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Embodied Hermeneutics: Meaning-Making in Persian Sufi Poetry

The study of Sufi poetry is often conducted from a “history of ideas” perspective, in which poems and their imagery are reduced to ornamental representations of Sufi thought. A poem’s meaning thus becomes something fixed, static, and ultimately separable from specific social contexts and historical hermeneutic practices. The proposed panel challenges this dominant approach by showing how poetic meaning-making is, for pre-modern audiences and poets, inextricably bound up with a variety of bodily, material, and ethical practices. Instead of inquiring after poetic meaning in-and-of-itself, the papers in this panel all focus on the various processes through which pre-modern readers and writers make meaning through and in poetic texts. Creatively drawing on a wide range of philosophical, scientific, poetic, and exegetical sources, the papers show how poetic interpretation is practiced and theorized—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—as a fundamentally embodied activity. In this way, the panel not only offers fresh readings of several specimens of sufi poetry, but also presents new theoretical models for recovering the embodied nature of Persian literature derived from the tradition itself.

The first paper, “The Well-Tempered Lyric of Bīdel Dehlavī (d.1720),” examines how the ideal of the well-balanced temperament (mezāj-e moʿtadel) is adapted by Bīdel from Islamic philosophy and medical science as part of his approach to self-mastery, presented by him as a lifelong effort to acquire command simultaneously over one’s mental, physical, and creative domains. The second paper, “A Tale of Two Interpretations: Wine as Symbol and Wine as (Embodied) Metaphor in Sufi Poetry,” examines the two remarkably different modes of interpretation that the important Sufi poet and intellectual, Jāmī (d. 1492), proposes for Sufi wine imagery in his Lavāmiʿ. In addition to standard Sufi symbolist readings of wine, Jāmī also proposes that wine/intoxication functions as a symbol for love because it evokes for the reader, through a more mundane and relatable object, the principal sensorimotor and affective qualities of divine love—a much more deeply embodied perspective on imagery than traditional Sufi hermeneutics allows, as this paper demonstrates in its concluding close reading of a poem by ʿAṭṭār. The final paper, “Perfumed Speech of a Poet-Pharmacist,” examines ʿAṭṭār’s recurrent likening of poetic speech to medicine. It argues that the logic of this metaphor shapes ʿAṭṭār’s authorial self-presentation and implies a particular social function for his verse, all while gesturing to a larger entanglement of truth, utility, and meaning in Perso-Islamic thought.

Presentations

The Well-Tempered Lyric of Bīdel Dehlavī (d.1720): Galenic Humoral Theory in Islamic Medical Science, Sufi Thought, and Persian Lyric Practice
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Bīdel of Delhi (d.1720) is a philosopher, Sufi, and poet for whom abstract thinking, embodied cognition, and lyric practice are inseparable. This interconnectedness of the physical, the spiritual, and the poetic is especially evident in the way Bīdel inherits the ideal of the well-balanced temperament from Islamic medical science and Sufi thought. He yokes this concept to the important figuration of the human body as a manuscript copy (noskhe) in order to articulate his distinctive vision for how to realize the ethical imperative of self-knowledge. Not one to compose prose treatises, Bīdel distributes his ideas about temperament across several genres in his vast corpus. For instance, in the narrative poem Ṭelesm-e ḥeyrat (The Enchanted World of Wonder, 1669), he unfolds a systematically mapped geography of the embodied human imagination. The reader is taken on a tour of the senses and faculties, is introduced to Galenic theories of temperament, and is invited to consider the interconnectedness of the body and the mind in Sufi spiritual practice – in other words, to see how affect, perception, and imagination are enmattered. This important theoretical discussion undergirds Bīdel’s overarching project of understanding the role of the imagination in the attainment of certain knowledge of true reality.
This paper examines the ideal of the well-balanced temperament (mezāj-e moʿtadel) in Bīdel’s thought. First, the evolution of this concept is briefly traced in the works of Avicenna, Ibn ʿArabī, Hojvīrī, Jāmī, and Dāra Shikoh – a lineage (hypothetically reconstructed, and necessarily schematic!) that aids in the appraisal of the specific functions this concept performs within Bīdel’s own system of thought. By reading passages from Ṭelesm-e ḥeyrat alongside Bīdel’s autobiography, Chahār ʿonṣor (The Four Elements) and one lyric poem, this paper suggests that for Bīdel, the process of working towards self-mastery – striving to become balanced, regulated, un-erratic – involves a laborious lifelong struggle to acquire command simultaneously over one’s physical (corporeal), mental (rational and emotional), and imaginative (creative, poetic) domains. Taking these domains to be conceptually, figuratively, and literally interdependent is a key to understanding what Bīdel means by collectedness (jamʿīyat) and ideal composure (jāmeʿīyat) – the attainment of which is the stated aim of his lyric endeavors.

Perfumed Speech of a Poet-Pharmacist
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Farid al-Din ʿAṭṭâr (d. 1221) was a well-known sufi poet who composed a large divân and several didactic mas̱navis. The latter have been a particular focus of recent scholarship, which tends to emphasize their allegorical structure and theological teachings (Ritter, Pourjavady, Corbin, et al.). In addition to their sufi content, however, the mas̱navis also offer a wealth of metapoetic reflections on literary composition and reception that help us reconstruct an implicit poetics that infuses ʿAṭṭâr’s (and other poets’) work, but which was never explicitly theorized.
ʿAṭṭâr routinely likens speech to medicine. The metaphor is pervasive throughout his oeuvre, and even highlighted by his own pen name. This is more than mere ornamentation; it is indicative of a particular way of thinking about poetry and its effects on its audiences. As a form of spiritual medicine, poetry not only carries meaning, but also affects its recipients on a bodily and emotive level, ontologically transforming them by elevating them to a state of spiritual health. It thus points to a medieval understanding of poetry as fundamentally embodied, functional, and pragmatic, which does not easily sit with the modernist and romantic assumptions about poetry that dominate today.
This paper explores the dual meaning of “ʿAṭṭâr” as druggist and perfumist, which reflects a more fundamental entanglement of the beautiful, the meaningful, and the useful in Islamicate thought. The medicinal metaphor’s logic organizes how ʿAṭṭâr imagines his own authorship, the function of his poetry, and the reception of his work. Like any doctor, he must demonstrate his own medicinal authority before he can prescribe his drugs to others. Drawing on longstanding cultural associations between doctors and preachers, he confesses his own spiritual weakness and makes himself the target of his own didactic admonishments; by publicly “taking his own medicine,” he proves his sincerity and thus his homiletic authority. Readers, too, must consume his poems according to particular regimes to maximize their transformative power. Through the pervasive association of poetic speech and medicine, ʿAṭṭâr’s works are presented as sites of daily, ritualized reading, therapies directed at the development and maintenance of spiritual health. In keeping with panel’s goals, the paper reveals new ways of reading Persian didactic poetry by uncovering a pre-modern poetics that valorizes poetry’s physiological and pragmatic aspects.

A Tale of Two Interpretations: Wine as Symbol and Wine as (Embodied) Metaphor in Sufi Poetry
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Jāmī (d. 1492), the towering fifteen-century Persian Sufi poet, in his commentary on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s wine ode, entitled Lavāmiʿ, presents the reader with two distinct ways of analyzing the poem’s anacreontic imagery. Most of his work reads as a traditional Sufi interlinear commentary “on the words, phrases, unveiling[s], symbols, and allusions [of the poem]” with the clear goal of revealing for the reader the elaborate supra-literal network of allusions to myriad Quranic passages, hadith, and Sufi metaphysical concepts that are contained in each of these poetic “symbols.” This “symbolist” method of hermeneutic analysis, as one of its modern scholarly proponents has termed it, became one of—if not the—primary lens through which both premodern and modern readers have read Sufi poetry. While the “symbolist” hermeneutic tradition represents an undeniably important interpretative community within Sufism and the history of Persian poetry, there are a number of problems with exclusive reliance on this approach in our analysis of poetic imagery, as several scholars have pointed out (e.g., Meisami, Keshavarz, Sells).

The most significant of these problems, as this paper will argue, is that modern studies employing this approach ignore an equally historically grounded approach to poetry that Jāmī—in this same commentary—calls “expressing meanings in the clothing of forms.” Analyzing the “complete similitude” of earthly wine and love, Jāmī presents a radically different and deeply embodied perspective on the poetic function of metaphoric imagery. Sufi poets, he argues, “employ” “words and phrases” such as “earthly (ṣūrī) wine” “as metaphors” because they reproduce for the reader an imaginary experience that simulates (metaphorically) the experience, event, or concept that they wish to communicate to their reader. Wine is not just the Quranic “drink of Zanjabīl” or the “everlasting divine effusion,” as al-Qayṣarī argues in his commentary on the same poem. It is also a metaphoric embodiment of love that performs meaning through its diverse poetic manifestations. Moreover, these “meanings in the clothing of forms” are in the final instance not just poetic ornament in Jāmī’s view; they are pedagogical devices that marshal bodily experience of “sensorial perceptions/tangible objects” (mahsūsāt) in an attempt to convey the subtleties of higher spiritual realities.

The paper will conclude with the application of this more deeply embodied approach to poetic analysis in a reading of one of ʿAṭṭār’s qalandarīyāt, showcasing the different ways in which these two approaches understand the function of poetic imagery in a specific poem.