In the Muḥīṭ-i A`ẓam (“The Greatest Ocean,” 1667), his first long mystico-philosophical poem, composed in the form of a sāqīnāmah (poem to the cupbearer), the Indo-Persian poet Mirzā `Abd al-Qādir Bīdel (1644-1720) describes how the pre-eternal divine essence comes, like wine, into fermentation and results in the creation of the universe through a stage-by-stage ‘outpouring,’ or emanation. In the eight chapters of the poem, called dawrs, or “rounds,” the Unity of Being behind the multiplicity of the phenomena is described with the symbolism of wine within the framework of the conventions of the sāqīnāmah genre.
While meditations on the nature of speech/poetry have long been a conventional part of the Persian masnavīs as well as sāqīnāmahs, in Bīdel’s thought the problem of speech versus silence assumes a cosmological-ontological dimension and runs through the entire Muḥīṭ-i A`ẓam. For Bīdel, speech is not simply a human ability, but, in analogy to the Divine command “Be!” that brought the universe into existence, is inherently linked with the world of multiplicity, while silence constitutes the means to realize the unity behind multiplicity. Drawing on Bīdel’s meditations in dawrs 4, 7, and 8 of the Muḥīṭ-i A`ẓam, as well as in a prose composition of his titled “Favā’id-i Khāmūshī” (“Benefits of silence”) that forms part of his prose autobiographical work Chahār ‘Onṣor, I discuss Bīdel’s various approaches to the problem of “to speak or not to speak,” including his attempts to reconcile his poetic efforts to describe the “Tavern of Realities” with his belief that Reality cannot be expressed.
