle of the Nakshbandi
way.
Number 5, Yusuf and Zuleikha,
Joseph and Zuleikha,
the famous
love story which hopefully we'll have time to
dip into briefly at the end of this
talk.
Number 6, of course, Leila and Majdanorm.
One of the favorite love stories that comes
into
the waves of love that transform Europe and
start raising it up from a kind of
formalistic
monastery based flagellant religion and turning it towards
the path of love.
And then finally, Firatnomer
Eskandari,
the book of wisdom of Alexander the Great,
which is about Alexander and his travels.
And the various sages and philosophers including
Aristotle, who he meets, who uplift him with
various
aphorisms on his way.
So,
this Haftarang,
the 7 Thrones, is one of the great
extraordinary firework displays
of Persian literary capacity and also the sheer
amount of wisdom,
which have been accumulated by the Muslims
by this time,
using love particularly as the master signifier that
enables us
through our perception of beauty to recognize the
creator's
origin
and presence
of originating and presence of
the phenomena of existence.
1492,
he falls seriously ill. It's very cold.
Friday 17th of Muharram, he's on his deathbed.
Navari sits beside him, they do the nachrabandi
thikar,
and he moves on to the next world.
It's Janaza, of course, everybody is there. The
leading men of the state are carrying the
tabot,
and is buried, as we said, next to
his own teacher,
Mulla Sa'adadin
Kashkari Radiallahu'an.
Other books, we don't know how many books
he wrote exactly, because it's complicated and some
of them have different titles.
He he we did indicate, and this is
kind of important particularly for his reception in
the Ottoman world,
that he was
concerned
by
the apparent tension between the way of the
mind and the way of the heart.
The way of Avicenna and the philosophers and
the motorcalimin,
or logic chopping
induction,
and the path of ecstasy and personal experience
of the divine.
And one of the books that he writes,
which has been done into English actually,
by Nicholas here, is
Adurut al Fakhira, the Precious Pearl,
which is where the philosophers
and the Kalama scholars and the Sufis
come together in order to discuss metaphysics.
What is the nature of being? What is
the nature of the perfect human being? What
are the processes by which the mind can
induct the nature and the presence of God?
And this work was actually
commissioned by Sultan Mehmed the conqueror. He wrote
all the way to Herat to say, Mulla
Jamini, we have these discussions. We have ibn
Aarabi is very popular amongst the olamat but
some people think that Kalam is intention with
him. Can you sort this out? So he
produces this book, The Precious Pearl, in order
to get into this. And he does this
also in others of his works, particularly his
Lawaiaha,
which is
a kind of it's a Persian work
in which he
defends the position of Ibn Arabi
against
certain Kalam perceptions. The Kalam scholar is not
really against Ibn Arabi. This is classical Islamic
civilization, a world of
discussion
and respect. But there's certain tensions.
And he also writes a commentary,
Nokshan Noksh, on the for Sos al Hakam
of Ibn al Arabi. He writes a commentary
on the 2 great poems of
Ibn al Tharid, the hamriya,
the wine ode, and also his Ta'i adul
kobra,
which is this enormous
poem
about metaphysics,
600 lines or something, which is the masterwork
of Ibn al Farid, the great Egyptian
Sufi
scholar. So, yeah, you can see that he's
not a slacker, but I
I did want
to,
sort of, deal with some of his poetry,
having dealt with his life.
And despite the difficulties of translation, perhaps we
can get something out of it. And the
one that I'd like to look at is
a neglected
classic of our civilization,
which is his, Yusuf
va Zoleiha.
Joseph and Zoleiha.
Zolegha, of course, is the name which the
tradition and the tafsir authors
attribute to the seductress
wife of Al Aziz Potiphar in Egypt. This
is
spun out by the tafsir authors of,
the great story, Arsen al Khosas, the most
beautiful tale, which is told in Sura 12
of the Quran, Surat Yusuf.
Now, of course, because this is about love,
transformation,
vindication,
This is the kind of surah that, the
olema and the sufis amongst the olema are
going to be particularly interested in. The Quran
can't simply be telling us a love story.
Some of the early Khawarij in Islam thought
this is this is just a love story.
They wanted to take it out of the
Quran,
because
Khwarez literalists,
not not into love.
But the ulama, of course, saw that this
is part of the the panoply of paths
to God, which the Quran is offering to
us.
Now this story
is indicative of the way in which modern
Muslims and
people at the fringes of Muslim discussions
misunderstand.
These three waves of love, by which Islam
has enriched and transformed Europe,
or sought to do so,
do not come from some kind of mystical
fringe in our civilization. But as we've seen
with Timurid Herat,
the center of the civilization
is these discourses.
Mulla Kashfi is giving the Friday Khotbas
in Herat, and is from this Nakhlbandi Sufi
world. Mulla Jami is the greatest poet and
the greatest Naqibandi
sage.
Baikara,
Khaju O'Baydullah Ahrar, Mohammed Parsa,
al Ishir Nivai. These are these are the
heart of the Muslim religious
intelligentsia
of the time and it's all Sufism. So
we read with regret,
modern attempts to cause division.
So for instance, Elif Shafak, who's now Turkey's
best known female novelist,
whose perception has been kind of shattered by
old Ataturkist ideas of the Sufirs and the
scholars and
reactionary and progress and so forth. So, this
is what she says, oh dear. Throughout the
centuries, in the eyes of the conservative minded,
Zuleikha has stood out as a despicable symbol
of lust, hedonism and ultimately feminine evil.
As wicked as Zuleikha might be in the
eyes of conservative Muslims,
she was considered in a completely different way
by the Sufis.
So she's saying that
Mullah Jami is not a conservative Muslim.
What's she talking about exactly?
It's a kind of Westernized
orientalist 19th century perception of conservative, meaning bad
and meaning exoteric,
and the Sufis being some kind of spirit
illuminant,
free willing, free love type of alternative.
As we've seen with the life of Mullah
Jami, as you can see with Maulana and
all of these other writers, it's not like
that. It's never been like that. This is
a piece of the typical confusion that comes
from,
the the disasters of
of the breaking of Turkey by
by Ataturk and the internalizing of these
divisive and negative stereotypes by people who really
haven't studied the tradition and wouldn't be seen
dead in a Ottoman
in a library of Ottoman literature.
So,
let's set aside these modern
divisive bifurcations
and actually see for ourselves what Molna Jeremy
if you go into a bookshop,
a good bookshop in modern Istanbul, and ask
for Mullnajami,
they'll give you his logic work. Yeah. Because
the logic work is what Mollanjami is in
the madrasas.
So conservative minded. Okay. But this is his
Yusuf and Zuleikha.
And I want to read through some of
this.
There are some English translations,
kind of from the Fitzgerald
era.
There's an Alexander Rogers, who in 1912 did
a translation.
And there's also a certain Charles Horn, who
in 1917
published a translation.
More recently, because the Yousef and Zuleikha story
has really inspired
so many
in Islamic literature, from Sheikh Hassan, Kamal Pashazadeh,
to Yahya Effendi, to many of the India's
Indians. Most recent one, actually, 19 9
2010,
is the Yusuf Zuleikha
of,
somebody called Kolralli,
who is considered to be the founder of
Tatar
and Bashkir literature, on the banks of the
vulgar, right up in Russia.
Their first great literary monument,
there's people up in the frozen north,
Kazan,
and Bolghar,
is the use of Anzalekha story. So Rafael
Buharayev
has produced this edition and very nice
translation. And it's a nice nice book. It's
got nice illuminations and calligraphies, and it's a
beautiful thing to have. That's the Yousef and
Zuleikha story.
Incidentally, the story of the prophet Yousef was
very interesting to Muslim minorities historically.
Why?
Because here's the prophet of God
happily serving as a civil servant
in unbelieving Egypt.
So if you're oppressed by Ivan the Terrible
or Catherine the Great or whoever,
You can say, religiously, it's not a problem
for us getting a job with these people
because Yousef could work for Fir'aun and one
of his employees. And so this was a
precedent.
Useful example for Muslim minorities down the centuries.
Anyway,
Yusuf and Zuleikha. Now the story is elaborated
from a lot of legends and nobody in
the history of Islamic poetry has claimed that
this is all historically true. It's a fable
that is designed to uplift you and give
you hope and to illustrate the transformative,
sacramental power of love.
So Yusuf is famously
Utzia Shatrul Hossen, given half of all beauty.
He's absolutely
ravishing
and stunning.
And,
Zuleikha,
who is in the poem
described as a princess of Mauritania,
has a dream
of Yusuf,
Three dreams again.
And she falls in love with him in
her dream.
So when she wakes up, she's in love.
The princess is in love. And she knows
that he's in Egypt. She longs to go
to Egypt.
So,
here is the kind of
it's pulling out the organ stops as the
Persian language here. The kind of the
the beginning. This is Horn's translation.
And you have to remember that this experience
is a kind of music. That there would
be a reciter
who would produce these lusciously
exquisite verses for public delectation.
And it's not supposed to get to the
point quickly. You enjoy the beauty of the
language as you go.
The ravens of the night were hushed. The
bird of dawn began his lay. The rosebud,
newly awakened, blushed to feel the touch of
springing day.
And bathed the roses round on veil, roused
by the warbling nightingale,
the jasmine stood all bathed in dew, wet
with the violet's lids of blue.
'Solecha, fairer than the flowers, lay tranced, 'twas
not sleep that stole her senses
through the night still hours, and raised new
visions to her soul, the heart unfettered, free
to rove, turn towards the idol of her
love.
So then,
to fast forward in the story,
she hears that she has been betrothed,
to this great man of Egypt. Everybody says
how great he is. And she thinks, this
is the fulfillment of my dream. It's a
true dream. So in her excitement, off she
goes and she approaches Egypt.
And she's
so delighted to see the caravan that's bringing
her beloved towards her.
So this is her a bit later. O
joy too great, O hour too blessed, he
comes, they hail him. Now more near, his
eager courser's feet I hear. O heart, be
hushed within my breast.
Burst not with rapture, can it be the
idol of my life, Divine, all radiant, clothed
in mystery,
and loving me as I adore, as none
dared ever love before,
shall be, nay his, even now is mine.
I will be patient,
but his breath seems stealing o' my senses,
death were better than suspense like this.
One draught, though 'twere the last, of bliss.
One glance, though in that glance I die,
to prove the glorious
certainty.
And then, of course, the moment happens when
the,
the palanquin
has the covers taken off and she sees
the man she's going to marry,
and it's not Yusuf, it's the Aziz, this
middle aged
Egyptian bureaucrat.
Not he, not he, on whom for years
my soul has dwelt with sacred truth. For
whom my life has passed in tears, and
wasted was my bloom of youth. For whom
I breathed and thought and moved, my own,
my worship, my beloved, I hail the night
that I might gaze upon his star's unconquered
blaze.
The morn but rose that I might pray,
hope, wish, expect from day to day.
My sole existence was that thought, and I
do wake to know 'tis naught.
'Vain tears, vain madness, vain endeavour, another blasts
my sight forever.'
Have I then lingered long in pain, in
sad suspense, in musings vain, to be, O
crowning grief betrayed,
in foreign lands a victim made?
Relentless destiny accursed,
were were all the joys thy visions nursed?
Is there no drop of hope left yet?
Must I all promises forget?
Dash not my cup to earth, say, Power
benign, I may be blest, even yet he
may be mine.
Why hast thou thus so queerly robbed me
of my peace?
What have I done to thee to be
thus treated? It is folly indeed that I
seek help from thee.
When souls melt, thou art called upon for
aid, what is the melting of thy soul?'
Thus raved Zuleikha,
when without arose the
sudden deafening shout, that hailed the close of
all their toil, lo Memphis and the banks
of Nile.
And onward to the palace gate the train
poured on in sumptuous state. The glowing portals
opened wide, in flowed the overwhelming tide, ushering
the Aziz and his bride.
A throne the Peries might have framed, the
sun and moon's pale lust ashamed, and she
whose radiance all effaced,
Zuleikha on the throne was placed,
sparkling with jewels red with gold,
Her heart shrunk, withered, crushed and cold.
So then of course the plot thickens when
Yusuf does appear, but he's a slave
and is employed
by her husband
in her household.
So the famous episode of her losing control
and her attempted
seduction of Yusuf and the sexual harassment
charges
brought. And of course, he's chucked into jail.
So we have to fast forward.
And here we have,
the prison scene.
And here you can see that the poet,
Abdurrahman Jami,
is moving us to recognize that all of
this is a symbol.
So we have to think, what does this
mean?
Who is Zuleikha?
What is this beauty that she's fallen in
love with? Why is it that her hopes
are dashed when she's betrothed to somebody who
is not her beloved?
Does this mean anything?
Though in a dark and narrow cell, the
fair beloved confined may dwell,
no prison is that dismal place, 'tis filled
with dignity and grace
and the damp vaults and gloom around are
joyous spring with roses crowned.
Not Paradise to me were fair if he
were not a dweller there. Without his presence
all his night
my soul awakes but in his sight.
Though this frail tenement of clay may here
amidst its pomp remain, my spirit wanders far
away and dwells with his imprisoned pain.
In solitude, where Being signless dwelt,
and all the universe still dormant lay,
concealed in selflessness, 1 Being was
exempt from I or Thou ness, and apart
from all duality,
beauty supreme,
unmanifest except unto itself,
by its own light yet fraught with power
to charm, the souls of all concealed in
the unseen, an essence pure, unstained by aught
of ill.
No mirror to reflect its loveliness,
nor comb to touch its locks. The morning
breeze ne'er stirred its tresses.
It's got its with a capital I now,
of course. No calyrium led luster to its
eyes. No rosy cheeks, earshadowed by dank curls
like hyacinth.
Nor peach like down were there. No dusky
mole adorned its face, no eye had yet
beheld its image.
To itself it sang of love in wordless
measures.
By itself it cast the die of love.
So this is the Divine, the Absolute, before
manifestation in the beauty of the world.
But beauty cannot brook concealment
and the veil, nor patient rest unseen and
unadmired
'twill burst all bonds, and from its prison
casement to the world reveal itself.
See where the tulip grows in upland meadows,
how in balmy spring it decks itself, and
how amidst its thorns the wild rose rends
its garment and reveals its loveliness.
Thou too, when some rare thought, or beauty's
image, or deep mystery
flashes across thy soul, canst not endure to
let it pass, but holst it, that perchance
in speech or writing thou mayst send it
forth to charm the world.
Whatever beauty dwells, such is its nature and
its heritage from
everlasting beauty which emerged from realms of purity
to shine upon the worlds,
and all the souls which dwell therein.
One gleam fell from it on the universe
and on the angels.
And this single ray dazzled the angels till
their senses whirled like the revolving sky.
In diverse forms, each mirror showed it forth,
and everywhere its praise was chanted in new
harmonies.
The Cherubim
enraptured sought for songs of praise. The spirits
who explore the depths of boundless seas, wherein
the heavens swim, like some small boat, Cried
with one mighty voice,
'Praise to the Lord of all the Universe.'
No heart is that which love no wounded
they, who know not lovers' pangs, are soulless
clay.
Turn from the world, O turn thy wandering
feet, come to the world of love and
find it sweet.
Once to his master a disciple cried,
to wisdom's pleasant path be thou my guide.'
And this is said to be an actual
incident in the life of
Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahraral.
Amurid once came to him,
a young man saying, 'Can you be my
moshid please?'
'Hast thou never loved?' The master answered, 'learn
the ways of love, and then to me
return.'
So the idea is that Khwadu Ahrar wouldn't
accept the discipleship of somebody who'd never been
in love. That's the idea.
Drink deep of earthly love, that so thy
lip may learn the wine of holier love
to sip.
It's very different from the
usual Western Christian monastic idea
that earthly love, love of the human beloved,
opens and awakens something within us where we
perceive
an aspect of the mirror that shows the
divine beauty that awakens us so that we
can move from this metaphorical love to the
real love, 'Ashkikhir'
But let not form too long thy soul
entranced.
Pass o'er the bridge with rapid feet advance.
If thou wilt rest thine ordered journey sped,
forbear to linger at the bridge's head.
So falling in love with your girlfriend, your
bride, whatever, is
a useful,
necessary
invitation to the true love. And it contains
within itself a metaphorical pointer that is real.
It's not a false illusion,
but it's, as he says, the bridge's head
is the beginning of the journey.
In this orchestra full of vain deceit,
the drum of being each in turn we
beat.
Each morning brings new truth to light and
fame, and on the world false luster from
a name.
If in one constant course the ages rolled,
for many a secret would remain untold.
If the sun's splendour never died away, nor
would the market of the stars be gay.
If in our gardens endless frost were king,
no rose would blossom at the kiss of
spring.
And then of course,
in quotes,
'I shall roll up the carpet of life
when I see thy dear face again, and
shall cease to be, for self will be
lost in that rapture, and all the threads
of my thought from my hand will fall.
Not me wilt thou find, for this self
will have fled.
Thou wilt be my soul in mine own
soul's stead.
All thought of self will be swept from
my mind, and thee, only thee, in my
place shall I find.
More precious than heaven, than earth more dear,
myself were forgotten if thou wert near.
Mine eyes have been touched by the truth's
pure ray, and the dreamer folly has passed
away. Mine eyes thou hast opened, God bless
thee for it, and my heart to the
soul of the soul thou hast knit.
From a fond strange love thou hast turned
my feet,
the Lord of all creatures to know and
to meet. If I bore a tongue in
each single hair, each and all should thy
praise declare.
By the excellent bloom of that cheek which
he gave, By that beauty which makes the
whole world thy slave, By the splendor that
beams from that beautiful brow, That bids the
full moon to thy majesty bow,
By the graceful gait of that cypress, By
the delicate bow that is bent e'er thine
eye, By that arch of the temple devoted
to prayer, by each fine woven mesh of
the coils of thy hair, by that charming
Narcissus that former arrayed, in the sheen and
glory of silk brocade,
by that secret thou call'st a mouth, by
the hair,
thou call'st the waist of that body most
fair, by the musky spots on thy cheeks
pure rose, by the smile of thy lips
when those buds unclose,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then
we find
that in her love for Yusuf and her
growing recognition that Yusuf's beauty is not from
Yusuf but is a sign of the transcendent.
So he is Shahid in the Sufi language,
he is a witness to what is
belong beyond. And what is in her soul
of passion is ultimately
a passion for the creator, the one who
has made him, sadeeq.
She confides in her maid saying, I'm in
love with the slave.
And
so crazy is her love
that she takes off her rings and her
jewels and gives them to her slave, to
her servant saying,
just recite to me some beautiful poems about
Yusuf and tell me how wonderful he is.
And she's intoxicated
by these poems. And so eventually, she becomes
a pauper. She gives away everything.
She gives away everything to her servant just
to hear more talk about Yusuf and the
wonders
of Yusuf.
And then
there comes the critical moment
that Aziz,
Potiphar has died,
but there is in the house the idol.
This is Egypt. Okay, there's Thoth, there's Ra,
there's Amon, there's you have to think of
the Egyptian scene. And in the house there's
a domestic idol
which is said to have been the basis
of
the, the beginning of her repentance. Because when
she started to seduce Joseph, this is in
some of the tafsir authors, she takes a
cloth and throws it over the idol. So
the idol won't see what she's doing.
But the idol of course in Jami's view
is a symbol
of
the Self, the lower Self. So she then
says,
we're,
I guess, nearly there now.
'O thou who has broken mine honours urn,
thou stone of offence wheresoever I turn, I
should smite for thy falsehood has ruined my
rest with the stone thou art made of,
the heart in my breast.
The way of misfortune too surely I trod,
when I bowed before thee and made thee
my God.
When I looked up to thee with wet
eyes in my woe, I renounced all the
bliss which both worlds can bestow.
From thy stony dominion, my soul, will I
flee, and thus shatter the gem of thy
power and thee.
With a hard flintstone like the friend as
she spoke, in a thousand pieces the image
she broke.
Riven and shattered the idol fell, and with
her from that moment shall all be well.
She made her ablution, mere penitent sighs. With
the blood of her heart and the tears
of her eyes she bent down her head
to the dust with a moan. She made
supplication to God's pure throne.
And then you
have her long prayer to God, because she's
now seen beyond the snares of the world
and her prosperity. She's given it away because
of her love, and she's broken,
and she's broken the idol,
and now she speaks to Allah
And
then we don't have time for
reading all of this.
And she is still thinking about Yusuf.
So the point of this is that she's
not renouncing
her love, but she's now seeing what it
means. She's still in love with him, but
she's now old. That's the tragedy. She's grown
old in this.
Though restore the lost blessing for which I
pray, may I feel heart free from the
brand of its woes and culled from the
garden of Yusuf, a rose.
'Where is thy youth and thy beauty and
pride?'
'Gone since I parted from thee,' she replied.
'Where is the light of thine eye?' said
he,
'Drowned in blood tears for the loss of
thee.
Why is that cypress tree bowed and bent?'
That's
a stature,
a figure. By absence from Thee and thy
long lament.
Where is thy pearl, and thy silver, and
gold, and the diadem bright on thy head
of old?
She who spoke of my loved one, she
answered, shed in the praise of thy beauty,
rare pearls on my head. In return for
those jewels a recompense meet, I scattered my
jewels and gold at her feet.
A crown of pure gold on her forehead
I set, and the dust that she trod
was my coronet.
The stream of my treasure of gold ran
dry. My heart is love's storehouse
and I am I.'
And then, having explained how she's lost all
of her dunya, and she's broken the idol
of her former attachments,
and she's still absolutely
transformed
by this love for Sayedna Yusuf
and her need for him,
then a miracle happens.
The beauty returned which was ruined and dead,
and her cheek gained the splendor which long
had fled.
Again shone the waters which sad years had
dried and the rosebud of youth bloomed again
in its pride.
The musk was restored and the camphor withdrawn,
and the black night followed the grey of
the dawn.
The cypress rose stately and tall as of
old, the pure silver was free from all
wrinkle and fold.
From each musky tress fled the traces of
white, to the black Narcissus came beauty and
light.
The one sole wish of my heart, she
replied,
is still to be near thee, to sit
by thy side, to have thee by day
in my happy sight, And to lay my
cheek on thy foot at night,
To line the shade of the cypress, and
sip the sugar that lies on thy ruby
lip,
To my wounded heart this soft balm to
lay, for naught beyond this can I wish
or pray?
The streams of thy love will new life
bestow on the dry dusty field where its
sweet waters flow.'
Thus spoke the angel, to thee, O King,
from the Lord Almighty, a message I bring.
Mine eyes have seen her in humble mood.
I heard her prayer when to thee she
sued. At the sight of her labors, her
prayers and sighs, the waves of the sea
of my pity arise.
Her soul from the sword of despair I
free, and here from my throne I betrothed
her to thee.'
So, we get a happy ending.
But he's not telling the story just for
our amusement or entertainment, but it's about the
journey of the soul.
It's about the need to divest ourselves with
the love of everything that is other than
the divine beauty, the Absolute.
And also a sign of hope in the
dream
which in her youth she had seen,
the youthful aspiration, the spiritual awakening, the need
for beauty and for the absolute,
and for union,
actually comes true in the end.
So the message is, don't despair,
despite the fact that
she was married to her beloved's master,
despite the fact that the beloved was sent
to jail, despite the fact that she was
old and grey, Allah and his power can
bring people to the end
of their spiritual quest.
So,
it's also important to reflect that whatever
Shafak might
claim, our tradition,
values
woman as a symbol of spiritual trans transformation.
Majnun and Leila is
about Majnun's transformation.
This is the story of Zuleikha's transformation.
And also the absolute valoration valoration
of love, which, of course, in an Arabic
system in particular, is characteristic of Islam, which
is why the holy prophet
said that women have been made beloved to
me.
So unlike some traditions where they're seen as
the devil's snares,
here you find them as
not just
the recipients of divine beauty,
but also the seekers of divine beauty.
So in this story, she's given agency despite
her helplessness
and she is finally vindicated.
So there's much more we could say about
the Joseph and Zuleikha story, but we've come
to the end of our time, I think.
And, alhamdulillah, if that's just a tasty drop
from the sweet sea of Imam Jammie's
ocean that is still so
appreciated in places like Afghanistan,
Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, Bukhara, where people still speak Farsi and
love Mol Najami.
Many traditional places in India,
an older generation of the Darul alums used
to love this tradition before this current preoccupation
with the fatwa and hadith
monopolization
of Muslim learning,
appeared in recent years. Yeah. The Khathama shahra,
the seal of the poet.
Impossible to imagine anybody
bettering this accomplishment.
And despite the the beauty and the urbanity
and the sophistication
and all of the literary conceits and tropes
and images, and,
we find nonetheless that it is all about
God.
And that he is sugaring the pill of
the difficult path of spiritual transformation
with these beautiful stories
in order to make people, in this case
mostly from the elite, think seriously about
what beauty is, what we find in beauty,
how to move from metaphorical beauty to the
contemplation of the true beauty of the divine
Jumal.
So may Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, show his
mercy to Imam Mullah Abdulrahman Jami
and bring him light in his grave. And,
insha'Allah, benefit us from this extraordinary paradigm of
leadership. And Insha'Allah, in the current
eclipse of Muslim greatness, to bring a new
dawn, Insha'Allah, and to raise up once again
people who shine
with deen and culture and civilization
to add more jewels to the diadem of
the crown of
our civilization, Insha'Allah.
Thank you for your patience.
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.