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The Sacred and the Secular

A falcon swoops and pinions a dove in midair. There are divine energies here, and mythic thinking marks them with its distinctive fusion of natural with magical powers. Not that mythmakers fail to see distinctions. Myths can make the keenest discriminations.1 But mythic discourse does not so willingly dissolve the aura cast by its sacralizing gaze. It savors the extraordinariness of the extraordinary. By cycles of ritual, story, dance, poem, and song, cultures retell and seek to relive those moments that so trap the gaze or arrest the mind—to mime the bear or deer or monkey, become the god that animates the game, paint the walls with torsos and evocations of the animal energies discovered in the field.

It is in such efforts that art, science, and religion take their birth. They are not at first clearly demarcated. Not that myth is false or frightened science. We do not catch the essence of religion by dismissing it as unliberated art. Nor do we understand science by scouting it as religion made prosaic. But there is an overlap. The heart of the scientific hunger to understand and the artistic itch to speak or sing or paint the highlands of experience do not so readily abandon the religious desire to celebrate and recapture the lost vision, to see it once again, from safety. Neither science nor art ever wholly loses the sense of wonder that is the matter and root of all religious feeling.

Uniqueness, of course, is irreducible. Its moment is killed by analysis. Setting a backdrop to his own tale, Melville explains in his chapters on the painting of whales that to see a drawing, or a stuffed carcass in a museum, is not to see a whale.2 Schematic renderings are crude, fantastical, scaled down to the point of falsity. Cuvier, “brother to the famous Baron,” painted “not a Sperm Whale but a squash.” Others, of more experience or livelier imagination, show whales in action—“though in some details not the most correct.” The painted board of a stump-legged beggar near the docks at Tower Hill begins to convey something when it mutely narrates how the “kedger” lost his leg. The cartoon drawings of the amputee’s placard show “as good whales as were ever published in Wapping.” This man has seen a whale.

The bulk and danger of the whale may demand a canvas as broad as the northern and Antarctic skies. Moving from pictorial to natural representations—from the whales of prehistoric barrows and rock formations, to the whales found by the prepared eye in the “topmost heaven,” Melville shows how romantic poets and transcendentalist painters could find intimations of immortality in nature and divine brushwork in the Arabian desert or Niagara. But he also reveals how kindred sensibilities might find divinity itself in an instant and project natural powers beyond the cave walls and barrows of human art and up to those topmost heavens.

Religion protects its moments by setting its cynosure at a vanishing point, beyond the mere things of nature. The falcon is not entombed in any feathered corpse. It flies upward to become a god—no mere image but a spirit, in excelsis, beyond capture or control. Yet that very rise, which lifts objects beyond the ordinary, yields secularity too, as its precipitate. For it leaves the natural object bereft, reduced to ordinariness. The basalt falcon becomes the prize in some camp treasure hunt, a token goal in a film noir that cynicism will empty of treasure and of mystery.

Repetition too yields secularity. Just as science demands reproducibility, ritual can routinize religiosity in its drive to institute powerful but fleeting emotions. Whether in high church formalism, devotional legalism, drugged gropings after ecstasy, hypnotic dhikrs, wild glossolalias, or maenad bacchanals, the demand to handle and control the extraordinary undercuts the very summit that is its goal.

All religions look with awe upon some thing, event, or pattern. They differ in their varieties of response, in allocating that awe and seeking to preserve and transmit it without loss. The worshiper rocks to and fro, as one midrash puts it, drawn to the warmth and light of the flame but scorched if drawn too close.

Secularity poses special problems for monotheists. They press the idea that religious awe belongs only to the highest. But they also seek fascinated mastery of the peaks their quest may open to view.3 The central monotheist theme is this: that being, goodness, life, insight, and inspiration—all things of real worth—stem from God, although no mere thing exhausts divine perfection. The falcon, eagle, or lion may be emblems, but they never comprehend divine power itself. Even to touch or know or represent that Absolute demands divine initiative, a miracle of grace or faith, incarnation, or revelation.

Monotheistic ethics submits all human actions and desires to God’s will. But God’s absolute intent is made explicit, humanly relevant, and humane only by the presumption that God is honored in the recognition of creaturely deserts—that God, to put it anthropomorphically, desires His creatures’ well-being, in keeping with their capacities and needs. Hence the ethical impact of the idea that creation is God’s work and that we humans are created in God’s image. Still, creaturely goods are not gods. If only God is Absolute, no mere intent or aspiration holds absolute worth or merit. The idea of human rights may be anchored or smashed and wrecked upon that rock.

By denying the absolute value of natural objects, experiences, and desires, monotheism constantly risks emptying them of all value. Zen, by contrast, the most secular and aesthetic of religious traditions, finds a kind of absolute in the idea of emptiness. It builds an ethic and an ethos on the discipline of emptying the mind to house its daily lodgers while curbing attachment to any of them. Thus, by indirection, it inures mind to the paradox of the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

Zen shares a certain ascetic penchant, then, with the monotheistic traditions. Both look beyond the sensation of the moment. But the beyond of Zen arises dialectically, from the negation of the particular as such, much as a painting needs an object to orient the infinitude of negative space. Monotheism, for its part, looks beyond the particularity of the moment—first, ethically, to the next moment, and then, further, to eternity.

Both Zen and monotheism pursue an unnamed and unnameable boundlessness. But for monotheists the Infinite is a reality mirrored and refracted in created things. For Zen initiates, emptiness locates the depth behind the myriad things. The risk is fetishism, complementing the yawning sense of absence and hunger for the absolute that is the shadow side of monotheism.

When Kawabata visited the Kahala Hilton (as it was then called) he saw the beauty of the sunlit glasses stacked by the poolside bar. Mundane objects became an occasion, through their orderly arrangement, their crystal lattices, their natural and artificial glory—if the word is not too suggestive of an epiphany. Later, busloads of visitors from Japan trooped dutifully to the spot.4 Rather than discover the wondrous in their own mundane, they pursued Kawabata’s vision—as though their Nikons could give them his eyes. The procession became a ritual almost—at once sacralized and routinized.

Monotheism finds significance in all things, not in isolation but as expressions of divine creativity—God’s pleasure, or perhaps displeasure. Paganism holds ultimate value closer to home, but at a cost. For it keeps its values free and independent of one another, in some measure. But autonomous values may conflict, and likely will. In a mythic scheme, definition is won by contrast and contrast is dramatically projected as conflict. Life is a value in paganism, but so is death. Kindness is celebrated, but so is cruelty. Intensity advances its own claims. For all values either flash their own flavors or point elsewhere—and thus propose integration, subordination to a system, hierarchy beneath an absolute. If autonomous values are to be preserved, as romantics might prefer, a premium is placed on vividness. Contrast becomes a value in itself, and violence may follow. Intensity becomes the badge of authenticity. Tragedy is then the highest art; and paradox, the most profound philosophy.

Secularity need not careen to the orgiastic. Confucianism is a case in point. But secularity has this in common with paganism: that it prizes values insofar as they are not subsumed in some Ultimate. So the multiple and disparate interests of secularity, even if well mannered, may seem misdirected to the monotheist. Disparate values are cherished, for their moment—elegance, pleasure, fun, fashion, discipline, honor, sport, seduction, vengeance, virtuosity, bravado, sprezzatura, fame, and other aesthetic modes. Not all are wholesome or conducive to human flourishing. And none will be valued as highly by the rest as it is by its own lights and appetites.

It is the short weight of such values when judged against one another that gave Socrates the opening he needed for corralling in a common scheme all such recalcitrant values that would lay claim to any real worth. This Socratic dialectic, refined to a method by Plato and Aristotle and made a system by later thinkers, casts into sharp relief the moral posture implicit in monotheism. For it is a defining thesis of monotheistic ethics that such values as pleasure, risk, experience, even knowledge, or ascesis, or filial piety are soundly weighed only if judged extrinsically. They do not come off well as absolutes.5

Yet, through a paradox of monotheism or a perversity in secularity, monotheistic religions seem to feed upon and egg on their rivals, autonomous, secular pursuits. Spurning or neglecting secular concerns only gives them an identity and an animus. But trying to set them into an overarching value hierarchy can assign them canonical legitimacy. Equilibrium is elusive.

Focus and Distraction

Islam originates as a particularly earnest monotheistic creed, born from the visions and admonitions of the Arab prophet. Muhammad was deeply troubled by the recklessness and unconcern he saw around him. Ecstatic experience confirmed his moral vision, and an angelic voice gave it the shape of inspired poesy, in images of judgment against his fellow Meccans’ way of life. He inveighed against their moral laxity and what he called distractedness. They practiced infanticide (Qurān 6:152, 17:31), buried daughters alive (Qurān 81:8, 16:58–60). And they wore revealing clothing, drank wine, played games of chance (Qurān 24:31, 60; 33:59; 6:152; 2:216, 5:90). The revelatory condemnation of wine and of maysir gambling arrows reflected no merely utilitarian concern with alcoholism or self-impoverishment.6 It voiced a demand for cohesion and a warning against forgetfulness: “The Fiend desireth only to strew strife and enmity amongst you with wine and arrow-shuffling—to distract you from mindfulness of God and worship. Will ye cease and obey God, and obey His Emissary, and be ware?” (Qurān 5:91–92).

Focus is demanded in a community of believers. The intoxicated are polluted, unfit for prayer (Qurān 4:43). But the theme of distraction, extends more broadly. Man’s thoughts, the Sufis argue, belong properly to God. Thus Ibn Tufayl (ca. 1105–1185/6) equates failure of concentration on the thought of God with the alienation of infernal chastisement.7 What is at stake poetically is admission to the hereafter. Metaphysically, for Ibn Tufayl, that means eternal and ecstatic communion, ittiāl with God’s ultimate unity.

Yet, as if in mockery of the Qurān itself, Hamadhānī (968–1008) makes wine and dandified clothes symbols and paradigms of youthful joy and antinomian abandon.8 Muhammad’s antipathy, as described in the canonical sources, to music and dance, silken garments, secular song and poetry, thematize a zeal for direction of the mind toward God.9 Yet forbidden fruits taste all the sweeter. The persona that Jāi (ca. 776–868/9) sets in motion in his burlesque apology for the trade in song girls voices openly what must have seemed a common sotto voce rationale: Why should puritanical denials tempt a passion that can be lawfully sated? If song girls distract from the thought of God, don’t many other things—talk and food, drink and pleasure gardens, venery and the chase—in both senses of those terms?10 The solemnity of the warnings cast the faith in somber hues and color forbidden pleasures with a rebellious purpose, along with their tinctures of delight.

Nar b. al-ārith, a wealthy Qurashite, opposed Muammad’s mission. The owner of song girls and perhaps of books acquired in his merchant travels to Iran, he cited the mighty monarchs of Persia to discredit the Prophet’s accounts of vanished nations that had failed to heed God’s call. He was captured in battle against the Muslim forces at Badr and executed, according to tradition, by the Prophet’s own hand, or at his orders by Alī. His memory is kept alive in a threnody ascribed to a surviving daughter or sister, and he becomes a sort of secular patron of song and the lute. For it is Nar, they say, who brought the lute to Mecca.11 Singing will be proscribed and many lutes smashed in the name of Islam, but the Prophet is said to have regretted Nar’s slaying, and the variant stories as to who wielded the sword express such regret, at least on the part of those who told the tale.

Poetry and Music

Poetry enjoys an ambiguous status in Islam. It is not forbidden. But, as a patterned mode of discourse, where pattern is a vehicle of art and art can militate for autonomy and for control of content, poetry is clearly suspect. Muammad vehemently rejected the name of poet (Qurān 36:69, 69:40–41). But the poetic qualities of the Qurān are evident—placing the Prophet on much the same uneasy footing as Plato, who also feared the dominance of artistic values over the claim of truth. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1148/9–1210) artfully dissolved the dilemma by appealing to the spontaneity of Muhammad’s inspired discourse: The Prophet’s art was not contrived but compelled—as unpremeditated as the rhymed and metrical exclamation he made when his toe was wounded in battle. But the difficulty persists. For the special authority of spontaneity is a literary distinction, indeed, a romantic topos older than the Hellenistic age, when even Skeptical philosophers gave credit to the spontaneous responses of body or mind.12

In the Qurān (26:224) we read: “Those who stray follow the poets” and in the adīth, of Bukhārī and Muslim: “Better a belly full of rot than a belly full of poetry.”13 Yet the Prophet is quoted as finding wisdom in poetry, even magic in eloquence. He encouraged poetic satire of his enemies and detractors, although he deplored extravagant rhetoric in general.14 He listened entranced, the traditions report, to the poetry of Abū ‘l-alt, who never became a Muslim, and when he heard Labīd’s half-line, “All things but God are vain,” exclaimed that no truer words were ever spoken, by a poet.15 But the hemistich, by the author of one of the Seven Golden Odes later avowed to have been suspended at the Kaba, was mated with another, developing its elegiac theme: “And all that is fair must perish.” To this Uthmān b. Maūn, is said to have objected violently: “You lie! The joy of Paradise will never cease!”16 The emotive demands of Labīd’s poem were countermanded by a higher authority.

Even internally Labīd’s line struck a paradox: Its words purport to recognize no worth but God’s, yet as they are spoken they enunciate their own value as well. Words rhymed for the faith might harbor spiritual value; and satires hold pragmatic worth. But there is a joy in satire, and in all poetic power, that is quite distinct from the joy of heavenly union.

The Prophet, it is said, softened toward poetry when Labīd embraced Islam. Labīd, for his part, is said to have withdrawn his poetry on hearing the Qurān. A vowedly secular poetry remained suspect for its content, of course. But even sacred poetry broached values distinct from the Highest. And wasn’t poetry at large, by its very nature, secular, following where feelings beckoned to words? The words of the old poets in particular, recorded and remembered, rekindled feelings that were by no means trapped in amber. But they added layers of nostalgia as the decades and centuries passed. As Tarif Khalidi writes:

Jahili poetry, often embedded in stories relating to the lives of the poets, was collated and provided with commentaries in literary anthologies of the 3rd–4th/9th-ioth centuries. . . . the past is recreated or evoked in a manner which the Qurān was later to brand as jāhilī, even while it shared with this poetry certain terms to describe and situate that past. This poetry speaks to us in many moods: epic or lyrical, tragic, ironic or nostalgic. . . . Youth is always recalled in sorrow.17

Transmuting ambivalence into elegy, the culture adopts almost the same tone toward its own youth as do the poets whose memories and longings it enshrines.

Music is at once more abstract and more sensuous than poetry. The ascetic side of Islam frowns on it, and more sternly on dance. Drama does not thrive in the house of Islam, although present in the Shīite passion plays of Kerbala.18 Representational painting will flourish in Iran, and with lesser brilliance in the courts of early Arab monarchs and later Mughals, Ottomans, and other dynasts.19 It is found among Muslims in India, Turkey, China, Central Asia, and Africa, but most often as a court phenomenon, celebrating warfare, love, or the hunt. These secular themes recur in the miniatures that adorn Iranian epics and line the walls of Arab pleasure palaces. Religious themes are touched in Islamic art, but often with a self-conscious, almost guilty modesty. Or they are sublimated in geometrical motifs of austere complexity or ornate splendor, eloquently suggesting the inadequacy of line or form to a supernal subject.20

In Sufi art, modesty yields to a puckish, quietly antinomian lilt, the full-faced youth swaying gently to music he alone can hear, a wine cup held openly in his hand. In the mosque, images give way to words. Icons fail, but calligraphy blooms, and words become iconic, leaping from the walls and the manuscript page. Here again the secular lurks in the aesthetic, as fancy yields to fantasy in the elaborate Ottoman tughras that declare the many titles of a monarch in resplendent gold and lapis lazuli. Tile work is brilliant. Carving is a tour de force, but sculpture is stillborn. Ballet or opera, alien and uncountenanced.

Dance is generally deemed un-Islamic, ruled unlawful by the jurists, although no text or tradition expressly forbids it, and the traditions of Bukhārī’s ahī explicitly permit it on the day of the Great Festival.21 But gravitas turns the Qurānic (17:39) admonition “Walk not proudly” into a proof text against dancing, which Muslim purists and puritans pointedly apply to the ecstatic dhikrs of the Sufis.

Āisha, it is said, was rebuked by Abū Bakr, for listening to two female singers.22 Nāfi is reported to have learned from Ibn Umar, a companion of the Prophet, to follow Muammad’s example by putting his fingers in his ears on hearing the sound of a musical pipe.23 adīth is not alone, of course, in confounding music with noise. Gilson speaks of music almost as an assault. He cheerily quotes Kant’s “priceless observation” from the Critique of Judgment “on the impertinence of those who sing spiritual hymns in their homes during family devotions without considering the noise they inflict on their neighbors.” Music may be the most agreeable of the arts, Kant allows, but even that renders it suspect, as “enjoyment rather than culture,” since it “involves neither concepts nor definite ideas.” To which he adds: “if we measure the value of the fine arts against the culture which they impart to the sentiment, and against the enlargement of the faculties which must be combined in judgment for cognition, then music immediately passes into the lowest place among the fine arts . . . because it brings only sensations to bear.”24 So “music is sure to see itself despised by those who judge art by knowledge. As Voltaire said: ‘One sings what is too silly to be said.’”25 Yet, silly as they are, I don’t think anyone has set those last words to music. The words show more a blind spot in Gilson and a bald spot in Kant than any real insight into art or culture. Gilson is plainly moved by prejudice, partly sectarian—distaste for Protestant family worship; and Kant, similarly, by amusement at the Schwarmerei he so disliked in Pietism. Only contrast Gilson’s glowing remarks about statuary: “When statues are carried in a pageant, the spectacle can take on a hallucinatory beauty, which invariably produces a strange effect, like the Spanish statues that swing gently to and fro with and almost living grace when they are borne in religious processions.”26 Invariably? I don’t think that’s quite what a Muslim observer would have felt, say, not long after the Reconquista, on witnessing some fiesta procession in Spain.

A Sufi exponent of musical spirituality, responding to the Islamic condemnation of music as noise, acutely sets apart “assaultive” from “nonassaultive” music: “The first . . . produces an agitation. . . . The second . . . has the effect of transporting the listener to some other place,” perhaps “to the presence of God.”27 Even so, partly for its sensuality, and even more for its emotive effects, music remains suspect in Islam.

Ibn Abī Dunyā, the subject of the only obituary recorded by Ibn al-Athīr for the year 894, was tutor to two Abbāid caliphs and wrote over a hundred works, including a series of seven Censures: of the world and worldliness (al-dunyā), of the vicious passions (envy and ire), of loose language (slander and obscenity), and of the implements of distraction (intoxicants and instruments of diversion). The last of the series, Dhamm al-Malāhī, the Censure of Toys, devotes some ten folios to the condemnation of vocal and instrumental music.28 Citing numerous adīths, it links music and its tools with wine and gaming, racing pigeons and sexual license. Some of the direst warnings of the Final Judgment aim at those who keep song girls and indulge in related forms of decadence and debauchery. Music is vicious, precisely because it is a distraction: One man grew so devoted to his song girl that he gave up the mosque altogether. Ibn Masūd destroyed musical instruments with the same vehemence that Carrie Nation used against saloons. It is the devil, he said, who makes a man sing as he rides—perhaps playing on the notion that riders sang to ward off spirits. But the worry, again, is distraction: The devil gains access because the song has not mentioned God—and if one sings poorly, bowing to the devil is next! Chess, Ibn Umar reasons, is worse than backgammon, because it is more absorbing. Song, for the same reason, is worse than poetry. As in Kant and Gilson, cognitivism abets austerity. But the real fear is lest music become a sensuous vehicle for autonomy of spirit.

Music, it would seem, then, even when tolerated, could never be cherished in Islam.29 And it is true that Islamic culture does not afford to the temporal abstractions conveyed in music by tone and timbre the same acceptance that it gives, say, to the geometrical abstractions of mosaic or faience. Nor do we see classically the kind of secular spirituality attaching to Islamic music that has arisen in the West among devotees of the symphony. Indeed, the smashing of musical instruments and breaking up of musical parties are paradigm cases of what the classical Muslim jurists take to be ordained by the religious obligation to “ordain what is right and forbid what is wrong” (Qurān 3:104).30 Yet, despite the censorious traditions, music thrives at the heart of pivotal Islamic institutions. And beneath the spiritual meanings it bears in such contexts, wear and rubbing may occasionally expose impulses other than the purely spiritual.

The samā or mystical concert is a stimulant to Sufi ecstasy. Often accompanied by rhythmic movement or dance, the samā is never a purely passive affair. There is always at least mental participation, and typically a joining in the chanting, in active quest for the higher states that are the mystic’s goal. Samā gatherings are not normatively held for the pleasure of the music. Yet sensuous values are present, legitimated by the sacred setting. So Sufis have long warned against secularization (or resecularization) of such events. The music, the dancing, the celebratory meal may turn a dhikr into a party, a paganizing trance-dance ritual, or today, a performance for the tourists.

Persian secular poetry has long been fitted to the samā, made over by the assignment of metaphorical meanings to its imagery and then marked with the distinctive rhythms and forms of the Sufi repertoire. The mystic virtuoso Ibn Arabī, seeking discipline, urges that the samā should keep to Qurānic texts. But the ever practical Ghazālī prescribes religious poetry rather than Qurānic texts, lest the familiar words of scripture dim the liveliness of the experience.

Perhaps derived by “a sacralization of the secular concert and a sublimation of arab,” the emotional, even bodily response to poetry and song,31 the Sufi samā, never wholly loses its aura of sensuous or emotional excess. The institution spread rapidly from ninth century Baghdad to Isfahan, Shiraz, and the great province (or little empire) of Khurasan. The samā came of age in Persia, spread by Persian disciples of such mystics as Nūrī and Junayd. Most of the early writers about it were Persians too. Widely accepted in countries of Islamic culture, it took hold most firmly where Persian influence was strongest—in Turkey and India particularly.

Niām al-Dīn al-Awliyā (d. 1325) loved poetry and favored the devotional samā, which helped him propagate his Chistī Sufi order from Uttar Pradesh to Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal, and the Deccan. But his chosen successor, Naīr al-Dīn Mamūd Chiragh-i Dihlī (d. 1356) took a different tack. He relaxed the Chistī demand for strict obedience of acolytes to their pīrs and abolished the controversial prostrations of these aspirants before their guides, giving prominence to law, scripture, and adīth, in place of music. An ascetic from his youth, he was indifferent even to the most spiritual poetry and, as Bruce Lawrence puts it, lukewarm at best in assaying its spiritual worth to others. He criticized the pretensions of ajjīs and never made the pilgrimage himself, modestly arguing that neither had his master. Even while that master lived, tradition records, Mamūd left an assembly where a woman sang and played the drum, saying that this was not in keeping with the sunna. The master’s approval was not enough. A practice must be vouched for by the Qurān or adīth.32

The more heavily Chistī spirituality leaned on music, the more elaborate grew the defenses of the samā. One apologetic turns the tables on arguments from distraction: It is those who impugn the samā who are distracted, by their very detachment; the listener is wholly absorbed. Critical questions may come from the lips and speak of reason, but their answer, could it be given, would come from the heart and speak of love.33 The tension remains. For as the Sufis themselves say, the listening at the core of the samā might be selfish or soulful, a response of one’s nature, or a response of the heart.

There are no real condemnations of music in the Qurān, only rejections of vain or idle talk (23:13, 25:72, 31:5, 38:55). These must be worked up into proof texts with the help of a few tenuous suggestions, say, about the voice of Iblīs (17:66) and more general remarks: “Will ye laugh and not weep, making merry?” (53:60–61). In context, that last seems to aim at those who did not hearken to the Prophet’s message as seriously as he hoped. Taken more broadly, it is a call to high seriousness and still says nothing about music.34 Yet the application was plain enough to jurists in search of a legislative hook. And the defenders of music had little more to go on—only vague remarks about gladness and a preference for the beautiful over the harsh and ugly (30:14, 31:18, 35:1, 39:19). Against the tradition that Muhammad condemned the use of song girls, Ghazālī could cite a rival adīth, also on the authority of Āisha, offering the assurance that the Prophet himself had listened to two song girls at her house. Muhammad, it was said, joined in a work song while helping dig trenches at Mecca. But the four first caliphs, we read, all disapproved of listening to songs or other music, so the strict legal school of Iraq banned it, although the school of Medina did not.

As the poet Ibn Abd Rabbihi argued (860–940), if song is unlawful, then so is Quranic chanting. Henry Farmer, the celebrated scholar of Islamic music, chuckles at the acrobatics jurists went through to distinguish the two.35 For, as Ibn Qutayba notes, the cantillation of the Qurān is musically indistinguishable from singing. But that cantillation was far too entrenched to be drawn into the vortex. Even its designation, tarīb, which would normally connote an excessively emotive tremolo, did nothing to inhibit the practice. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya called it simply the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, and the worries of the jurists were subdued in the understanding that cantillation was perfectly acceptable, as long as it did not obscure the sense of the divine message.

But music did not confine itself to the samā and Qurānic tarīb. The professional singers, instrumentalists, and song girls of the Jāhiliyya did not disappear on the rise of Islam, and the great philosophers of Islam, Kindī, Rāzī, Fārābī, Ibn Sīna, and Ibn Bājjah all wrote treatises on musical theory. Ibn ufayl, a founder of the so-called “Andalusian revolt” against Ptolemaic astronomy, is said to have remarked cheerfully when he lined up for his pay at the (nominally puritanical) Almohad court: “If they’re in the market for musical theory, I can supply it.”36 A word, then, about song girls, and then about musical theory and practice.

There were free professional singers in Arabia at least as early as the seventh century, but song girls (qaynāt, qiyān) were typically slaves, highly trained in musical entertainment and highly valued by those who marketed them for sale, or for hire in lavish entertainments.37 The institution probably had deep pre-Islamic roots among the tribes and in the taverns, at various levels of elegance or commonness. Two song girls were used in early propaganda against Muhammad, and executed for their trouble. But the institution survived and flourished at Mecca and Medina. The banning of wine thinned the ranks of the singers far more than the condemnations of early Muslims. But the Islamic conquests swelled their numbers, as entrepreneurs sought to add value to the slaves acquired as booty, by training them in music. The fabulous prices commanded by the finest of these women soon became the stuff of legend. Schools and music masters vied to meet the demand for qaynāt in the newly built garrison cities of Iraq, and later in Baghdad, Cordova, and Seville. Specialized dealers used their qaynāt to gain wealth, protection, patronage, and influence.38 Some of the slave songstresses became celebrities as poets, wits, or performers, or as the mistresses of powerful men, or mothers to caliphs. Some were given their freedom, one was the subject of a biography. There was a chorus and even an orchestra of qiyān.

Song girls were sought after for their charms and not just for their talents. But there was piety among them, despite the role in which they were cast, and doubtless at times in response to the demands of that role. Many of the singers had vast repertoires of poetry, and some were learned in literature and the sacred sciences as well. Some were free, and many were not baubles of the court but tavern workers, as in the past. Lacking the respectability of free matrons and wives, the qiyān enjoyed a certain mobility that was withheld from others. They wore colorfully dyed clothing, unlike the natural colors seen in the home. And they were encouraged to engage in repartee with the men they were supposed to entertain, albeit never as equals. The institution of the qaynāt retreats with the retreat of slavery in modern times, and egalitarians could hardly mourn for it deeply. But comparable roles persist today, and the secular entertainments at which the qaynāt were adept survive in the repertoire of those troupes of women who entertain at family feasts even today in Moroccan cities.

Musical theory was the province of philosophers, who were also often physicians and scientists. Kindī (d. 867) is exemplary in this way. His work on music adopts a cosmological perspective, relating the Pythagorean mathematical system of musical tones to the seasons and elements, the compass points, humours, days of the week and heavenly bodies. The same neoplatonizing approach, based on a quest for the deep foundations of the psychological and even therapeutic value of music, was popularized in the essays of the Sincere Brethren of Basra and survives in traditional Islamic literature about music down to modern times.

A rival, Aristotelian scheme is found in Fārābī. And Avicenna “brusquely dismisses” the cosmological approach, and its Neopythagorean numerology.39 But the contrast is not simply between the spiritual and the naturalistic. For the Sincere Brethren introduce the idea that sound is propagated spherically; and Fārābī, for his part, ranks musical instruments by their approach to the human voice. His musicology is noted for its logical rigor, but his focus on theory does not obscure his interest in the practical art of music making. That combination recurs in asan al-Kātib’s Kamāl Adab al-Ghinā (late tenth or early eleventh century), which preserves fragments of the lost musical work of Kindī’s disciple al-Sarakhsī (ca. 835–899), along with discussions of the etiquette and aesthetics of performance practice.

afī al-Dīn al-Urmawī (d. 1294), the father of the Systematist school of Islamic musical theory founded a method of notation based on inscribing musical values at various points on a circle. The system was perfected by Qub al-Dīn Shīrāzī (1236–1311), a physician, astronomer, and philosopher known as “the polymath” (al-mutafannin). A student of Naīr al-Dīn al-ūsī, Qub al-Dīn became a qāī under the Ilkhānid Mongol rulers of Persia and influenced his sovereign’s conversion to Islam. Retiring to Tabrīz, he avidly studied adīth and lived the life of a Sufi—ascetic but rather relaxed in his religious observance, loving wine and chess, performing his devotions in the mosque, but “sitting among the scorners.” He played the rabāba, a small viol, and was skilled in conjuring tricks.40 His life displays the tangled skein of many of the secular threads of humanism in Islam.

Musical theory and practice unite again in the work of Abd al-Qādir al-Marāghī (d. 1435) a celebrated composer and performer whose Persian writings reflect the traditions of practice in the music of his day and whose influence persists down to the present. He describes some forty musical instruments, including Indian and Chinese examples that reflect the varied interests and the multicultural windows of a cosmopolitan artist and thinker.

Citations against music can be found in all four Sunnī schools of law, but three of the four founders of those schools are reported to have enjoyed it. ujwīrī, an exponent of Sufism (d. 1072–77), tenders the widely offered explanation: The fault lies not with music but with the behaviors that customarily accompany it. Abū Sulaymān al-Dārānī (d. 830), an ascetic known for his weeping in worship, argues in the same vein: Music adds nothing new to the heart but only stirs up what is already there. Dhū l-Nūn (ca.796–860), the Nubian freedman who rose to be a major early Sufi, admits that mere sensuous listening lists toward heresy. But at its core, he urges, music is God’s stirring of the human heart to seek Him.

Abū ālib al-Makkī (d. 998), in the same vein, describes music as a slippery rock of sensuality for the ill-prepared but no danger to the steady minded, if it is used not for mere amusement but for spiritual growth. Junayd (d. 910) had warned that love of music is a mark of laziness in Sufi novices—as though music opened a shortcut to higher states.41 But Ghazālī follows Makkī, the author whom he mentions first among the Sufis whom he studied when he was seeking his way out of the thicket of despond into which his doubts had cast him. Prizing experience over theory and valuing Sufism for its grounding in practice, he opens the use of music to Sufi novices as well as steady-minded veterans. Daqqāq, a Moroccan Sufi and younger contemporary of Ghazālī’s, might have his worries that ecstasy could foster unbelief, if the inexperienced are carried away by sensations of divine indwelling. But in Ghazālī’s view the fault lay not in music but in bad theology. One might outgrow the need for spiritual stimulants, but they are not themselves improper, as long as one avoids instruments with profane associations and follows the path under proper guidance.42

With Ghazālī’s approval, then, the melody unheard beneath the sensuous surface of music could become a metaphor for the progress of the soul. As the mystic poet Ibn al-Fāri (1181–1235) put it, in gnostic mode, music reminds us of our true home and so helps free us from the flesh. That argument offers, in effect, an answer (unself-consciously Platonic) to the somber advice of Abu Nar al-Sarrāj (d. 988), who held that music does not help prepare a man for death.

Ghazālī’s wiser and more moderate approach is much the same as his stance toward logic and mathematics, holding onto the device and condemning only what might accompany it. Granted the Sharī a condemns certain instruments for their association with vicious company and debauched practices—wine, gambling, female impersonators. Yet what is not explicitly forbidden is permissible. It is not unlawful to sing what would be lawful if merely spoken. “Whenever joy is permissible, so is the stirring up of joy.” And likewise with courage, resolution, love, or longing, including the love of God.

From the references to Sufi music and dance in Ghazalī’s Iyā and his praise of Sufi practice as an avenue toward resolution of the speculative dilemmas that had triggered his spiritual crisis,43 it is not hard to discern that Sufi music played its part in resolving that crisis. With the authority that gave him the title ujjatu l-Islam, the Proof of Islam, Ghazālī more than repaid the debt by defending music juridically and philosophically, not only when spiritually employed but in any licit context. Analyzing song into its elements, each of which he finds permitted by tradition, Ghazālī concludes that the traditional authorities deem song no different from poetry, or ordinary, un-ornamented speech. Pointing to the Qurānic thesis that the embellishments found in nature are the work of God (35:1), he argues that song is just such an embellishment. Music, like erotic behavior, may need to be regulated, but it is not disapproved by the Law. And neither is “dancing and the beating of tambourines, or playing with hide shields and darts, or looking on at the dancing of Abyssinians and Blacks on occasions of joy.”44

A Muslim contemporary of our own age argues in much the same vein:

The idea has gained popularity somehow, that Islam, as a religion, is against the fine arts and that music is prohibited by the Sharīa. The fact of the matter is that jurists have shown strictness in this regard only to avoid waste of resources. But this strictness has nothing to do with the Sharīa. It is based on judicial discretion. Anything that may lead to evil through excess and abuse can be curtailed by judicial discretion. But this can never change the reality of the Sharīa and its true prescriptions. On this the Qurān (7:30–31) says: “Say: Who has forbidden the ornament of God which He brought forth for His servants, and the good things of His providing. . . . Say: My Lord has forbidden only indecencies, inward and outward, and sin, and unjust insolence, and that you associate with God that for which He sent down no authority, and that you say concerning God such as you know not.”45

The modernist author, Abū l-Kalām Āzād, addresses some of the same arguments that troubled Ghazālī. He differs from the classical authors in four respects: He generalizes, to include the fine arts at large; he cites economic rather than moral constraints; he focuses more on secular pleasures as an adornment to human life and less on Sufi practice; and he writes with one eye cocked toward a non-Muslim public, or toward secular-minded readers who might be seduced from Islam by the thought that theirs is a dour faith. So he blames not puritan jurists of the past but critics (and extremists?) in the present for misconstruing the Islamic ethos and intent.

But in Ghazālī’s time, as in our own, not every authority was convinced by such defenses. Music remains problematic in Muslim countries, and in Muslim law it was classically disputed whether one who breaks a lute, a tabor, pipe, or cymbal must reimburse the owner. Abū anīfa takes the affirmative, since instruments are articles of lawful commerce. But their use is not so clearly countenanced. And two of Abū anīfa’s followers, Abū Yūsuf and Muammad, dissent from his view, pressing for greater zeal.46 Makkī and Ghazālī struggled with the traditions, but Mālik did make it a duty to return a newly acquired slave girl on discovering that she could sing, and Shāfiī frowned on music, chess, and backgammon—“all the games that people play. For play is not the practice of the pious or the manly.”47

Dress and Display

Still manliness is not always the aim in view. The Qurān (7:26) plays at the interface of poetry and prose when it informs its hearers that God “bestowed clothing on you to cover your shame and put you in fine feather, but the garment of piety is the best.”48 Utility here stands alongside modesty and ornament as the warrant for deeming clothing a divine gift. But piety trumps all of these, with an impact that arcs back to touch the matter of ornament. So we read in the adīth: “Whoever wears a silk garment in this world shall not wear it in the next.” But note the structural symmetry. Such patterns, as Oscar Wilde knew long before Levi-Strauss, are the topiary frame of wit—itself a secular value.

Islamic traditions about clothing are as variegated as the fabrics they address. Some of the ideas come with the booty of conquest, some are of domestic manufacture. There are traditions urging that silk should be cut up for women’s veils. Others allow silks for men suffering from a skin inflamation. The broad consensus is that silken clothing and gold jewelry are fit for women’s wear but too luxuriant for men. Yet exceptions can be made: a signet ring for men, for example. One adīth has it that silk is best sold; another that it should be burnt; others allow a small amount for trimming. Both the Prophet and his wife Āisha are said to have worn various colors. A Paris MS of arīrī’s Maqāmāt dated to early-thirteenth-century Syria shows Pilgrims “wearing Irām garments that are dyed in subdued hues”—not in the now obligatory white.49 Ibn Abbās is quoted with the advice: “Eat what you like and wear what you like as long as you avoid two things: prodigality and pride,” a sentiment much echoed. But elsewhere we are cautioned that a plain white garment is suitable for meeting God, in mosques or in the grave.50

Muslim jurists have their work cut out for them when they turn to sewing a coherent legal doctrine from the patchwork of counsels preserved in adīth. The dislike of luxury is plain. Gold rings, silver cups, silk, satin, brocade—even tanned leather is proscribed in various traditions.51 The reasoning is plain once again: Luxury, or even fancy, distracts. Muammad, it is said, was given a spotted silk mantle; but, finding it distracted him in prayer, he cast it aside and would not wear it again.52 Yet just such distractions become delights to dandies, whose variegated silks are caught still fluttering in the pages of Hamadhānī’s thousand-year-old Maqāmāt.

A man who trails his garment rakishly, Muammad warns in one adīth, trails his hem in Hell. In a more credulous variant, one such decadent was swallowed up by the earth.53 He who attracts mortal eyes here will not be looked on by God in the Hereafter.54 Yet what is condemned in this world is a reward in the next: “He who drinks from a silver cup drinks hellfire”;55 but the meed of the heedful, “their recompense for what they have borne—a garden and silk” (Qurān 76:12).56 The images are brilliantly limned: “God will bring those who have been faithful and done righteously into gardens, under which rivers flow, where they are allowed armlets of gold and pearl, and their clothes will be of silk” (22:23).

Some Muslims preferred not to wait. As Yedida Stillman writes:

The idea of austerity in male attire quickly gave way in the century following the Prophet’s death, with the rise of a leisured class in the Islamic Empire. Only ascetic pietists still wore simple clothing, and they eventually came to be known as ūfīs because of their plain wool (ūf) garments. The Muslim bourgeoisie, on the other hand indulged itself with garments made from every conceivable type of luxury fabric and justified their indulgence with countertraditions expressing the permissibility of wearing silk, brocade, satin, and the like. In the words of one such countertradition, “When God bestows benefaction upon one of his servants, He wishes the physical sign of that benefaction to be visible on him.”57

Stories of the luxurious garments of the Umayyad court may be meant by later comers to discredit the ousted dynasty. But the art of the era shows that Umayyad luxury was no fiction. And we note that clothing was a target, precisely because it was a mode of self-expression and a ready vehicle of excess. Neither the obloquy nor the ostentation ended with the Umayyads.

The richly bordered garments that Arab monarchs bestowed on favorites, poets, musicians, philosophers, and potentates, evolved into a secular ceremonial. By Abbāsid times tirāz meant not just embroidered fabric but robes of honor (Arabic khilā, cognate with the English gala) presented on court occasions and bearing suitably ornate and precious designs, often inscribed in gold thread running through the silk.58 Production of such fabrics, since they bore the ruler’s insignia was, like the coinage, typically a royal prerogative, and a prince’s court had its own factory and artisans dedicated to the purpose.

Tirāz bespeaks pomp, as Ibn Khaldūn explains. It is a mark of authority and a sign of favor, sharing the éclat of power. Pre-Muslim dynasties, Ibn Khaldūn writes, used figural borders that might include images of the king. Muslim rulers substituted their own names, along with auspicious phrases. Most dynasties followed the practice, and its elaboration became an index of prosperity. But the early Almohads abandoned tirāz, “because they had been taught by their imām, Muhammad b. Tūmart al-Mahdī, the ways of religion and simplicity. They were too austere to wear garments of silk and gold. . . . Their descendants in the later years of the dynasty, however, re-established it somewhat, although not nearly as splendidly as it had been.59 The inscription, worked in gold, might well be a pious phrase. But, as Ibn Tūmart saw, the subtext too readily took control. Indeed, both the medium and the message bespoke secular values: elegance, virtuosity, royal favor, sovereign authority. Fabulous sums were spent on court dress. The gold thread in a single military robe could cost 500 gold dinars, and in 1122, as Stillman learns from Maqrīzī, 14,000 robes were needed for a single court event.60

The dialectic does not stop there. In Fāimid Egypt the garments of a Shīite imām, who was imbued with divine light and the charisma of infallibility, themselves acquired baraka, and irāz fabrics began to show up in large numbers as burial garments. The Fāimid court, not slow to note the market potential of its franchise, developed a special line of irāz for sale to the public. The sale of luxury garments to the bourgeoisie became a significant source of revenue to the court, and bogus inscriptions soon appeared, presumably from unauthorized manufacturers, much as prestige brands are pirated today.61

By Mamluk and Ayyubid times, vesting with a khilā was the name for investiture in office. In Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus government workshops still turned out court dress. But the fine garments were now also privately produced. The khilā market of Ibn Khaldūn’s Cairo bustled with dealers. Hunting scenes were featured on one design, an emblem of secularity. As uniforms grew increasingly standardized for the military and for civil servants in the Turkic regimes, clothing all the more marked the man. Only the ulamā eschewed the khilā and its distinctive irāz bands. Black robes and a turban, the garments of austerity, had become their uniform.

Social status is not a religious value. But where religious values are held high, a devotional posture can enhance social status. Hence Ghazālī’s concern over the worldly use of spiritual gestures.62 Two social divisions of greatest concern to classical Islamic societies were strongly underscored by dress: that between women and men, and that between Muslims and non-Muslims, the dhimmīs, the tolerated or “protected” communities of the People of the Book. Turbans, sometimes called “the badge of Islam” were a mark of Muslim male dignity and gravitas. Veiling was an expression of female dignity and chastity, at least among urban, as opposed to peasant or beduin, women.

The veil was and still is most commonly seen (by both advocates and detractors) as a religiously mandated expression. But many values lend it support, not a few of them tinged with secularity. For the reserve that the veil and other forms of covering announce is a mark of respectability. The resumption or reimposition of veils for women in Islamic societies today bears nationalistic as well as pietist overtones, and the two often interpenetrate. But 40 percent of the educated Egyptian women interviewed in one study explained that they went veiled or wore “Islamic dress” because it was the latest fashion. The currency of that fashion in turn is an expression of cultural identity and of resistance to values and lifestyles often seen as threatening and foreign. Neo-Islamic dress, “a full- length loose gown, or a longsleeve loose shirt and a full-length skirt, or loose slacks with an overshirt extending below the waist, sometimes a long light overcoat, and a head scarf . . . or wimple . . . has become a sort of pan-Islamic uniform.”63 The message, in part, is one of assertive unavailability. So it carries a feminist subtext, but without recourse to the language of liberated or confrontational sexuality. And again, Islamic or Sharī dress can express rebellion against “often liberal, pro-Western, middle-class parents, or in a more political form, against secular, modernizing, but undemocratic governments.”64 But what can be a matter of personal choice and communal self-affirmation in an open and pluralistic society all too readily becomes a matter of oppression in a closed society, or one in which social pressures are seeking to force closed a door—to light and open air, to jobs, education and opportunity, to personal expression and social interaction—that might otherwise have opened.

In medieval times the veil could be emulated by non-Muslim women, and the turban meant as much to a respectable non-Muslim as a business suit might mean to a European today. Garments bore too powerful a valence to be left untouched by invidious markings. In Mamluk Egypt, for example, social stratification was sharply signaled: “Dhimmīs were so-to-speak color coded by their outer garments. Beginning with a decree issued in 1301/700, Christian men had to wear a blue turban, Jews a yellow one, and Samaritans, a red one, in clear contrast to the white imāma worn by Muslims. Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan women were required to appear in public in a blue, yellow, or red izār [wrap], respectively.”65

Sharīa law under Islamic regimes ruled that dhimmīs were not to ride horses, bear arms, or emulate Muslim dress. They must wear a thick cordlike belt, short cropped hair, and special headgear. Often there was a patch or badge, sometimes specified to bear the image of an ape for Jews and a pig for Christians. Neck rings of lead or iron might be required, to distinguish non-Muslims at the baths, and at times even a brand or tattoo. Repeatedly the restrictions were relaxed, often on the community’s payment of huge indemnities. But they were regularly reimposed at the demand of the ulamā or the mob, in keeping with the Qurānic (9:29; cf. 2:61) demand that non-Muslims be humiliated.

Such regulations do not speak for the humanism of monotheistic ethics. But the sumptuary rules that S. D. Goitein calls an “obsession pestering Muslims almost throughout their entire history” do reveal the interplay of secularity with religious exclusivism. They signify intolerance and triumphalism, but they are also “a sign of the excessive importance attributed to clothing and the status it confers” in Muslim societies.66 Just as robes of honor can become ends in themselves, so can the invidious differentiation of credal commitments and communal engagements. Status, in Islamic norms, is based on piety. And that means Islamic piety. So a Muslim (marked by clothing) becomes a socially superior being; a dhimmī, a social inferior. Since the external so readily displaces the internal as the focus of attention, the value system that the sumptuary laws were supposed to regiment is now inverted: Status becomes the end, piety and the signs of piety and affiliation become the means. Such inversions are a risk in any attempt to objectify what is of moment spiritually. The effort to institute a seemingly authentic norm has undercut more central and more universal norms. The issue remains for Muslim thinkers and leaders to address.

Dunyā and Dīn—in Wine, War, and Love

Secular values raise their heads in the very heart of Islamic norms. They may rival religious values, offering a release from perfect earnestness and magnifying their intrinsic appeal through claims upon the love of freedom and the delicious delight of the forbidden. They may be coopted by religiosity, and they may exploit its energies in turn—from within, by turning religious projects to secular ends, and from without, by antipathy and mockery. What we must not ignore in these dialectics is the valuation placed on the secular by the faith itself, which prizes asceticism yet treats sensuous delight as a divine gift, which ascribes all power to God yet seeks mastery in God’s name, which denounces wine and gambling but promises wine in heaven (47:16) and gambles this world for a heaven whose pleasures would be damnable on earth.67

There is a chiasmus here. So far as wine goes, Kathryn Kueny’s study of the semiotics of wine in Islam, blames a deep ambiguity in the nature of wine. She finds a cultural ambivalence that she traces to the physiology and phenomenology of intoxication.68 But this may be to describe the effect rather than name its cause. For to speak of an ambiguity is already to presume an ambivalence. And the account is also awfully general. Many cultures celebrate or condemn, regulate or restrict wine and other intoxicants, often simultaneously. The distinctive Islamic response is colored by the role of wine in pre-Islamic Arab culture, the ethos of the tavern and wine garden and the values they fostered, values that Arabic poetry will articulate well into the Islamic age and that the laws and discourse of Islam will both react against and appropriate.

Wine, to the pre-Islamic poets, was “red as the blood of sacrifice.”69 But just as these poets did not balk at appropriating sacred images to their secular purpose, when they boasted their manly strength, love of pleasure, dogged determination, bitter but unbending resolution before the blows of fate and the threat of oblivion, so the Prophet did not hesitate to use their sensuous imagery for his own higher and more ordered, if more didactic purpose.

Following in the footsteps of Mary Douglas, Kueny notes that the Qurān treats wine and other intoxicants not only as a threat but as a blessing and a sign of grace.70 On Judgment Day, nurslings will be forgotten, babes aborted, men will seem drunk.71 But the wine so freely passed and poured in the gardens of the Qurānic paradise, does not intoxicate or inebriate.72 It does not cloud the mind or arouse debauched behavior. It leaves no hangover. Cooling wine becomes the emblem of heavenly bliss; and the scalding, bitter drafts reserved for the denizens of Hell become the emblem of their torments.73

As Kueny shows, the Qurānic revelations as to wine follow a progression, from the open acceptance of Sura 16 (v. 67), to the announcement that wine and gambling hold both sin and benefit, “but the sin is greater than their profit” (2:220), to the demand that believers turn out sober for prayer (4:43), to the admonition to shun wine and gambling as satanic abominations, barriers to felicity (5:90–91).74 The adīth knows that wine was not always forbidden. It was banned at a specific juncture, as the Prophet’s companions are asked to recall in later years. But the adīth makes of the Qurānic admonition a categorical prohibition with legally defined boundary conditions, penal sanctions, and corollaries in the laws of purity and commerce.75

Wine bears a meaning in the culture the Prophet grew up in; it acquires a heightened meaning in his own discourse. That heightening assures the prominence of wine in rebellious and antinomian gestures. The ambivalence that the Qurānic verses never wholly suppress intensifies in poetry, giving impact to the Sufi poet’s wine imagery and piquancy to the ambiguities that secular poets and decadents play with after the rise of Islam.

The general problem is not unique to Islam. It is a fragment of the larger issue faced by all teachings that seek to reorient humankind toward higher values and yet make incentives or rewards, stages or phases, standards or criteria of the familiar goods that we human beings pursue. The secular trinity of pleasure, wealth, and honor raise pure and arbitrary freedom as their banner. They resist the moral monist’s recasting of freedom as responsibility and reject the reduction of autonomous sensations and excitations to mere tokens. Dialectically, some would say diabolically, secular values reassert their power. For imagination will not be still. Even God, right, and immortality must speak in sensuous and thus secular terms when rhetoric sets them before the tribunal of popular imagination. With a wizened and perennial smile, imagination will remark that its best audience, the vulgus populus, knew all along what was really good.

The intellectual and spiritual soul, which pietists and contemplatives picture as locked in earnest debate or deadly combat with the selfish ego, for which imagination speaks (and would prefer to do the thinking), begs to disagree. It knows of higher goals, prefigured in the absolutes of moral judgment—a higher freedom than arbitrary choice and capricious action, a higher joy than sensuous delights. It even knows a higher impulse in the vulgus populus, which it hopes to shape into a holy mass. Yet it is powerless to picture the goods it promises without surrendering its thoughts to its adversary, imagination.

The true focal point is God. In the prophetic imagination of Islam at its point of origin that means the reality of judgment, God’s justice sternly confronting human frailty.76 That vision casts all other sights into stark relief, exposing the worthlessness of all merely worldly concerns. On Judgment Day the oblivious and distracted will be jolted into awareness. Their gaze, in the striking image of the Qurān, will be turned about and redirected. Suddenly it will dawn on the benighted that they have bought dear and sold cheap, that temporal distractions have lost them eternal bliss and cost them eternal pain.77 In every revival of Islam and every attempt to recapture its pristine prophetic message, the same vivid contrast reemerges, between worldliness and religion—dunyā and dīn. It is Ibn ufayl’s burden when he recasts an old saw: This world and the next are “like two wives; if you make one happy you make the other miserable.”78

Radical monotheism is exclusive. It can be jealous not only of other gods but of any rival commitment. Islamic rigor and its sometime rival, sometime ally, mysticism, are vigorously, militantly theocentric. They seem to speak for the sternness of a God of perfect justice. Yet the God of monotheism is also merciful, most merciful, in the epithet most frequently invoked in Islam. His mercy is evident in His theophany, the grace of His creative act and providence, above all, in His sending prophetic admonishers to the wayward and distracted, calling them back to allegiance, allowing repentance and surrender, islām to His will.

Here we strike the root of a cardinal paradox engendered by the tension between monotheism and secularity: In Islam, as in the other faiths, this world is often imaged as an antechamber; its values are taken to serve those of the next. Time remains the enemy, as it was in the pre-Islamic poets. But they saw time as inexorable, unforgiving fate. Monotheism proposes that time can be defeated. It boasts that death itself shall die. The world cannot win the resulting contest—except by distractions. Yet transcendence too cannot win at the world’s game, except by the world’s own means. So Islamic other-worldliness, when it turns to that game, can be very worldly—seemingly must be, if the profession and propagation of Islam are to achieve their worldly goals. Muammad was a political and military as well as a religious leader, and from his immediate successors and their rivals to the “seventy odd” splinter groups of the faith—the Shīites, Khawārij, Abbāsids, Almohads, Almoravids, Mahdists, and Wahhābīs, to the followers of Khomeini, Qaddafi, and bin Laden today—every major Muslim movement in history has claimed political as well as spiritual authority, and many have used military and other coercive means to win their claims, even as they used spiritual inspiration to legitimate their temporal authority.

That jihād, construed as military contest aimed at the expansion of Islam, should be counted a central institution of Islam reflects the worldly claims made by Islam in behalf of otherworldly aims.79 Islam does seek allegiance in this world. Even the word islām bears more than a hint of triumphalism. It does connote pacification as well as submission to God’s will—peace under God’s dispensation, as the Muslim authorities understand it—much the sense that ‘peace’ had, say, in the pax Romana. Yet early in Islamic history Muslims saw that warfare is a project fraught with values inimical to those of monotheistic morals and spirituality, and a potent source of secularity.80 Faith fueled the Crusades as a project to remake the world in God’s plan, but it also fanned a lust for conquest. And later it breathed exhaustion with the carnage of crusading and bred the pacifism of the anti-crusading movement, whose spirit can still be heard in its songs in praise of another, less ambitious peace. In Arabic literature too the same piety that demands the hegemony of religion over politics bespeaks a striking rejection of conventional notions of jihād.

The Sincere Brethren of Basra picture the representatives of humanity defending man’s dominion over nature by boasting that the sons of Adam worship one God. The king of the jinn, who adjudicates the animals’s case against the humans, asks how it is, if all men worship one God, that human sects are so divided; and if all seek the same Goal, “Why then do they slay one another?” A “reflective Persian” answers: “This does not arise from faith, for ‘There is no compulsion in faith’ (Qurān 2:257); rather it comes from the institution of faith, that is from the state,” religion’s younger and lesser brother, which needs power to establish a religion, but perverts that power by making it an end in itself, seeking domination through religion. Such corruption of the spiritual impulse is all too palpable at the present moment. Blood lust, anger, envy, and fanaticism desecrate the very name of Islam, distancing where they have not eclipsed, its spiritual goal. True jihād, as the Sufis say, is self-mastery, and the really precious sacrifice is self-sacrifice.81 Here the Ikhwān sublimate Islamic militancy, in keeping with the Sufi ideal and the dictum of Pirkei Avot (4.1), “Who is a hero? He who quells his inclination.”82

Turning from thoughts of war and militancy to a more peaceful focus of literature, consider romantic love. Here is a home for the secular par excellence. For lovers create a cosmos in their coupling. They are impatient of external bounds to their attachments. Yet all monotheistic religions are active in regulating erotic relationships—with whom they shall be formed, when, how, and for what duration. The religions are guided by ideas of the worth and dignity of the human person83 but also by concerns for offspring, social structure, hygiene, and the uses and postures of the human body, created in the image of the Divine.

Poetry pursues interests of its own, the lure of sentiment and promise of impact. It celebrates the sensual, heightening and modulating the emotive impact of sensuality by setting it into dramatic conflict against risk, enmity, interference, and the most implacable of foes, time. The Arabic nasīb, the amatory opening of the pre-Islamic qaīda, was defined by its fixation on these themes. It reaches for a single limpid but complex emotion—romanticism loves emotive complexity—that of lost love, a love lost first to circumstance and ultimately to time. The Sincere Brethren catch the echo of this elegiac tone, applying it to their own spiritualizing ends, when they ascribe snatches of its poetry to the owl. He understands humankind, for

he lives in their abandoned dwelling places, decayed buildings, and dilapidated castles. Having studied the ancient ruins of mankind, he has learned the lessons of ages past. . . . He fasts by day and weeps and worships by night. Often he admonishes mankind and calls them to recollection with his laments for bygone kings and vanished nations, declaiming stately elegies. . . .

Where are the monarchs of old

Who ranged from Udhayb to Dhū Afrād?

What hope have I if the halls of Muarriq are ruined . . .

And the turreted towers of Shaddād?84

Hamadhānī, the greatest secular satirist in Arabic, pays tribute to Imru al-Qays (d. ca. 550), the poet prince and legend-laced quester to avenge his father’s murder, for creating the topos of the abandoned campsite. Abū l-Fat al-Iskandarī, Hamadhānī’s rogue hero, echoes a line of Imru al-Qays’s most famous qaīda on the opening page of the Maqāmāt: “He was the first of all those who halted to grieve at abandoned encampments. Now that’s ‘setting out early, birds still in their nests’!”85 In the “Jurjān Encounter,” Abū l-Fat, as usual in disguise, strikes a metaphor worthy of Imru al-Qays himself. The rogue, in the guise of a wretch jaded by vagabondage, recalls his babe, left at home—“Like a bangle of silver, lost and left cracked / On the lea by maids of the tribe.”

Here is a taste of the poetry of Imru al-Qays, his “Golden Ode” or Mu allaqa, one of the seven odes recognized as early as the eighth century as the finest examples of pre-Islamic poetic art and thus, in the strict sense, a pre-Islamic classic. I translate as follows:

Stop, that we three may weep, recalling a lover

At a campsite where the twisting dune falters

Between Dakhūl and aumal,

Tūdih and Miqrāt.

The traces are not yet erased

By the weaving upon it of south and north winds,

Although you can see oryx dung cross its barrens and hollows,

The tracks dotted through it like pepper grains now.

As I did on the morn of the day her tribe left,

So I stand once again,

And I watch as they load, like a colocynth splitter

From among the acacias.

And my friends standing with me,

Their beasts over against me,

Say: “Don’t perish now—

Take heart, Pull together.”

But my cure is my tears

That fall in profusion.

And what good are tears

Shed over cold tracks?

“So wept you before over little ārith’s mother,

And before that, for her neighbor, Umm Rabāb at Masal.”

When either arose the musk wafted from them

Like the breath of the East wind, pungent with cloves—

And the teardrops of longing

Streamed down my breast,

’Til the width of my swordbelt

Was wet with my tears—

“And had you not many a fair day with them—

Not least, that day that you spent in the vale of Juljul—”

And the day that I hamstrung my mount for the maidens!

Oh, the pack to be carried with my camel gone!

While they played with the meat,

Tossed the fat back and forth—

From one girl to another,

Like fringes that dangle on twisted raw silk.

And the day that I climbed into Unayza’s litter—

“And she said to you, ‘Now what! You’re making me walk!’”

And she said, with the saddle leaning off with us in it—

‘You’ve ruined my camel. You get down, Imru al-Qays—’

And I said to her, ‘Just keep on going, loosen up on the reins.

Don’t hold back one more taste of your juicy red fruit.

You’re no different from others I’ve come to with child,

Or distracted from nursing year old babes decked with charms.’

When the child cried behind her,

She would turn part way toward him.

But the part underneath me—

That part never turned.

Yet one day on the brunt of a sand slope,

She turned chaste—

Broke it off with an oath

That could not be undone.

Ah, Fāima, gently now with your teasing.

If you must cut me off, then be fair.

Loathe me if you will, but untangle our clothing.

Then shed me and go free.

Are you dazzled because

The love of you slays me,

And whatever you order

My heart must obey?

Your eyes shed no tear

But to strike my heart’s depths.

With two darts from those eyes,

I am hit fatally.

There’s an eggshell pavilion

Where none hoped for entry

That I’ve dallied in gaily

Taking unhurried pleasure—

Slipped past watchers and kinsmen,

Avid to hail the dawn of my death—

As the Pleiades showed themselves in the heavens,

Their rising unfurling a gem studded sash.

At the curtain when I entered,

She had slipped off her clothing,

All but her nightdress, ready for sleep.

‘Great God! You’re incorrigible!’

Then I lifted her up,

And I walked,

She trailing a broidered hem down behind us,

Erasing our steps.

Clear of the compound, swallowed up in the trough

Of the waves of the dune,

I drew her head to me,

Caressing the hair of her temples.

She swayed to me,

Slender of thigh and sweet ankle

Willowy, white, and not overblown,

Breasts gleaming like mirrors.

Turning, she showed me

Her full and smooth face,

Eyes like a doe’s glance,

Guarding her fawn,

And her neck like the neck of an oryx—

Not overlong,

When she gracefully shows it—

And not unadorned.

The hair wreathing her back,

Twisted up and coal black,

Plaited locks tumbling down from her comb,

Thick as dates on a palm.

Hair twisted upwards,

And curls wandering down,

Doublets and loose tresses,

Knots coming unwound.

Waist lithe as my reins,

And as supple and slender—

And a leg like papyrus

Bending down to the water.

Motes of musk scintillate

Just over her bed,

As she sleeps through the morning,

Leisurely, still undressed.

She gives with indulgence—

Fingers light as the sandworms—

Or a toothpick of tamarisk,

Never heavy or coarse.

She lights up the gloom

Like the bright candelabrum

Of a monk in his cloister,

Locked away in his prayers.

On her like would the calmest eye gaze with delight,

Pleasure turning to ardor,

As she stands, virginal,

Between girl’s bodice and woman’s—

Like the virginal white,

Fed on water unsullied,

Of a first ostrich egg,

Slightly muddled with yellow.

Let men other and blinder

Take consolement for youth.

My heart will never

Betray the passion I’ve known.

Haven’t I shouldered down enough men to attain you,

Beaten off enough foes—

Every one as attentive

And as honest as I in his blame!

O night, like a wave of the sea,

Swelling your tresses upon me

Like curtains of cares

To oppress—

I’ve told you before

When you spread your loins on me

And mounted up lazily,

Slow on my chest:

“O tedious night,

Make way for the dawn!”

But what good is dawn

When it rolls slow as you?

Ah, what a night—when each star

Seems bound by a line to Mt. Yadhbul,

And the Pleiades, tied in their stalls

By cables of linen to silent stone slabs.

The waterskin strap I’ve set on my withers,

Low down as a packhorse, for many a tribe,

Cutting through barren gulleys

Bald as any ass belly,

While the wolf howled like a wastrel,

Disconsolate, and disowned.

And I’ve said to him, ‘Wolf, why do you howl?

No one would get rich in choosing between us—

We both, when we’ve caught somewhat,

Seem apt to lose it.

He’s the loser who plows

Your furrow—Or mine.’

Setting out early,

Birds still in their nests,

I’ve been off bagging game

On a great threadbare hulk,

Charging and wheeling, headlong over heels,

Hurtling together, down from above,

Like one giant boulder

Cast down by the flood.

He’s a bay, and his backcloth slips off him

Smooth as rain from a pebble washed by the stream.

Slender but feisty, he pounds when he’s riled

Like a great copper cauldron that’s set on the boil.

Steady he flows when the game starts to dribble,

Their hooves kicking clods from the rough trodden ground.

The lad slides down off him like a garment slipped off—

A coarse load, though light, for such a fine perch.

That horse runs like a child’s top

Passed on a string

From one hand to another,

The thread stretched between.

He’s got flanks like a fawn

And legs like an ostrich.

He lopes like a wolf

And trots like a fox.

Solidly made—check his stance from behind,

His tail mounted square in the gap of his legs,

Blocking it richly,

Reaching just off the ground.

His back, when he turns,

Square as the grindstone for colocynth buds,

But smooth as the stone

Where a bride pounds her spices.

Spattered blood at his throat

Like tinctures of henna

Matting curly blond hair,

At his neck’s forward thrust—

There, just before us—

The herd of gazelles,

The females milling giddy,

Like maids in long skirts!

Turned tail, they scattered, strung out in a line,

As beads fall from the necklace

Of a swell of the tribe

When laid on too heavy by uncles on both sides.

I glued him to the leaders,

Still pursed up together—

An unbroken mass,

The stampede passed below.

So we took two at once,

A buck and a doe,

Not a drop of sweat on him

To wash down his flanks.

Then the cooks were long at it,

Browning and roasting,

Toasting and grilling,

Boiling up a quick stew.

Only later, while resting, did somebody notice,

Long after the day’s long events had been done—

He had stood there—

Our eyes could hardly embrace it—

He had stood through the evening

In clear sight, with the saddle

And bit still upon him,

Waiting to be let go

Friend, do you see the lightning out there?

Did you see how it spread,

Flickering fast as hands flash

In the blossoming stormclouds!

Or was it a hermit’s light

Flared in the valley,

Its twisted wick guttered

As he makes free with oil?

There I sat with my two friends

On the ridge between Dārij and Udhayb,

Contemplating what lay out there beyond us,

And what lay behind and ahead.

And now the storm’s signposts of lightning stood over Qaan on the right,

Its left flank mounting up over Sitar and Yadhbul,

Drenching Kutayfa as it passed—turning up on their beards

The great trunks of acacia,

Passing on to Qanān,

Sending down by its spray

The white footed goats,

By every path downward.

At Taymā not one trunk of palm was left standing—

Not one clump of reeds, unless buttressed with rocks.

And Thabīr, its great top swathed in those seas,

Was a man huddled up in a cloak of striped cloth.

By morning the peak of Mujaymir

Was snarled like a spindle—

Debris knotting its slope,

Borne by the flood and the storm,

Whose flow had flung down on the desert

The wrack of the mountain,

As a Yemeni merchant

Unbales his goods.

That morning the songbirds seemed drunk with spiced wine;

And the wild beasts drowned in the night,

Washed down in the flood from the uplands,

Looked like onions plucked up from the ground.

To the Muslim scholars who pored over the usages of the pre-Islamic poets with a view to fine tuning their glosses of the language of the Qurān, the old poetry represented the pure Arabic of desert speech86 but also the pure hubris of the desert ethos, the ethos of the Jāhiliyya, the days and ways of barbarism. And the Muslim scholars were not wrong. The Muallaqa of Imru al-Qays is a tour de force in miniature of the romantic canon: the sense of loss and destiny, the relishing of sentiment for its own sake, of erotic passion, danger, laughter, proud prowess and rejection, the thrill of sport and of risk taking for its own sake, pride of power, and projection of one’s freedom and pride onto one’s beast, the intimacy and loyalty of fellowship, the blind power of the elements as metaphor of the wild freedom the poet loves, and simultaneously, symbol and agency of the destruction he fears.87

Even the seemingly incongruous image of uprooted onions at the poem’s close finds its place in the romantic canon as a kind of secular memento mori. Writing of this bit of iconography as a pictorial device and without obvious reference to Imru al-Qays’s kindred usage, Kenneth Clark translates the image into words:

Roots and bulbs pulled up into the light give us for a moment a feeling of shame. They are pale, defenseless, unself-supporting. They have the formless character of life which has been both protected and oppressed. In the dark their slow biological gropings have been the contrary of the quick resolute movements of free creatures, bird, fish or dancer, flashing through a transparent medium, and have made them baggy, scraggy and indeterminate Looking at a group of naked figures in a Gothic painting or miniature we experience the same sensation. The bulb-like women and root-like men seem to have been dragged out of the protective darkness in which the human body had lain muffled for a thousand years.88

Clark finds in the bulbous Gothic nude an alternative tradition to Greek ideals of nudity. For Imru al-Qays, similarly, the passive, naked, vegetative images of violation with which the poem ends strikingly set off the active, sensuous forms of his hunting vignette and the lithe beauty of his lively nude word portrait. These images of vitality are made more vivid by the contrasting images of death, and tinged with a romantic poignancy by that backlighting.

Modern scholars find in pre-Islamic poetry an articulate conspectus of the values of the pre-Islamic age, emblematic of all that Islam has done and undone.89 But the Islamic preservation of that poetry means that we must also reckon with what Islam has never done: It has not erased the fascination of the secular themes of love and conquest, fight and flight. Indeed the puritan strain in Islam heightens that fascination. Romantic themes are absorbed—assimilated or unassimilated or semi-assimilated—to the spirit and ethos of Islam. Their claim to life demands it, and Islam can scarcely gainsay them.

But subtler dialectics are at work alongside the dynamism of recalcitrant motifs. For the pre-Islamic poets boasted on two levels, we have suggested: first, openly, of their prowess or vertu (muruwwa); but also, between the lines, of the art that evokes their own emotions and the emotions they choose to conjure in the minds of others. So the subtler autonomy of art joins the outspoken insouciance of romantic values—mastery of horses, hounds, women, enemies, and rivals.

Bāqillānī (d. 1013) is testy when he sets out to criticize Imru al-Qays. He thinks the Mu allaqa far overrated. Focusing on the nasīb, he judges the poetry gross, overly concrete, offensive, implausible. But his critique moves ahead, line by line, as a literary commentary must. He appeals to formal criteria: Imru al-Qays is prolix, repetitious, redundant, awkward. His language is forced. He swings wildly from elevated to low diction. His composition is disjointed, lacking in harmony, or even coherence. His thoughts are inconsistent; his style, unrefined. He pads his lines reaching for rhythms, adds details to no seeming purpose, undercuts his own claims with faulty transitions, antitheses, anticlimaxes. His images are commonplace, even vulgar or cheap; his wording, plain, weak, at times even effeminate, rarely original.90

Bāqillānī does not spare Imru al-Qays’s morals. He exploits the poet’s self-betrayal while blaming his ill judgment in exposing himself: “His habit of depraving women need not imply their attachment to him . . . on the contrary, it should entail that they are repelled . . . by his levity, foul habits and base doings. He is so openly obscene that the noble minded would loathe the like of him and scorn even to speak his name. . . . Everything that he says of himself makes him contemptible, foolish, and indecent, and were better left unsaid.”91 Yet Imru al-Qays knows his own charm. His art may seem crude to Bāqillānī; his “line” may sound trite as well. Still, he did not seem to want for lovers, before and after time overtook him.

Bāqillānī is an Asharite theologian and a fighter, the author of our oldest fully extant handbook of Muslim theological polemics (K. al-Tamhīd). His critique of Imru al-Qays belongs to another classic work of his, on the Inimitability of the Qurān. His aim is to show how God’s prose outstrips the overesteemed secular poetry whose standard bearer is the Mu allaqa of Imru al-Qays. Bāqillānī knows that he cannot destroy Imru al-Qays’s poetic authority simply by attacking his morals—even from the high ground lent him by the Qurānic condemnation of adultery, along with theft and murder (25:68, 60:12; cf. 24:2–3, 17:32). He must tackle the poet as a poet. His aesthetic is no more congruent than his morals with that of Imru al-Qays. His is a different age with a markedly different sensibility. He looks for a seamless continuity in the ancient ode, which he surprisingly does find in the sacred text. That appraisal rests in part on love of the well-remembered scriptural verses, in part on the Asharite image of the Qurān as an eternal, cosmic reality. But the appeal is to continuity, ultimately an aesthetic category.

The dialectics of the polemic force this resort to literary standards. To discredit the poetry, Bāqillānī must undercut its claims to originality, concision, authenticity, and charm. He will play off Imru al-Qays against the poets of his own day and even offer the old roué pointers on the proper way to write seductively, without loss of dignity (ad v. 17). He cannot undercut the poem without quoting and glossing it in extenso, acknowledging its fine points, and touring its images and effects, whether charming or disconcerting. But in this he succumbs to the secular subtext, the autonomy of the poet. Morally, he judges Imru al-Qays as his post of qāī would suggest.92 Aesthetically, he judges harshly, unfairly, but by standards that poetry itself projects, not excluding the vividly self-proclaimed standards of Imru al-Qays’s celebrated ode. Here dīn, the faith, bows to dunyā, the world. Almost losing sight of his chosen aim of using secular poetry to show off the inimitable art of revelation, Bāqillānī puts the Qurān to work in behalf of literary criticism, citing one of the sacred verses—each of which is called a portent by the faithful—to expose a flaw in Imru al-Qays’s diction.93

Transformed as it was by the coming of Islam, Arabic love poetry did not disappear. In some ways it transformed Islam, even from the outset. For a faith that would call young men to lay down their lives battling in God’s path needs more to offer than the seeming abstraction of peace within the Absolute.94 Muammad painted pleasure gardens, running with wine and water, milk and honey, as a reward for his warriors (Qurān 47:15). From the start these were symbols (amthāl—see 14:24, 16:75, 30:58, 60:10–11, 2:26, 29:43); but symbols, as poets have known at least since the earliest tales of Pygmalion, can come to life and captivate even their creators.

The perfect complement to the heavenly gardens and lush rivers were the fair, dark-eyed maidens, who, as tradition elaborated the theme, will welcome fallen warriors, and all the faithful men of Islam, with the embrace of long awaited true loves. The ūr or houris, promised as mistresses, appear in the Qurān beginning in the Meccan period, (Qurān 44:54, 52:20, 56:10–40). Faithful women receive no male counterpart. For symbols always have an audience implicit. The ūr are complaisant virgins with swelling breasts, like of age (to their husbands, thirty-three, the age of Jesus at his death). Their maidenhead is constantly renewed, tradition adds. Āisha, the prophet’s witty wife and erstwhile child bride, is said to have groaned on hearing this last, but she was reassured that in Paradise there will be no pain. The Qurānic litany, punctuated by the refrain: “Which of your Lord’s favors do ye call a lie!” sets the scene elegantly: “Two gardens . . . of spreading branches . . . in them two fountains plashing . . . with every kind of fruit in pairs . . . lying on couches cushioned in brocaded silk, the fruit of both gardens near to hand. . . . And there maidens of downcast glance, untouched by man or jinn . . . like jacinth or coral. . . . Is the reward of goodness aught but good? (Qurān 55:46–60, cf. 62–77).

The maidens are prizes. They are called rewards—objects of ultimate conquest.95 But they are made of dream stuff. Shākir b. Muslim describes their welcome, holding themselves out before each faithful arrival: “How I’ve longed for you!” When they speak, as they do in the traditions, they laughingly compare themselves to mere earthly wives.96 In Ibn Wahb (743–813) the houri chides: “Wretched man, why did you not forswear such loves as these, that compared to mine last but a night or two.”97 How can mere reality compete with fantasy?

The perfection of the houris grows hyperbolic in tradition: Formed of saffron, amber, musk, or camphor, with skin so fair it is transparent, the paradisaical maidens are adorned with jewels. Their pavilions, each hollowed from a single pearl, house seventy beds and seventy couches. Jesus has a hundred houris at his disposal. Men will enjoy their houris as often as they have done good deeds, or as many times as the days they have fasted in Ramaān. Thus the adīth: “A martyr has six privileges with God: He is forgiven his sins on the shedding of the first drop of his blood; he is shown his place in paradise; he is redeemed from the torments of the grave; he is made secure from the fear of hell and a crown of glory is placed on his head, of which one ruby is worth more than the world and all that is in it; he will marry seventy-two of the ūrīs with black eyes; and his intercession will be accepted for seventy of his kinsmen.”98

As the Prophet matures, the ūr recede into the background Qurānically, displaced in the later sūrahs (2:23, 3:13, 4:60, 13:23, 36:56, 43:70) by the beatified wives of the elect. But they do not fade from popular imagination or the religiosity that responds to the longings of that imagination. Since they both answer and displace an earthly sensuality, the ūr naturally take on many of its tonalities. Accordingly, as Charles Wendell argued, one does not understand the houris by searching for foreign “influences.” The key, rather, is in the adīth attributing to the Prophet the self-revelatory words: “I am the most Arab among you.” Following the lead of Josef Horovitz, Wendell shows that the white complexion of the ūr is described in the same terms that pre-Islamic poetry applied to the beloved. Their goblets and brocades are borrowed from the song girls and cup bearers of the old poems of wine and love. The fair skinned and beautiful attendants that once moved gracefully among the pleasure gardens of the Mu allaqāt and Mufaaliyyāt have slipped quietly into the Qurānic paradise.99

The welcome that the houris offer their battle-scarred lovers100 reveals the vehicle of that transformation: The risk and energy of battle have been sacralized, and so has its reward-now universal, but still sensual. A poetic convention has become an eschatological promise and, in time, a theological dogma, complete with its own balkafa, fleshing out the cosmography of Islam. Ulysses’ long awaited embrace with Penelope, the peaceful climax of the tumultuous dangers of the Odyssey,101 is transfigured into a moral expectation for every faithful follower of the Prophet. But it is no longer the beleaguered wife who waits but a full-bosomed virgin, who emerges into reality from the avowed symbolism of revelation (Qurān 47:3, 15; 14:18, 26). The image holds sway by the sheer power of its beauty, as though this were a pagan theodicy, an oasis Valhalla and not a promise from the moral emissary of the One God.

The interplay of secularity with spirit grows more complex. For in Sufism the heavenly beloved, who has long awaited the release of her mortal hero from the embrace of his worldly love, becomes an archetype of the mystic’s goal, a metaphysical persona who guides the soul—eternal, universal, yet his alone. Asín finds here the antecedent of Dante’s Beatrice. In the Epistle of Forgiveness, a version of the heavenly journey of the Prophet, written “with a touch of irony so delicate as to be almost imperceptible,” the blind poet Abū l-Alā al-Maarrī “censures the severity of the moralists as contrasted with God’s infinite mercy.” Abū l-Alā “seeks to show with literary skill that many of the libertine and even pagan poets, who finally repented, were pardoned and received into paradise.” The celestial maiden sent by God to welcome the weary wayfarer at the gates is the beloved of Imru al-Qays!102 In Ibn Arabī the maidenly idée fixe remains powerfully erotic.103 And for many Sufis the erotic becomes not the mere symbol but (as it was in Plato) the paradigm of that love by which the mystic yearns toward the divine.

Such love, with its delectable confusion of heavenly and terrestrial eros, sets a second star in the firmament, paired with the one star by which faith offers to guide one’s course. Does the earthly erotic merely hint of divine love? Or is it somehow constitutive? Mystics may hang themselves on this ambiguity, and poets may relish it. So three topoi emerge: divine love symbolized by the earthly erotic, divine love subsumed or consumed in earthly eros, and a quasi-antinomian play on the ambiguity.104

Similarly, Islamic wine poems, like the corresponding paintings, may be allegories of divine intoxication, evoked as a forbidden worldly taste. But they may be subtle toyings with ambiguity. Or they may be mere wine poems, none too sublimated celebrations of the pleasures of the vine, now touched with an air of rebellion against the stringencies of Islam. Ibn al-Fārid’s famous khamriyya figures the ‘obligatory’ joys of mystic union on the illicit joys of wine, echoing the antinomian wine poems of Abu Nuwās (747–893)—who played in turn with religious themes in his secular poetry.105 As the literature expands and the topoi rigidify, symbolism sometimes rests in the eye of the beholder. But even when the intent is clearly spiritual, it is hard to keep some eyes from straying from the higher sense to the image itself, or to the artistic act of symbolization.

The mystic poets of Islam move beyond the secular fascination with the play of ambiguity and the titillation of a sensuous or willful rebellion. Many promote confusion of erotic and spiritual intentions as a subjective correlative to the pantheistic confusion of identities, human and divine, that is the great theme of their work. Their aim is to evoke that intoxicated state, beyond restraint, where ecstasy connotes union.

But Muslim purists typically abhor the erotic figuring of the divine. Cautious, if not adamant against mystic intoxication and its poetic devices, they quash its antinomian ambiguities by making love verses of their own. Their literary celebrations of love are sequined with rhyme, meter, and other decorations whose appeal is formal, aesthetic, and often sensual. The aim is to fight fire with fire, secular love against the mystic erotic confusions that supply the language of pantheistic libertinage. The resulting art and inquiries may be secular in manner and matter. But the motive is religious: the removal of all confusion between the sacred and the profane.

Thus among the celebrants of secular love we find Ibm azm of Cordoba (994–1064), poet, historian, jurist, author of the first systematic work in Arabic (or, it is said, in any language) on comparative theology. Widely recognized as one of the most original minds of medieval Islam, Ibm azm was clearly one of the most loyal.106 He codified Ibn Dāūd’s āhirī (literalist) doctrine of Islamic law and applied it systematically in the religious sciences. The son of a wazīr at the Umayyad court, he was raised among court and harem intrigues and saw the fall of his father’s party’s fortunes, exile and imprisonment in the legitimist cause, banishment, military service as wazīr to Abd al-Ramān IV, capture and release, an interlude of writing, enthronement of a bosom friend as Abd al-Ramān V, a brief new term as wazīr, the assassination of his patron, further imprisonment, a third stint as wazīr under Mutadd, the ultimately deposed last Umayyad caliph of Cordoba, a ten-year refuge in Majorca, and a long and stormy maturity of polemical scholarship.

Attacking Mālikī jurists as time servers and the Abbādids of Seville as usurpers, Ibn azm was banned from teaching regular classes but continued to take disciples brave enough to befriend him. At his death he left some four hundred of his own works to his son. Like other Muslim literalists, he was suspicious of reason.107 He criticized even the idea of logical impossibility, arguing that human notions of logic are subjective—and, just that, merely human notions, dependent on discursive thinking and the fragile thread of memory. His anticipations of Descartes’ and Kant’s criticisms of the faith of naive rationalism rest on a limpid yet rambunctious religious faith: What is absolute is neither nature nor the mind of man but God alone, a sheer, commanding will. It is the same faith that makes Ibn azm a fountainhead of the tradition of courtly love in his celebrated Neckring of the Dove (awq al-amāma), written apparently in the 1020s at Jativa after his release from capture in the battle for Abd al-Ramān IV before Granada.108

The book is an essay on love—its signs and symptoms, phases, feelings, stratagems and changes—the gamut of romantic courtship, with its sighs and glances, loyalties and betrayals, secrets, hints, adversaries, trysts, triumphs, and disappointments. There are chapters on love at first sight, love letters, persons who fell in love while asleep and others who fell in love only after long acquaintance. The enemies of love include the Reproacher, the Slanderer, and the Spy. The work ends with a promised exaltation of continence and exhortation against sin. But every phase of love is lovingly described and recapitulated in poetry from the author’s own diwān. Continence, for Ibn azm, is not mere detachment but the hard-won renunciation of those who have known and pursued love avidly, using every device of a worldly courtship and experiencing every emotional nuance and twinge of grief, separation, union, and forgetting, sensations cherished in reflection and canonized in art, as they were in anticipation.

Of the romantic and poetic values enunciated in Ibn azm’s “delicate anatomy of chivalrous love,” Gibb remarks: “It is strange that it was this same Ibn azm who, belonging to the narrowest school of Islamic theology, devoted much of the rest of his life to bitter attacks on his theological opponents; the sharpness of his tongue, which became proverbially linked with the sword of the tyrant al-Hajjāj, eventually forced him to give up political life and brought about his practical excommunication.”109 Von Grunebaum credits this curious collocation to the richness of the Islamic world and the versatility of its polymath authors.110 But an explanatory hypothesis is perhaps less circular: Ibn azm offers secular love in place of the sublimated and unsublimated eroticism of the mystics. To those who found a spiritual meaning in erotic longings, Ibn azm offers a naturalistic alternative. This too may spiritualize love, by promoting courtliness. But the goal is to keep spirituality clear of sublimated emotions and theology clear of the metaphysics that artful theosophists and poets fathered upon those emotions—the monistic metaphysics of erotic mysticism. Love wins autonomy here not despite a puritan sensibility but at its behest.

Ibn azm himself labels The Neckring a secular exercise, calling it a recreation licensed by the sacred permission and encouragement of purely playful pastimes. He writes (after suitable isnāds): Abū l-Dardā said, “Recreate your souls with a little vanity, the better to hold fast the truth.” “A righteous and well approved father declared, ‘The man who has never known how to comport himself as a cavalier will never know true piety.’” The Prophet himself said, “Rest your souls from time to time; they rust the same as steel does.”111 Here Islamic legalism and traditionalism declare their distance from the God-intoxicated excesses of those Sufis who claim to make God all yet seem in the same breath to wish to make man God and to throw over the traces of moral reserve, piety, and traditional belief and practice.

But Ibn azm uses a lateral approach, not a frontal attack like Bāqillānī’s. The key words in each line of one of the erotic mystic poems of Ibn al-Fārid might as well be chapter headings for Ibn azm: separation, reunion, loneliness, disquiet, anguish, memory, recollection, yearning, passion, joy, conquest, visitation.112 Ibn al-Fāri may echo the desert poets and their imitators, even borrowing almost every one of Mutanabbī’s rhyme words in one composition,113 but Ibn azm scorns the old poetry. Appealing to urbanity and courtly sophistication, he dismisses Imru al-Qays and his ilk in tones of literary ennui: “Spare me those tales of Bedouins, and of lovers of long ago! Their ways were not our ways, and the stories told of them are too numerous in any case. It is not my practice to wear out anybody’s riding beast but my own. I am not one of those who deck themselves out in borrowed plumes.”114

Ibn azm’s strategy, rooted in āhirīte theory is pursued by the later anbalites, especially the school of Ibn Taymiyya. For the āhiriyya were early exponents of secular love, and Ibn Taymiyya’s followers expand his vehement opposition to monistic mysticism and mystical eroticism into a whole library of loving elaborations of the autonomous sensibilities of the erotic. All of their topoi are prefigured in Ibn Hazm.

Ibn Dāūd of Ifahān (868–909), the son and successor of the founder of the āhiriyya was a systematic and rational (at times even permissive) opponent of all reliance on human reason in elaborating Islamic law.115 He stridently opposed pantheistic mysticism and was a signatory to the fatwa that led in time to the execution (in 922) of al-allāj, the mystic who had scandalously proclaimed Anā al-aqq, “I am the Truth.” Ibn Dāūd was also the first Muslim to convey a tradition (on the authority of his father) ascribing to the Prophet the romantically appealing notion of martyrdom for love: “He who loves and keeps his secret, remaining chaste and forbearing, will be pardoned by God and consigned to Paradise.”

Ill when he related this adīth, Ibn Dāūd died, soon after, of his own concealed love for the youth to whom he had dedicated his magnum opus. So he reportedly confessed on his deathbed.116 Passionate debate swirled for generations among the jurists and theologians around the story of his death and the figure of the martyr of love. But the topos had a much longer afterlife. For the new adīth alloyed chastity with yearning and death. In the theme of unconsummated and consuming love the poetic literalists of Islam, by fusing piety with pathos, had forged a perennial prick to romantic delight, the all-too-medieval literary convention of Platonic love.

Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), as we mentioned in our introduction, was a leader of Muslim resistance to the Mongol invasion. An ardent ritualist, he sought to curtail the use of hashish, holding it an intoxicant, despite the seeming silence of the Sharīa on the subject, and he combated arbitrary use of the formula of triple (i.e., absolute) divorce as an abuse of the Law’s intent. His strident antagonism to the quest for mystical union and the Sufi cult of saints makes him the godfather of all Islamic purists who find sensuality in Sufi dhikrs and fear pantheism in Sufi meditations. But it also made him godfather to the anbalite tradition of secular love.

Sufi leaders repaid Ibn Taymiyya’s bitter enmity in kind and saw to it that he was persecuted.117 He died imprisoned for his violent opposition to Sufi beliefs and practices. Monism and pantheism were among his chief charges against the mystics. They in turn accused him of corporealism. But he claimed to oppose both anthropomorphism (tashbīh) and abstractionism (ta īl) in theology. He took refuge in saying that he described God as He described Himself in His Book. The author of a lost refutation of Ibn Tūmart, the founder of the Almohad movement, and of an extant Refutation of the Logicians, Ibn Taymiyya confessed that in his youth he was swayed by the works of Ibn Arabī. But that was before he detected their insidious heretical bent.

His teachings on love strove to follow the dogma championed by Amad b. anbal (d. 855) that the dicta of the Qurān and Traditions should be accepted without inquiry or qualification (bi-lā kayf). So he opposed the Asharite endeavor to reduce God’s attribute of love to that of will. He defended love between man and God but attacked Sufi erotic monism as antinomian and ultimately blasphemous. Early Muslim mystics had struggled with the idea that only God is worthy of human love, and Ibn Arabī had suggested that human passion is of a piece with mystic love. But Ibn Taymiyya argued that human love is loyal and obedient only when it knows (as Aristotle might have said) its object, its means, motives, and occasions. There are different kinds of love, and the faithful should know better than to confuse wife with sister, or the love of God with eros.118 The secularization of human love was a natural corollary of Ibn Taymiyya’s position, and his disciples vividly delineate and go on to celebrate human love, aiming, in the first instance, to clear the mind of the moral and spiritual confusions retailed by the poets and the apologists of Sufi inebriation.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1272–1350), Ibn Taymiyya’s principal disciple for sixteen years, accompanied him through his imprisonments and tortures. During the master’s final imprisonment, both men wrote books, conversed, and prayed to keep up their courage. The disciple’s Rawdat al-Muibbīn, The Lovers’ Garden, is a thoroughgoing exposition of secular love, exploring divine love as well, but dismissing mystical eroticism. “Prolific but sensitive,” Ibn al-Qayyim—whose father had superintended the Jawziyya madrasa of Damascus and who had himself flirted with unorthodoxy in his youth—brought together his master’s anti-Asharite and antimonistic polemics with ascetic and literary themes to forge what Bell calls the “definitive and most eloquent” statement of the anbalite doctrine of love.119 Practical training in mysticism and erudition in the literary sources, emulation of Ibn Taymiyya’s legal and theological doctrines, and appreciation of his ideal of spiritual warmth (in lieu of “incarnationist” ardor or “unificationist” Schwarmerei) made Ibn al-Qayyim the ideal elaborator of his master’s approach. He knows that love belongs to God alone but vigorously refutes what he sees as the dangerous Sufi reading of that exclusivity and offers his own reconstruction of the goals and avenues of mysticism.

The Rawdat al-Muibbīn takes its outline and much of its material from The Censure of Passion by the moralist Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1200). But it reverses the censorious current, treating secular love positively—as a “Garden of Delights.” Sexual love is a legitimate facet of human experience. Its value is assured by clarity as to its distinctness from the spiritual love of God, with which it is consistently compared but never merged.120

Dropping the pedigrees of his traditions, Ibn al-Qayyim applies reasoned argument, anecdote, and entertainment single-mindedly to his task. Not that he has surrendered to the lure of philosophy or succumbed to the charms of literature. He is not a romantic. Indeed, he disapproves of Ibn Dāūd’s martyrdom to passion.121 But he sees a need to entertain as well as instruct—to instruct by entertaining. He knows that his didactic aim will fail if his work is merely didactic. He must expound the autonomous charms of human, natural love122 if he is to preserve the higher love, of God, from subsumption into a hypocrite’s rationale for sensuality or a self-deceiver’s surrogate for spiritual fulfillment.

Ibn al-Qayyim’s naturalism is vigorously anti-Platonic. He struggles against the courtly notion that ‘love is destroyed by union’ and celebrates licit unions, where love is intensified by usage—not, as in Ibn Dāūd, sanctified by abeyance. Profoundly secularized, love is now an end in itself, not a tragic triumph of obedience.123 Rather than swamp the love of God in sensuality or worse, Ibn al-Qayyim makes an ally of amorous autonomy—for the sake of Heaven.

But such purity of motive is hard to sustain. Ibn Abī ajala (1325–1375) was a Sufi but an intense admirer of Ibn Taymiyya and a virulent foe of monistic/erotic mystics like Ibn Arabī. He polished his style in a series of maqāmāt but asked to be buried with his qaīdas in praise of the Prophet. The collection echoed the style but rejected the erotic and monistic Sufism of Ibn al-Fāri. Ibn Abī ajala’s Anthology of Ardor (Diwān al-Sabāba), which collected matter from predecessors like Ibn azm and Ibn Dāūd, became one of the most widely read Islamic works on love. Its contents—dealing with chaste love, love at first sight, sleepless nights, martyrs and victims of love, love notes, rivals, jealousies, and the like—are said to have influenced Stendahl.124

Something of a latitudinarian in personal practice, Ibn Abī ajala, according to one detractor, was a Shāfiite to the Shāfiites, a anafite to the anafites, and a traditionist to the traditionists. More fairly, perhaps, he is called a anafī by rite but a anbalite in outlook. A follower of Ibn al-Qayyim, he lost the passionate balance that writer had struggled to maintain in behalf of licit union, betrayed by a sensuous eye, which his poetic tastes egged on. He was, as Bell puts it, “an amateur of delicately phrased indecencies” and delighted in verses praising the breeze that exposed the beauties of a sleeping boy by blowing aside his clothing.125 The anbalite motive persists, but innocent delights seem now to give way to guilty pleasures.

As for Marī b. Yūsuf al-Karmī (d. 1624), his reverent intellectual biography of Ibn Taymiyya is a fitting companion to his book on love. He sums up centuries of discussion by quoting all the authorities and seeking peace among the parties. The pious erotic secularists are no longer to find fault with the erotic mystics. The Sufis, by now triumphant, have become at once less threatening and more sober seeming. Latter day militants of Ibn Taymiyya’s stamp, such as the Wahhābīs of Saudi Arabia, will still oppose the Sufi cult of saints and the dhikr. But Karmī was a Hanbalite of more diplomatic cast. He accepted Ibn Dāūd’s adīth sanctifying the martyrs of love and sought to patch up the old anbalite quarrel with Ibn Arabī. Drawing heavily on his predecessors for literary material and formal structure, he quietly dropped troublesome traditions in the interest of reconciliation. Calling Muammad the “lord of lovers” and “mainstay of the enamored,” he benignly opens his discussion of love with warm endorsements of licit union. Like many of his predecessors, perhaps more than most, he seems ready to surrender to his material, which all along had been agitating for autonomy, if not control. He sees no harm in closing his treatment with a generous selection of his own verses on love.126

The exponents of literalism in love and law spotlight the androcentric cast of traditional Islamic society. Since the sunna permits four wives and unlimited concubines, there remains a sanctioned place for courtship and courtliness toward single women even among mature and married men, despite the tension between “cavalier” behavior and the more austere ideals of chastity. Further, homosexuality is a widespread concomitant of the seclusion and engrossment of women. It takes on culturally articulate forms as social barriers rigidify between the sexes, as is candidly attested by Ibn al-Nafīs (ca. 1210–1288), the traditionalist theologian and physician who discovered the minor circulation.127 Ibn al-Jawzī’s denunciations of Sufi pantheism were intimately bound up with censure of homosexuality. For Sufi sublimations on pantheistic themes were often perfused with homoerotic images. Drawing on the Hellenistic thesis of Arabic love literature that “love is an illness conveyed by a glance,” Ibn al-Jawzī’s Censure of Passion condemns the Sufi custom of gazing at the lovely faces of beardless youths (that is, disciples), whose visages, in the charged atmosphere of Sufi poetry, became visible images and apparitions of the Indwelling Godhead. Here, in Ibn al-Jawzī’s eyes, blasphemy was piled on decadence.128

Some anbalite love literature clearly seeks not just to bring the erotic imagery down to earth but also to turn the gaze toward what the conservatives saw as objects of more red-blooded interests. But boys came far more readily to hand than girls, and the shift from censure to fascination was a tempting holiday for writers, who might titillate even where they condemned. The anbalite constant, however, was the censure of Sufi pantheism.

Play, the Hunt, and the Freedom of the Dandy

We have poetry and music, clothing, wine, love and war. But what of sport, and play? The hunt was perhaps the most concerted of secular activities in classical Islamic societies, as in other medieval cultures. A rival to love, a counterpart to war, it was, as we have noted, a favorite topic in secular poetry and painting. Here was a showplace of manly skills and virtues, a place for thrill and risk, and for marvel at animal grace in the quarry and in one’s horses, hawks, and hounds. Yet, secular as it was, the hunt held an ancient religious significance, of which R. B. Serjeant found traces even in twentieth-century hunting in Hadramaut. The living evidence is seconded by ancient petroglyphs and inscriptions, the literary accounts of sacrificial customs, and the ritualized dancing and display that are still linked to the hunt. Even in the twentieth century, tribal hunters worried that some moral taint might rob them of an ibex—or that absence from the hunt might delay the rains.129 Serjeant notes the ironic self-deprecation of the South Arabian townsmen: “The artisans and petty tradesmen (masākīn), said my shaikh in Tarīm, love hunting, and in former times they were very much given to it. There was, perhaps still is, a saying amongst them, ‘The hunt is the sixth Pillar of Islam.’”130 The Sayyid ulemā voiced irritation, calling the hunt pagan and primitive. Didn’t some hunts offer propitiatory sacrifices to the jinn? Weren’t there indecent goings on, waste of resources, mingling of the sexes, abuse of animals, neglect of religious duties? The ancient pagan gods may be shrunk to sprites and spirits, but the autonomous values of the hunt continually reassert themselves: “A shout on the mountain,” one saying went, “is better than a chest full of goods at home.”131 The hunt, here, is both secular and secularized. For secularization defangs pagan beliefs and practices, softening them into customs or superstitions. But paganism is also custom given voice. And customs die hard.

Muslim princes and the wealthy squirarchy, the dihqāns of Iran and their counterparts in other lands, hunted with hawks or falcons, gazelle-hounds (salukis), cheetahs and caracal lynxes. Islamic law allowed for the ritual slaughter of captured game, making its consumption licit. The jurist al-Damīrī (1341–1405) wrote at length about the pertinent rules in his encyclopedic Life of the Animals. And the poet, secretary, physician, and astrologer Kushājim (d. ca. 961), a fixture (and master chef) at the court of the amdānid monarch Sayf al-Dawla, compiled an extensive work on hunting, incorporating many of his own poems on the subject along with goodly selections of an earlier prose work, perhaps dating to Umayyad times.

The cheetah hunt was adopted by the Lakhmid vassals of Sassanian Iran in pre-Islamic times. Among Islamic dynasties, the sport came into vogue among the Umayyads, and it is not hard to see why.132 Cheetahs are high maintenance beasts in captivity. Each generation required fresh capture in the field, since cheetahs could be bred only in the wild and must train their own young to stalk and hunt. The beasts need elaborate taming and training to hunt from horseback. But what could be more impressive than a cheetah perched on a prince’s pillion and leaping from the crupper to course a gazelle? Conspicuous waste, to use Veblen’s term, joined with virtuosity and élan to give the cheetah hunt its panache. The Abbāsid, Fāimid, and Mamluk rulers displayed cheetahs in their parades as emblems of opulence and power, and the cheetah hunt spread (among the wealthy) throughout the Muslim East, persisting down to modern times. Expenses for the requisite entourage led some afficionados into bankruptcy. But the poets (including Abū Nuwās) celebrated the cheetah’s lightning charge, and religion licensed the sport. For cheetahs do not mangle their prey, so the captured game is alāl, as long as the slaughter is reserved to the knife and the name of God is spoken as the cheetah is released. What was once an accommodation to dietary needs here becomes a bow to sport and the secular emblems of social status.

Franz Rosenthal ascribes the Islamicate interest in hashish to the love of play.133 Here too the secular declares itself. Generally taken in pill form, hashish was objectionable for its distracting effects, spiritually and materially. Yet it was sought after, perhaps for the attitude of unconcern it induced, an unfocused euphoria that mocked and often parodied pious earnestness. Hashish might seem to open doors to mystic experience, but its very use made Sufi ecstasies suspect. For, even if it could not be classed with wine, it led to permissive ways and open flouting of established norms and values.

The tension between spiritual earnestness and secular restiveness emerges more creatively in wit. Jāi (ca. 776–868/9), the great essayist, as Pellat writes

was shocked by the needlessly stiff attitude of some of his contemporaries, and from the start he set out to justify laughter, which he associated with life, and jocularity, stressing its advantages so long as it was not exaggerated, and showing that Islam was a liberal religion which in no way enforced reserve and severity; from there he went on to attack the boredom bred by most writings, which, in his opinion, were too serious, and he suggested a leavening of a little hazl [fun] in even the most severe speculations.134

But Hamadhānī, who called himself The Innovation of the Age and who poked fun at Jāi himself, among many other individuals and types, took a more frontal approach.

To give up the gods for monotheism is, after all, to give up the idea that somewhere, between the interstices of events or even at their roots, someone or some thing is peering out at us and laughing. The God of monotheism is earnest, sometimes deadly earnest, and the life laid out by monotheist culture, law, and ethics is earnest too. It has a goal and purpose. Even its tragedies have meaning, and its ironies aim at teaching us our frailty and mortality, redirecting our gaze beyond trivial, mortal concerns. Does monotheism leave no room for the absurd?

Clearly the ironies of disappointed hopes and specious pretensions can be heightened, not negated, by earnest homilies and ritual decorum. So monotheism begets satire just as paganism breeds cynicism. Indeed monotheism can breed cynicism too, as it breeds skepticism, by the very loftiness of its claims. For cynicism shrinks moral claims that look overblown in the same way that skepticism casts its shadow of doubt over all complacent claims to knowledge.

Bill Alfred used to point out how false it is to say that there is no Christian tragedy. As Faustus shows, tragedy can open no deeper pit than eternal damnation. Similarly, it is false to suppose that there is no Islamic farce, or parody, or satire.135 In every genre of epic, lyric, narrative, folktale, theater, or balladry—wherever high or low language gives liveliness to speech—there is room for mockery. The Marx Brothers knew that. The more earnest the expostulations, the deeper the sighs, the finer the sensibilities, the more ludicruous do they become when mocked.

Hamadhānī knew how to mock. He drew upon urbanity to mock rusticity even as he used the naturalness of vulgar speech, street argot, and slapstick, to mock urbanity itself. If there was serious intent in his mockery—and I do not doubt that there was—that intent defied the laws of gravity and will not be found in the handbooks of theology or tradition but in the smiles between the lines.

The maqāma was a thing of Hamadhānī’s own invention much imitated in his wake. His fifty-two surviving tales in the new genre mingle the values of poetry and prose to form a medium that seems to typify their author’s dissatisfaction with established literary conventions-not to mention the settled norms of his milieu. The tales give punch to their poetry by situating it in the narrative embrace of incident. And they naturalize the lyric, by making it an element in the action, much as modern musicals seek to naturalize their use of choreography and song.

The focal figure of Hamadhānī’s maqāmāt, Abū l-Fat al-Iskandarī, is a rogue and confidence trickster, a master of disguises, respecter of no one and nothing but verbal skill and pyrotechnic wit. The narrator, a named persona, comes to admire Abu l-Fat’s poetic brilliance and spontaneity, to imitate his tricks and vie with his virtuosity. But, of course, Abū l-Fat is inimitable. Nothing about him is constant but his inconstancy; nothing real but his roles.

The “Bishr Encounter,” the last in Hamadhānī’s collection, omits all mention of the now familiar Abū l-Fath, yet preserves a formal unity with the rest, since it is still framed by the raconteur, Īsā b. Hishām. James Monroe has shown how this maqāma forms a minuscule mock epic, violating in turn every canon of the Antar-type of heroic cycle.136 Bishr is a pragmatist about love, concupiscent rather than ethereal. He paid nothing for his bride, a slave girl; and she returns his disdain by urging him to marry his prettier cousin. Rejected by that girl’s father, he affronts the code of tribal honor by harassing her kinsmen (who are, of course, also kinsmen of his own). Setting out to capture the thousand camels that will win his new love’s hand, he slays a lion (first hamstringing his horse for balking at the lion’s sight—shades of Imru al-Qays’s camel!), then composes a love poem about his prowess and mocks heroic convention by carrying his poem not in his heart but written on his shirt, in the lion’s blood. The uncle relents, conveniently forgetting about those camels, when Bishr slays a serpent and brags unconscionably of his exploits.

A beardless youth appears on horseback and challenges Bishr to surrender his prospective father-in-law. After a suitable exchange of blood curdling insults (“shut of thee be she who shat thee!”), Bishr is roundly trounced and driven from the field, with many pricks to the kidneys. Most unchivalrously, he does give up his uncle, on condition that the youth reveal his identity. In a moment that mocks the poignancy of epic discovery, the boy announces that he is Bishr’s son. Exclaiming that he’s hardly even tied the knot and already has such a splendid son, Bishr is unceremoniously informed that the youth is his not by his bride-to-be but by the slave who had urged him to marry his cousin. But she became his bride only a day previous! Horseless, hopeless, tangled in anachronism (or other men’s wild oats) and covered with exploded conventions, Bishr swears never again to mount a noble steed or wed a fine lady. As the tale ends, he turns over the cousin who was the object of his quest, to the beardless youth.137

Pressing beyond his sound appraisal of Hamadhānī’s satirical intent, Monroe urges that Hamadhānī wrote the Maqāmāt to uphold moral values—to reject the shallowness and “false teaching” of Īsā the narrator. But that would make the ever present but usually transparent persona rather than his encounters with Iskandarī, the focus of the work and would open far more questions that it could answer: Is the heroic age yet alive for Hamadhānī? Do its values still function for him? Can one descend to parody and burlesque yet preserve the values one lampoons? Can a Muslim author parody “hadīth, sīra and the lyric” and even mock the Quran, yet escape censure, since he mocks through the mouthpiece of an unreliable narrator?

Part of Hamadhānī’s subject is falsity: the pretensions of false piety, the conventions of artificial romance—the same conventions that Cervantes will lampoon when he takes up the picaresque. Don Quixote too will renounce the false conventions of chivalry. Both he and Sancho Panza in their different ways, are profoundly honest. But Hamadhānī loves roguery and finds profound risibility in stupidity. His is not an earnest pen, at least not in the Maqāmāt. He does love his own virtuosity. His language, studded with the ornaments and original devices of a literary dandy, constantly calls attention to itself. It would be silly to say that he invented a new genre simply to express conventional thoughts. That could have been done in a sermon.

Hamadhānī does not simply deliver himself, because he does not deliver himself simply. His theses are unstated. His art is indirection. He plays on the foibles that he pinions. But his purpose is as much in the play as in the pinioning. His literary aim is not moral teaching, which he does not readily distinguish from moralism. But neither is he displaying mere verbal agility and erudition. That could be done in courtly rescripts, or a dictionary.

Hamadhānī uses language and uses it to effect. It is not his subject. His praise is sincere when he says of Imru al-Qays: “He gave us his horse, point for point.” That is a fact not to be denied, even though it comes from the mouth of the chameleon Iskandarī. Mentioning Imru al-Qays at the climax of the first Maqāma, the “Poesy Encounter” is no accident but a way of saluting literary values that the Maqāmāt will revisit. Hamadhānī is claiming a heritage and setting forth some purtenant values as well: originality in art, deviltry in morals, verbal power and precision.

The “Poesy Maqāma” is an homage, almost a dedication. But it is also a challenge and a melancholy admission—Shaw addressing Shakespeare through a puppet play. One cannot rival originality by emulation. New and more credible settings must be found for the lyric voice. The fluid, sinuous, and mobile prose that was the new toy of the Arabic secretarial class will afford the nest of words in which a new poetry may find its place, just as the urban environment will offer cover and a setting for a new kind of rogue. Mimicry of the surviving remnants of desert poesy, the lyric or elegiac qaīda, rings false and hollow in the city streets. New themes are needed. We already have Imru al-Qays—his horse, his girls, his hunts. There is not much more to tell there—but so much more to life’s twists, encounters, and surprises, the delicately situated conflicts of emotion, between embarrassed honor and angry impatience, between chastened frivolity and astonished discovery, between foolish generosity and sagacious connoisseurship. All of these and many more colorations and collocations of sense and emotion—as vivid as the particolored silks of the young Īsā’s dandy friends—are variations and elaborations of Imru al-Qays’s single theme, the classic dandy’s theme: of time’s passage, the clash of reality with appearance, and the victory that nature gives to time, but appearance, to art.

Time, as in Imru al-Qays, remains the enemy, destroying appearances and pleasures. Yet art strikes back, through laughter. Hence Abū l-Fat’s disguises and his spurious stories about his origins, present circumstances and future plans. Repeatedly he justifies his japes as a kind of revenge against time for the tricks it has played on him. His changes of role, posture, and language pass him through all the classes of men and every locale familiar and exotic to Hamadhānī’s readers. The satiric imp becomes in turn the type of every overserious or outrageous figure from the imām in the mosque and preacher in the rostrum to the vagabond pauper, ghāzī, doomsayer, catchpenny beggar, and extravagant conman. His changes bespeak the instability of time, that is, of fate and fortune, social circumstance, mores, opinions and expectations. In one of the many moments of discovery in which he is found out, now pretending to a noble Qurashite birth and breeding, Abū l-Fat tosses off words that would have the ring of truth for many of Hamadhānī’s readers, on the ethnic pretenses of their neighbors:

God’s creatures may take on many a form–

Their mingled lives, often protean.

By night they are Arabs,

Clear of birth and of blood

By day they’ve become Nabataean!138

A Nabataean, it helps to know, was a denizen of Iraq or Syria before the Muslim conquest—stereotypically, a peasant. The barb is aimed at pretensions to Arab birth and a lineage in the Prophet’s own tribe. Are the mawālī really Arabs? Is Islam itself a new disguise?139

Hamadhānī’s Maqāmāt are a sensuous genre, and the sensuous is the root and branch of aestheticism. But there is more. As Richard Ellmann remarks à propos Oscar Wilde:

Partly because he was himself leading a secret life as a homosexual, Wilde was keenly alive to the disparity between semblance and reality. He saw hypocrisy in various forms around him, as well as in himself, and particularly scorned those who pretended to pity and morality out of a desire to conform. One had, he thought, a duty to oneself as well as to others: the duty of self-discovery and self-expression. This duty made necessary, among other things, the loss of innocence, for innocence too long maintained could be as dangerous as guilt.140

It was Wilde, as Ellmann reminds us, who put in the mouth of Miss Prism (misprision) the description of her lost novel: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” And to the innocent Cecily Cardew he assigned the lines: “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

Sensualism is the visible counterpart of the dandy’s love of discovery and exposé, wit, surface, the play of appearances with realities, and display of appearances as realities. And aestheticism is the meeting ground of sensuality with artifice. Wickedness is delicious in its mouth, and the power of art is especially wicked and delicious. When Īsā describes the making of halva, Hamadhānī knows that he can make the reader’s mouth water, even now, just as if we were there in the marketplace, alongside Iskandarī’s rustic dupe, watching and taking it all in as Īsā spells out his order. This is the poetry of complicity. Its frisson is the Gotcha! of Baudelaire, when he catches the reader peeking in at the window of his poetry and crows, then coos: “Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère.”

When Abū l-Fat buggers a burglar or Īsā himself runs through a highwayman, we too are expected to participate.141 The response, visceral, even involuntary, is Hamadhānī’s literary triumph. Innovative, arcane and exotic language, unexpected turns of phrase, rhyme, inversion, anagram, barbed wit and evocative meter are the jeweled movement of his art, which celebrates not just the pungency of the sensate but its own command of emotions and sensations elicited by a deftly drawn objective correlative. In few words, intricately disposed, Hamadhānī tells his tale, limning the contexts that generate the emotive punch and set up the poetic punch line.

When Abū l-Fat is recognized as the teller of the tale in the Ruāfa Encounter, Īsā asks him to explain one of his more elegant and obscure conceits. The niceties of language are at least as worthy of note as the ribald yarn. Those niceties—figures of speech and thought, tricks of syntax, prosody and pattern—are the pivot points of Hamadhānī’s art. He revels in language just as his young men revel in their silks. Like his fictive narrator Īsā b. Hishām, he would travel far “to snare the rare and wild elusive word.” For that word, like his place-dropping and local color, is an emblem of his freedom, and of the skill by which that freedom is won.

Here, then, as with other dandies, artful expression betokens more than just itself. Like all satirists Hamadhānī is a critic. Like all parodists he is something of a cynic.142 But his criticism runs wider than disapproval of objects already (even officially) discountenanced. Where would be the novelty in that? What Hamadhānī is about is a transvaluation of sorts. His situations allow him to make explicit what everyone already knows but lacks the words or face to say—what oft was thought, but ne’er so openly expressed?143 Transvaluation is a mark of decadence and ennui of the sort that we associate with fin de siècle culture. Thus Abū Nuwās had a slave boy that he nicknamed “ugly” because of his beauty.144 But it is not just the libertines who are tired of the old values and not just the decadent poets who express such ennui. The values themselves may be tired, and the rationales that support them may be growing thin, all but transparent. That leaves room for a Hamadhānī, whose words cut a swath that is both corruptive and cleansing.

Hamadhānī’s target is not all values at once, of course. There must always be a standpoint, ground to push off from. But Hamadhānī has learned the cynics’ and the skeptics’ trick of shifting ground, switching his side drape, lampooning this in terms of that, and that in terms of the other. Only formal virtues like candor are relatively resistant to such testing. Hypocrisy is the most vulnerable of targets, since it pronounces its own denunciation and awaits only exposure. Candor presents a slender target, since it claims only to be what it is and say what it sees. It gains shock value, sometimes taken for verisimilitude, in part from the simple impact of saying what polite convention cannot say. Hence an author’s use of sage fools, sober madmen, and precocious children. But the true cynic, although he uses candor, has no use for it when its work is done. Like the mystic who pulls up his ladder after him or the skeptic who renounces a dogmatic skepticism, the cynic will blow up his final charge, if he can, since candor is uncomfortably close to earnestness, which he lampoons, and to hypocrisy, which doth protest too much.

Hamadhānī has just the out he needs, writing in fictions, repeating hearsay, using a persona whose witness proves repeatedly unreliable. So the tissue of fictions falls, leaving—not mere entertainment but also not the unquestioned words of God in the Qurān or the sanctified authority of adīth.145 Instead, what remains in the mouth is the bittersweet taste of impostures exposed, and the clean feeling that no new imposition has been set up in their place. As with Boccaccio, this barn cleaning leaves behind a sense of openness, of free access to sensate and expressive values that jostle with their chaster rivals, without apology or guilt.146 Like Freud, Hamadhānī purges built up anxieties, the products and byproducts of conflicts among values. But his chosen task is more like Nietzsche’s, more diagnostic than therapeutic. He would rather mock than weep, and rather laugh than treat—although laughter is a kind of therapy.

Hamadhānī presses further than Freud the conflicts among values in the culture he surveys. But drawing back from earnestness saves him from the madness that overtook Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche he faces a formidable task in the use of language. For one cannot simply tell people that good is not as good as they suppose, or that bad can have a goodness to it. One can reverse the words, of course, keeping connotations as denotations, as in the pop lyric “Bad, bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town . . .” But confusions are hard to avoid if this sort of thing is carried too far, and superficiality results if things are kept too general.

One cannot simply preach the beauty and nobility of evil or the insipidity of good. It’s no good to be doctrinaire about rejecting dogmatism or to charge disciples to emulate one’s moral or intellectual audacity and independence. To challenge moral usage is to explode clichés. So it needs poetry–as Rimbaud and Baudelaire understood. Or it calls for fiction, or dramatic writing, where inner voices are allowed to speak, dramatic irony strips away convention, and rhetoric slips off its clothes and slips under the covers to persuade by means of greater immediacy than open argument affords.

In Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle we meet a little boy whose ultramodern house, with its aluminum fountain and stainless steel gate typify the rigidity and sterility of his family’s existence. Only an eccentric uncle who inhabits a cockeyed garret perched precariously above the rooftops of Paris offers glimpses of another kind of life. The boy is fed in an antiseptic kitchen by a mother who wears surgical gloves to prepare his toast and autoclaves his cutlery as the child sits down to eat alone. But occasionally the boy takes his bicycle and rides to the edge of town or accompanies his uncle on mad jaunts. His great joy is to spend his pocket change on enormous pastries, covered with sugar and horrid red jam, purchased from a greasy pastryman who is constantly rubbing his hands on his filthy apron. After eating his pastry on a hillside overlooking the suburban street, the little boy conceals himself carefully and with equal gusto catapults good sized rocks at passersby, skillfully ricocheting the projectiles so as to disguise their line of flight but still give a good klonk to the pedestrians, whose bowlers are unfailingly knocked off. The climax comes when the little boy’s father (who manufactures plastic tubing and commutes to work in a slow-paced, multilane ballet) agrees to accompany him on one of his jaunts. The film ends with the two, child and industrialist, joyously practicing the deviltry of the catapult on the unsuspecting respectable folk who pass below. This perfect paradigm of innocent mischief finds its types in Till Eulenspiegel and Mullah Nasruddin, the Trickster figures of myth and fable, Loki and his ilk, the confidence men of The Sting, and the vast body of popular literature it follows.

Ulysses is a trickster. His deception of Achilles and his hollow horse conspiracy are reflexes of the delight that audiences take in watching a well-turned scheme (or plot) unfold, twist and drive to its conclusion. Also a trickster is Diomedes, Ulysses’s comrade in the theft of the Palladium. Homer’s audience will delight in hearing how Diomedes duped his younger combatant Glaukos in the name of honor and half-remembered bonds of family hospitality, getting him to exchange his precious armor for a battle weary veteran’s set. And Homer himself cannot resist telling at length of the two men’s feeling overtures to one another, joining in at the punch line:

So they spoke, and both springing down from behind their horses
Gripped each other’s hands and exchanged the promise of friendship.
But Zeus the son of Kronos stole away the wits of Glaukos,
Who exchanged with Diomedes the son of Tydeus armor
Of gold for bronze, for nine oxen’s worth, the worth of a hundred.147

Northrup Frye counts force and fraud as the two chief springs of action and sources of delight in secular literature.148 Both tilt more toward evil than toward good in the scales of morality and moralism. Both are present in good measure in Hamadhānī: force as an element of the sensate; fraud, in greater measure, since its soul is wit—its language, virtuosity and false appearances, and its outcome, shock of recognition. That gives us truth discovered through exposure of impostures.149

Iskandarī enjoys deceiving others. He delights in sending up the stuffy and puffed up, and he relishes the gullibility of his dupes. Īsā b. Hishām is indeed his disciple, not so much for his parodistic sermons—to ape these would be to parody a parody and land back in the realm of the deadly serious and seriously deadly—but as the retailer of his exploits, and their occasional imitator. For it is Īsā, not Abū l-Fat, in the Baghdad Encounter, who gulls the yokel, with a specious appeal to ancient family friendship that is Homeric in antiquity, and traps the country bumpkin into paying for his dinner, and getting slapped around for the privilege. Again, in the Lion Encounter, it is Īsā who bests Abu l-Fat, with a mathematical match for the verbal skill that has stunned him so often. Iskandarī begs a dirhem. Īsā, speaking in extemporized verse, as Abū l-Fat so often does, offers him a dirhem times one, times two, times three . . . “For as long as I husband one breath.” But arithmetic is the new math in tenth-century Baghdad, and Abū l-Fat is hungry. Īsā brings the series to twenty, but Iskandarī can’t keep up with the expansion and settles for twenty loaves, leaving Īsā to conclude that “there’s no luck for the luckless.” Hamadhānī’s audience enjoys the tickle that the simple man feels when the Devil is outwitted in folktales or in fabular movies like George Burns’s Oh God, You Devil or Ingmar Bergman’s The Devil’s Eye.

Is Iskandarī the devil? Hardly. His vices and his virtues are all too human. He is a man, but a man who wants to master the human condition before it masters him. His feelings run from hunger and exhaustion with travel (which is painted as a kind of addiction150 in the Maqāmāt and so becomes a metaphor of the unyielding grip of time—Iskandarī must devour the road before it devours him), to terror at death, to delighted guile, to silly wantonness and innocent deceit—deceit made innocent by the credulity or cupidity of the deceived, or their insensate piety (as in Isfahan), or the narrator’s own joyful willingness to be bilked, out of youthful extravagance, aestheticism, high spirits, and nobility.

Iskandarī’s charm is not the heroic evil of Milton’s Satan, cosmic spite worthy of the global theater in which its action is played out. Neither is it the perverse pride that Blake finds in that figure, nobility in defeat, a worthy rival and counterweight to divine majesty. It is not the lordly arrogance of frustrated spite and spleen, renouncing vassalage yet clinging to its appanages. Rather Iskandarī’s is an impudent and all-too-human irreverence that mocks at Fate, but winks at God, as much as to expect that He would understand.

What then is there to celebrate in impishness? The answer, I am suggesting, lies in the fact that where arrogance enslaves, impudence can liberate. Hamadhānī chafes at sobriety and all that is dour. When the young revelers return from a drinking bout in Ahwāz, they are halted in their tracks by an ominous figure bearing a bier. In a fitting irony, their sour admonisher proves a fraud, the fraud, Iskandarī, who wants only to kick up his heels, and whose parting message, tossed over his shoulder, is to insist that the young men pay no attention to all that he has said. Compare, for effect, the mocking imps that scamper from beneath the great crimson palliums of the stately cardinals that stalk the stage to the strains of the Dies Irae in Leonid Massine’s choreography of Symphonie Fantastique.

The adventurer turned medicine man encountered in Sijistan is the same fraud again. His conversion story is a sham, another swindle, that pays tribute in the end only to Iskandarī’s imagination and resource. For Abū l-Fath is never a mere ufaylī, unless that means more than a mere beggar or parasite but an artful dodger, a chameleon of constantly changing wiles, whose language is as unpredictable as his disguises, whose pranks give color to what our journalists call street life. What Hamadhānī celebrates in the Maqāmāt is freedom.

The metamorphoses in Iskandarī’s appearance and seeming condition symbolize that freedom. The incongruities about his age in the diverse encounters mark it again. These are emblems of the mocker’s battle against time, the one condition that his antics can better only by belying it. Wives can be invented by the ufaylī as easily as pasts and origins. Infants can be rented for a day’s begging or cadging.151 Front money can be gulled from one pigeon for use on another. What are identities? Iskandarī is rootless, unconnected, unstable of thought and mind. But the conditions of his weakness are sources of his strength. Like the éminence grise in Diva, he lives the aesthete’s creed, not in any monkish way but by making his every act and utterance a performance and his life itself a work of artifice. He exists only in language, device, and disguise, without solid, answerable frame or substrate of fixed character. He has created complete independence out of perfect dependence. Harīrī (1054–1122), Hamadhānī’s greatest imitator, was scored for writing frivolous tales of nonexistent folk. His answer: that Abū Zayd, was no fiction but a man of flesh and blood whom he had met, preaching in a mosque.152

In inventing Abū l-Fat, Hamadhānī has set up a mocking, fun house image that is at once a caricature and a rival to Islamic piety and sobriety. Iskandarī is neither responsible nor respectable. But he is free and gay, with a mad gaiety wholly foreign to veneration or venerability. There is no humility in his abjectness and no bearing in his pride. His figure confronts Islamic gravitas with a rival vision, of insouciance. Yet, like a mummer at carnival, he relieves the more somber colorations of religion. He apes hypocrisy but also offers secular release from the absoluteness of perfect earnestness. In that sense the trickster figure does perform a sort of service to Islam. We can see why Niām al-Dīn al-Awliyā would give himself over to study of arīrī’s Maqāmāt and indeed memorize forty of them.153 For beyond satiric exposure of false piety, false bravado, or false hospitality (as in the Maīra Encounter), Hamadhānī’s Abū l-Fat raises a kind of criticism that is hard to voice internally, and perhaps impossible in the language of the law books or the rhetoric of the minbar—and yet all the more necessary for that. This is the criticism of the live option, of laughter and verismo, fantasy and whimsy, set against the high seriousness of an ideal that claims exhaustive control and comprehension of the real.

Revived and redefined in the world of the Maqāmāt are secular values recaptured from the tribal and heroic age. But the prowess of the warrior has now become Odyssean guile, and the priapism of Achilles, or Imru al-Qays, has grown rather more indiscriminate. The old enmity with time remains. But the irony that confronts time has become literary—not bookish, perhaps, but detached, focused more on the manner of expression than on its emotive matter. And it has become urbane, not merely self-deprecating, as in Imru al-Qays’ self-portrayal as a once proud hunter and lover reduced to water carrier and pack animal by his own folly, but courtly, mannered, aware of the figure one cuts in fine fabrics or fine words, sharply aware of the social milieu in which those words and fabrics may be all that is visible to announce one’s presence.

The secular values that Hamadhānī voices belong to merchants, travelers, members of the secretarial and administrative class. For clerks in his time are not the same as clerics. The mores and notions broached are much older than Islam. Hamadhānī recasts them to reflect his own sense of modernity, setting them at a sharp remove from the heroic past. Their levity tugs against Islamic gravity and leavens Islamic earnestness in ways that I think were valued by the same sort of scholars as those who preserved the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia.

The official story remains: Studies of the ancient odes met a philological need, in Qurānic exegesis. And of course no surer rationale could be offered. In the same way, Eusebius preserved the old philosophy, as a historic propaedeutic to the evangelic message. But Eusebius could not contain the intrinsic interest of his materials. And the Muslim scholars who read the ancient odes, with their celebrations of very un-Islamic values, would naturally find a philologie interest in their rare words and usages, quite apart from their exegetical applications, and could hardly fail to rise to their emotive charms as well.

So the scholars preserved and studied, imitated and reworked the ancient Arab poems in faithful service to the study of the Qurān, but also in philologie fascination, and at not without aesthetic and romantic interest. They fed and pleased an urban nostalgia for the desert life and its freedoms, passions, and pleasures, even the sufferings that were more fondly recalled from the middle distance of another age. The old life would naturally seem richer than the life of city enterprise, paperwork and piety. Piety itself seemed less than whole, if piety was all it had to offer. Like these retailers of the old poetry and the anecdotes that surrounded it, Hamadhānī too has fallen in love with language. And like them, he too engages in a construction of alternatives. But his rival world is built not on nostalgia for a lost past but on a sense of currency, wit, and bemused detachment.

Even Muammad Abduh (1849–1905), who edited the Maqāmāt (with commentary, Cairo, 1889) and bowdlerized them somewhat, removing the most scabrous bits154 but not effacing their viewpoint or their values, must have felt the need for balance that works like Hamadhānī’s can provide. Abduh would go on to serve as muftī of Egypt. He would found a college for qāīs and serve as a trustee of the Azhar. And he founded the Salafiyya movement, a pan-Islamic appeal for return to the simplicity of early Islam. For him the Maqāmāt of Hamadhānī had become a classic, just as its author had hoped it would be. And a classic it remains, perhaps because it adds a catholicity of its own to a vision already claiming to be catholic. Hamadhānī’s fellows, then, besides Imru’ al-Qays, would be Chaucer and Boccaccio, and yes, Cervantes and the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, but also Apuleius, Swift, and the Defoe of Moll Flanders and Roxana. I would draw one further comparison here, with that radical mode of Kabbalistic thought that Gershom Scholem called a pursuit of salvation through sin.155 For the paradox parallels Hamadhānī’s own irreverent and unstated thesis that there are kinds of badness that can be good.

Beneath a stereotypic ideal that ignores “the deep inner conflicts” of a life of normative piety,156 Scholem found a corresponding restiveness with legalism and intellectualism, and a resultant “licentiousness, in the most unlikely places.”157 Such findings enliven our understanding of the Middle Ages and of religious life at large. For figures like Hamadhānī, or Rāzī, or Jābir ibn Hayyān, Ibn al-Rāwandī, or Abelard do not inhabit an age of unquestioned faith. Nor is the religious life in any age a sheer passive placidity. That life has always harbored its doubts, passions, frustrations, anxieties, and inchoate yearnings, sometimes violent, sometimes moving quietly just below the surface of overt expression.

Tensions between the spiritual and the sensate the disciplined and the antinomian, are sometimes salved with magic or mysticism. Other balms, medievally and beyond, were found in art or wealth. But there was also militancy, a two-headed beast that wore its adventurist helmet in the field but found a clerical neckband at home. And there were more pacific outlets, for those whose lives were not engrossed by the sheer struggle to survive—in philosophy, scholarship, the sciences, and the nascent realms of technology best known to the alchemist. But perhaps the greatest alchemy was laughter.

Here is my rendering of one of Hamadhānī’s fifty-two Maqāmāt:

The Isfahan Encounter

The story was told us by Īsā bin Hishām: I was at Isfahān, set for travel to Rayy, determined to vanish as quick as a shadow. My every glance looked out for a convoy. Every morning I was ready to saddle. But just as the moment awaited arrived, what should I hear but the summons to prayer, a duty demanding an answer, announced as if meant just for me. So I slipped away from my comrades and fell into step with the flock, worried I might miss the caravan I was leaving, but comforted by the blessings that prayer would confer in crossing the desert’s dire waste.

I went straight to the front row and took up the position. The imām faced the prayer niche and recited the Opening—in the intonation of Hamza, drawing out every long a and pulling up short for every glottal stop, while I seethed and simmered at the thought of my caravan lost, wondering what had become of my horse.

He followed the Fātia with the Wāqia while I patiently burned, roasting and sizzling with rage, like a steak on the coals. But there was nothing for it but to suffer in silence. That is, if I didn’t intend to speak out and keep silence forever. For I knew how raw they are in that place, and there’s no cutting prayers short ’til the final salām. So I stood as I was, anchored in necessity, until the whole surah was finished and I’d lost all hope of the caravan and given up on my mount and the journey.

Then he bent his bow for prostration, with a humility and devotion that I never before had seen. Slowly he raised up his head and his hands, saying, “God hearken to him who offers His praises.” And he waited until I’d no doubts that he slept. Then he struck the ground with his right hand as he fell down in prostration, pressing his face to the floor.

Taking the chance of raising my head, I saw no way out through the rows and went back to my prostrate position, until he’d pronounced “God is great,” and we could sit up.

He rose for the second prostration and recited the Fātia and the Qāria, in a chant stretched to the length of the Judgment Hour, leaving the whole praying throng drained of spirit.

His prostrations were done. He’d confessed his faith in his beard and now turned to the right and the left to salute the two guardian spirits that seemed stuck in his jugular veins. But just as I was saying. “God’s given me the perfect moment. Escape is at hand!” up stood a man who said: “Whoever of you loves the Prophet’s companions and the House of Islam, lend an ear for a moment!”

Said Īsā bin Hishām, “I stuck to my place, protecting my character.”

Said the man: “It behooves me to speak nought but truth and bear witness to that truth alone. I have come unto you with good news from your Prophet, but I shall not disclose it until God cleanse this mosque of any despicable creature vile enough to impugn his command!”

“I saw him,” the speaker continued, “in a dream—may God bless him and keep him—like the sun shining out from the clouds, or the moon on a night of its fullness. He traveled with stars in his trail, angels lifting the train of his garment. Then he taught me a prayer, entrusted to me, to teach to this nation. I have written it on these leaves, scented with musk and khalūq, saffron and sukk, and I offer it freely to whoever requests it. But if you make good the price of the paper, I’ll not refuse you.”

Said Īsā bin Hishām: The dirhems poured forth so profusely he seemed quite bewildered. But I followed, marveling at the cunning of his con and his art in getting his living. I wanted to ask him of himself but held back, to speak with him but kept silent, pondering his eloquence in impudence, his cunning in cadging, how skillfully he caught men in his snare and how pleasingly took their money—then I caught a glimpse of him—and, of course! It was Abū l-Fath al-lskandarī.

I said, “How did you ever dream up this dodge?”

He smiled and indited:

Men are asses, ever eager

To form up into a train,

More observant of who passes

Than of what they lose or gain.

You can lead them by their noses

Through their yearning to excel,

’Til you’ve gotten what you wanted.

Then they all can go to hell!

As Carl Petry remarks, the engaging rogues idealized in picaresque entertainments are not so readily met in the annals of historians.158 The tricks and effrontery are there, of course. Ibn al-Jawzī tells of Baghdad tricksters who made their living selling rosaries to the Shīites, and clay tablets straight from the grave of Husayn.159 The Kitāb al-Maghrib relates with relish how a ajjī from Iraq told the Ikhshīd of Egypt (who used to weep at the recitation of the Qurān) of a dream message from the Prophet, which the traveler had proclaimed at the sacred Zamzam well in Mecca, commanding the release from prison of a certain financial manipulator. Trying to be hardheaded, the Ikhshīd offered the man a generous travel allowance to go back to the well and tell the Prophet that the prisoner would be released when the funds missing and owing were coughed up. But the cadger stood his ground: “I do not make jokes with the Prophet.” As he made ready to leave, the Ikhshīd hailed him back and promised the prisoner’s release.160

Even here the delight remains literary. The medieval counterpart to the police blotter shows a darker picture. Life in the underworld was precarious at best, typically vicious, and as Petry puts it, “fraught with risk of reprisal.” Crime was ugly; beggary, desperate; adultery, then as now, dangerous and destructive. Imru al-Qays knew all that. But he made light of the damage and took mournful delight in the hardships and dangers, at least in recollection. Hamadhānī works on a still more rarefied plane. But his goal, we have suggested, is more than satire or exposé.

He repeatedly juxtaposes zeal with insincerity. The knot of men gathered in the mosque in the Ruāfa Encounter have come in to get out of the sun. Their talk is not of holy things and sacred practices but of gins and confidence games. Īsā, in Isfahan, peeking out from the rows of worshipers, can scarcely raise his head. He wants only to get to Rayy, and he knows that will have to wait. He is neither as pious as the crowd, whose zeal he fears if he cannot respect it, nor as free as Abū l-Fath, whose abandon he admires, if he cannot fully emulate it. His predicament perfectly situates a central ambiguity for the cultured Muslim. For that man or woman’s culture, be it Arab, African, Chinese, or Malay, is not coextensive with Islam. But neither is it separable from the claims of Islam. Piety seems to demand a choice—between dunyā and dīn, this world and the faith. But for those who are less committed to pure deviltry than Abū l-Fath yet less zealous than the credulous mosque crowd, logic does not seem to frame the options quite so starkly.

Faithful Muslims do seek to integrate God’s service with a life that is not barren by purely human standards. But individuals differ in what they find fruitful or barren. Secularity is the island or continent where such spirits live, at least part of the time. And that land mass, large or small, is never fully submerged. For Islam, like every religion, harbors its own secular moments and spaces. It fosters secularities that are at once inimical to its claims and yet symbiotic with it. They are dependent on it but also supportive of its worldly presence and self-assertion. And they exact a price in distraction of gaze and diffusion of interests.

To the Arab princes who painted palaces with nudes or rode to hawks, or hounds or cheetahs, to the poets who celebrated the senses and emotions for their own sakes or mapped the landscape of spiritual ecstasy on the topography of the erotic, to the artists who found in figural forms a means of glorifying God and, simultaneously, in that glorying, found a means of celebrating, even titillating human aesthetic sensibilities, to the ghāzī and the philosopher who saw Islam as a way of the world and not merely a way out of it, Islamic life was more than just an occasional pious moment yet less than an all-engulfing “worldview,” a seamless blanket or “blick,” through which no light could shine unless from within and in which no discontinuities could be detected, no holes or cross-weaves, admitting alien sunshine or unruly air.

Through hierarchies of means and ends, ploys and symbolisms, a bit of compartmentalization here and a bit of humor there, Islam becomes a way of life coloring every culture reached by the Qurān and the Arabic language. In the cosmopolitan civilization that results, communities and individuals find their own tents and awnings, accommodating the sacred and the secular in various modes of coexistence, some intricately devised, some casual or haphazard, some coherent, others restive or unstable, some synthetic or creative, others vapid, stiff, or angry. Many of these shelters are such that those who have lived in their shade could find that they were experiencing something of the best of this world without being deprived of some taste of the next.