Amy Motlagh is the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature, and an associate professor of comparative literature and Middle East/South Asia studies, at UC Davis. She is the author of Burying the Beloved: Gender, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford University Press, 2012) and articles on topics including Iranian cinema, literature, and gender and race in the Iranian diaspora. She is currently at work on a manuscript called “Translating Race: A Cultural History of Racial Thinking in Modern Iran and the Diaspora.”

Born in 1921 in Shiraz, eight years before the formal abolition of slavery by Reza Shah in 1929, writer, intellectual, and translator Simin Daneshvar later acknowledged that many of her stories came out of her childhood. An important “clearing center” for the Persian Gulf slave trade, the Shiraz of Daneshvar’s childhood is most extensively memorialized in her first major novel, Savushun (1969), which is set in World War II–era Shiraz.[2] Daneshvar attended a British missionary school in Shiraz that enabled her to learn English at a very high level of competency at a time when it was not common, even for affluent Iranians, to do so. She published her first collection of short stories, Atash-e khamush (Extinguished Fire) in 1948, but later insisted that it not be reissued; she was embarrassed by this early effort. She started work as a translator and writer of occasional pieces for newspapers and radio to earn money while she was a university student, and she would continue to be a prolific translator for the duration of her life: her translations include not only literary works such as The Scarlet Letter; Cry, the Beloved Country; and The Human Comedy, but also bestselling self-help works like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. She remained interested in the implications of translation as a profession and a practice in Iran throughout her life, but perhaps her most complicated negotiation with translation was her engagement with ideas of race between an American context and an Iranian one.

Daneshvar’s first self-conscious intellectual encounters with the concept of “race” seem to have occurred during the Fulbright year she spent at Stanford University in the United States in 1952–53. Daneshvar always acknowledged the important impact the Fulbright year had on her writing, and she indeed credited one of her teachers at Stanford, Wallace Stegner (1909–93), with changing the way she wrote entirely.[3] We can see the legacy of this fellowship period and Stegner’s influence in her fiction, not just in the explicit ways she attributed to Stegner, but also in her deployment of Blackness and whiteness in the first story collection she published after her Fulbright, A City like Paradise  (Shahri chawn behesht, 1961).[4]

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison suggests the ways in which Blackness functions as a foil for white masculinity in American fiction of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.[5] For Daneshvar, the practice of racial thinking and interpretation of race in her writing may have been mediated not only through Stegner’s mentorship but also through her work as a translator. One of the first books she translated after her Fulbright year was William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (Komedi-ye ensani, 1954).[6] Although she did not translate any of Stegner’s work, she was clearly influenced by his worldview and style, and continued to seek his patronage long after her Fulbright year ended.[7] Aside from her adoption of the by-now hackneyed phrase associated with the American “program year,” “show, don’t tell,” Daneshvar continued to correspond with Stegner for many years beyond the Fulbright and clearly regarded him as an important mentor.[8] Stegner’s most famous novel of the West (Angle of Repose, 1971) was yet to come, but he was already acknowledged by this time for a multitude of writings on the American West, including Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). Among these were One Nation (1948), which generated an associated film focused on the “American Negro” section of that book and called by the same name. Shortly after Daneshvar’s Fulbright period, Stegner also contracted to work as a propagandist for what was then the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).[9]

Daneshvar would also go on to translate other American works, with Stegner’s encouragement, including The Scarlet Letter (Dagh-e nang, 1955). For Daneshvar, American literature’s predilection for the “power of blackness” that Morrison critiques in Playing in the Dark may have come to her in part through education during the Fulbright year, and in part through translation. Stegner and Saroyan were both important architects in the development of a masculine mythology of the New West, and Stegner’s work has been both celebrated and critiqued for its depiction of the American West and of white masculinity.[10]

Daneshvar’s observations in her letters to her husband, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, complicate some of the accepted views about this remarkable writer, and shed a different light on her political affiliations and impressions of coeval political movements.[11] Her engagement with race is of particular interest, not just because of contemporary debates and attention to race globally as a consequence of police brutality in the United States, but also because it has been so much overlooked in her work. The way that she saw (or didn’t see) race is notable—not because, as many Iranian scholars and scholars of Iran erroneously suggest, Iranians are effectively color blind, but because Daneshvar’s understanding of and engagement with race reflects an attempt to grapple with a different racial paradigm in the United States. There, she witnessed some of the aspects of life that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement, and later witnessed some of the major protests involved with that movement. Also, Daneshvar herself dealt in her own writing with race in ways that are at times profoundly troubling.

Unfortunately, scholars of Iran to date have also not been able to fully face the complicated ways in which Iranian intellectuals have negotiated race and the legacy of slavery in Iran, either in terms of its connections to race or in terms of the way that they viewed racial thinking and slavery in other contexts, especially in the United States. In her dissertation, Seeing Race (2018), Beeta Baghoolizadeh suggests that the move to preemptively distance and separate Iran’s history of slavery from any association with other histories of slavery was in effect an attempt to whitewash Iran’s past.[12] As Baghoolizadeh shows, this was a self-conscious national effort during the Pahlavi period, but one which continues into the present, and with which Iranian scholars have to some extent collaborated.

This discomfort with the legacy of slavery in Iran’s past is evident in Behnaz Mirzai’s A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran 1800-1929 (2017).[13] The result of extensive archival research by Mirzai, this monograph nonetheless teleologically reads the story of slavery and its abolition as the inevitable triumph of the secular nation–state in Iran. Consequently, Mirzai spends little time considering the painful and enduring effects or consequences of the enslavement of Africans on their descendants. Moreover, Mirzai declines to engage the issue of racism, selectively citing the work of other scholars to insist on a distinction between the American history and experience of slavery and the history of slavery in the Islamic world.[14] Regrettably, this denial is a trope of the genre of Iranian writing on the history of slavery.

In a similar vein to Mirzai’s approach, Haleh Afshar’s uncomfortable essay “Age, Gender and Slavery in and out of the Persian Harem: A Different Story” (2000) remembers the “freed slave” who lived in the Afshar home, a woman who had originally been bought for the harem of Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar.[15] When she was “freed” (i.e., the harem could no longer support so many slaves), this woman, called only Sonbol Baji (Sister Hyacinth), became Afshar’s nanny.[16] Afshar uses what she says is a framework drawn from Audre Lorde’s notion of “bio-mythography,” and describes the impulse for this article as the desire to give voice to someone who never acquired the necessary literacy to write her own story. Yet Afshar struggles to reconcile this personal history of her family’s slaveholding with the liberal racial politics required of her in her adopted country (the United Kingdom). Instead, she relies on odd assertions that suggest Sonbol Baji found her time as a slave “empowering,”[17] and that “for Sonbol Baji her colour had been one of her major attractions. The king had wished for a beautiful ‘black’ girl in his entourage and had acquired Sonbol when she was a small child.”[18] Throughout the essay, Afshar deploys the words slave and black in quotation marks, and indicates that she finds these terms insufficient and possibly foreign to the context of Iran, even though the word commonly used in Persian to describe Afro-Iranians is siah (Black).[19]

An unintended visual critique of the history that Afshar offers comes in Pedram Khosronejad’s collection of Qajar photographs, Qajar African Nannies (2017), in which a photograph of Afshar and her brother Kamran with Sonbol Baji is published.[20] Although we cannot extrapolate too much from a single photograph, I believe we can see the photograph as a critique of Afshar’s characterization. The photo shows an Afro-Iranian woman holding a large Iranian boy, perhaps two years old; a plump little Iranian girl wearing a European dress and bow in her hair is posed in front of the woman, and a (white) doll is posed at the girl’s feet. The woman’s face is shadowed, but it is weary and expresses sadness, possibly even fear. As Khosronejad observes in his introduction to the volume, “The faces of all the Africans in the photographs of this collection confirm their deep sadness and the horror that encapsulated their entire lives.”[21]

The introduction aside, this volume does not attempt to interpret the photographs deeply. Khosronejad has indeed largely eschewed critical engagement with these photographs, saying that he sees his role largely as an archivist gathering material for others to interpret.[22] His discomfort with some aspects of this process is evident, and he has commented on the fact that these photographs of enslaved persons were taken without the consent of the subjects, but would theoretically belong to the descendants of the subjects, who, in his view, are impossible to locate owing to the destruction of documents related to their ancestors’ enslavement. Instead, the photographs have become the subject of dispute between different “owners”—the Qajar families, who claim them by right of inheritance, and the Iranian government, which confiscated them during the revolution.[23]

Other evidence also points to a discomfort with a critical scrutiny of the legacy of slavery, particularly enslavement of Africans, in Iran. Even a book ostensibly dedicated to the study of race, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi’s 2017 The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation,[24] which focuses on the development of an Aryanist-inflected Iranian nationalism, elides the way in which Aryanism was not simply staged at the expense of other “white” minorities in Iran, but also and in ironic ways, at the cost of effacing the history of slavery and its aftermath.[25] Anthony A. Lee, in a preface to his work recovering the history of the enslaved individual Fezzeh Khanom in nineteenth-century Shiraz, notes the results of the 1868 census, which showed that in Tehran, the population of Afro-Iranians was then 12%, a fact that has been ignored or glossed over in the historiography of the period.[26] In his portrait of Fezzeh Khanom, Lee draws on Bahai historiography, which constitutes one of the few sources to record even obliquely the lives of these slaves, but notes, “while it is commendable that the presence of these African slaves is acknowledged, their significance to history is ignored.”[27]

On the evidence presented by Daneshvar herself, her family likely enslaved people. Daneshvar never (to my knowledge) discussed this fact directly or put it in any explicit comparative framework with the legacy of slavery she saw in the United States. Yet she acknowledged that a character from the story “A City like Paradise” (“Shahri chawn behesht,” from the collection by the same name), Mehrangiz, was based on her own dadeh siah (Black nanny), an Afro-Iranian slave-cum-servant, who lived with her own family.[28] Elsewhere, I have argued that this figure of the freed-slave-cum-female-domestic functions in Daneshvar’s work, and in the imaginary of Iranian modernity, as a sign of a disjuncture, an irreconcilability.[29] In particular, I have focused on the way in which even as women’s rights and status came to the fore of public attention as important aspects of Iran’s modernization, neither reformist Iranians, including feminists like Daneshvar, nor the law itself could acknowledge female domestic servants (including former enslaved persons like Mehrangiz or Sonbol Baji) as women. Mehrangiz is perhaps the closest Daneshvar comes to showing real sympathy for a female domestic, and this attitude is clearly derived from Mehrangiz’s helpless abjection in the household.

Even for feminists, the personhood of servants existed outside the law, and the status of manumitted slaves who had become, perforce, domestic servants was particularly precarious. Yet in spite (or perhaps because) of this denial of their personhood, the figure of the servant persists in important ways in modern Iranian fiction. In my book, I argue that this trace in the literature is as important as any legal document. In literary texts as well as in political discourse, female domestic workers would increasingly become the Other to the imagination of a central, dominant Iranian womanhood, which defined itself not only in contrast to the traditional wife, but also to the household servants.

Many of Daneshvar’s short stories and novels prominently feature domestic servants, especially women, and Daneshvar often thematizes their position in the household in her stories. Only the eponymous story in A City like Paradise, however, thematizes the status of a former female Afro-Iranian slave. As alluded to above, this story follows the life and finally the death of Mehrangiz, who is now serving as a nanny, maid-of-all-work, and de facto concubine in the middle-class home of her former master’s daughter, to whom she was given as a wedding gift.[30] With the onset of modernity and Reza Shah’s reforms, which included land reforms and the Manumission Law of 1929, elite slaveholders saw a rearrangement of their fortunes. Here, we see that dramatized in the case of this married daughter, who cannot afford another person in her household, resents Mehrangiz’s sanctioned intimacy with her children (and unsanctioned intimacy with her husband), and treats her as subhuman and with immense cruelty. Although the story clearly evinces sympathy for Mehrangiz, the character portrayed as the true victim is Ali, the son of Mehrangiz’s mistress, who loves Mehrangiz more than he does his mother, and whose inability to achieve the signposts of manhood (e.g., employment, marriage) is obviously signaled as the true tragedy of the story, even though it concludes with Mehrangiz’s abject death.

If Daneshvar and other leftist and feminist intellectuals had difficulty seeing domestic servants as having souls—in other words, as “real” people[31]—we might also say that she had difficulty seeing the problems with the deployment of Blackness as abasement.[32] In the two additional stories in A City Like Paradise that also foreground race, “The Iranians’ New Year” (“‘Ayd-e iraniha”) and “The Playhouse” (“Suratkhaneh”), Daneshvar deploys the use of blackface in two Iranian cultural traditions to comment on the situation of the (non-Black) Iranian. “The Iranians’ New Year” tells the story of an American expatriate family living in Iran and their two young sons’ naïve fascination with a young man whose occupation is playing the Hajji Firuz character associated with the Persian New Year, Nowruz, while “The Playhouse” revolves around an actor playing the siah in a traditional theater.

In “The Iranians’ New Year,” the mediating sensibility is that of two American expatriate children in Iran in the 1950s, when Americans were beginning to be present in Iran in larger numbers, but the site of sympathy is the Iranian young man they patronize. The two children, Ted and John Michaelson, are fascinated by the blackface Hajji Firuz character, which is an important ritual aspect of the Nowruz holiday, and they become by extension fascinated by the young man living on the margins of their neighborhood who plays this character professionally. The boys adopt a charitable attitude toward the young man and his father, who is a shoeshiner, and build, unbidden, a kiosk shack for the men, decorating it with American symbols, such as the American flag and Mickey Mouse. When one day they find the shack abandoned and open to the rain and wind, which has destroyed their decorations, the younger boy first imagines that “red Indians” have attacked the place; then, when his brother pooh-poohs this idea, insists that it must have been “black men with masks” and that they must be “lynched.”[33] The story is very obviously a critique of American expatriates in Iran in the 1950s, when they had begun to look like representatives of a colonial presence, especially after the 1953 coup engineered by the CIA and MI6. The evocation of Blackness here comes in the form of the Hajji Firuz character, as well as in the comments made by the two boys in their mistaken understanding of what has happened in the kiosk. The young man’s father has died, and the boys do not understand the reasons for the poverty in which the young man and his father lived, or that their “help” does not in fact save a man who has spent his life shining shoes by the side of the road.

As in “A City like Paradise,” here it is not the plight of any Black person that is dramatized (or a critique of the strangeness of the Hajji Firuz blackface tradition), but rather, the abased condition of non-Black male Iranians. The boys are foolish (if naïve) white Americans, but in the story, they take on sinister qualities nonetheless: their innocence, which is protected by their whiteness and their privilege as Americans, enables them to feel self-satisfied at the pathetic help they offer impoverished members of a society whose language they don’t speak and whose customs they don’t understand. Yet Daneshvar does not attempt to unpack the Hajji Firuz tradition at all. Here, as in “The Playhouse,” she deploys blackface but does not interrogate it as a problematic or dehumanizing practice. Hajji Firuz, like Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands, is a historically mysterious and contested aspect of the Nowruz celebration. Explaining the origins of this figure has become part of an apologia related to contemporary Iranian negotiations of race.[34]

“The Playhouse” follows a few days in the life of Mehdi Siah (whose name essentially translates to “Mehdi the Black”), a blackface performer in the “low” dramatic tradition that was still popular at the time of the story’s creation. In this tradition, as the story confirms, the siah is the central character in the drama—the mediating character with whom audiences are invited to identify.[35] Mehdi Siah gets caught up in the tragedy of one of the other players, a young woman who has become pregnant out of wedlock and plans to ensnare the rich amateur who has recently joined the troop, wanting to “study” Mehdi Siah. Here, Mehdi Siah reluctantly chooses class solidarity by allowing the subterfuge and entrapment of the young man to progress without intervening. Here, too, as in “The Iranians’ New Year,” the reader’s sympathy is directed toward a disenfranchised Iranian male, whose condition of abasement is made manifest in both stories by wearing blackface.

Taken together, these stories suggest a significant change in Daneshvar’s sensibilities regarding race. Her previous writings show no such attention to race at all, suggesting that her time in the United States during the Fulbright fellowship radically changed her perspective on race (as well as on class). For this reason, I am suggesting the paradigm of translation to discuss Daneshvar’s negotiation of race. While translation has become so capacious a concept in contemporary scholarship that it risks the loss of any meaning at all, I believe it can be a useful metaphor here for thinking about the negotiation of “race” because it is so clearly a concept or idea that does not fully translate between languages.

Although Iranians began to go to the United States and Europe for education in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, Daneshvar was not part of that wave, by virtue of her age.[36]  However, she was one of the first, if not the only, Iranians to record experiences of racial encounters during the height of the civil rights movement, and the language she uses is tentative and does not conform to any preconceived or prescribed vocabulary for discussing race.[37] Her letters suggest her fascination with race as an operative concept in the United States that structures relations between Black and white Americans. She struggles to see how she herself is understood within this paradigm, and refers to herself as “just a shade lighter” than the African Americans she meets. Against this uncertainty about where she falls in the American color continuum, we must also acknowledge the fact that Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad, whose family was from northern Iran, clearly had a running private joke regarding her color. He sometimes refers to her in their letters as his “black girl from Shiraz” (dokhtar-e siah-e Shiraz) or “my black one” (siah sukhteh-ye man), and she frequently signs herself in the same way, or as “your black Simin” (Simin-e siah-e to).[38] On the other hand, Daneshvar is at times patronizing toward the Black Americans she meets: she seems confused and, at times, horrified or bemused at some of the situations racism in the United States engenders. She tells Al-e Ahmad the story of Dorothy, a young Black woman who lives in Daneshvar’s dormitory at Stanford and figures in the letters as someone who is remarkable for her beauty.[39] She answers a phone call intended for another girl, and when that girl is not available, the caller asks if he can take Dorothy out for a date. She accepts and waits for the caller in the dormitory’s lobby. When he arrives and discovers that she is Black, he berates her and says he won’t take her out. A female custodian for the dormitory, who is also Black and unnamed but frequently referred to, yells at the man and threatens him. Daneshvar ends the story by relating how she and another (white) friend intervene by coming home from the cinema and telling the custodian to stop, or she might be fired. Daneshvar sees herself as having helpfully intervened.[40]

Neda Maghbouleh’s important work on Iranian American racialization and racial thinking suggests some critical framework for Daneshvar’s difficulty placing herself on the color spectrum, and her ambivalent (dis)identification with Black Americans: “The specter of Iran was a racial hinge between white Europe and non-white Asia: a face, a body, a culture, and a concept that could open or close the door to whiteness as needed.”[41] Daneshvar’s descriptions of her interactions with Americans, as in the account above, show that her “blackness” is something she elects to participate in, but can step back from when she wants to do so, and take the position of whiteness.

Two comparatist Americanist scholars, Ebony Coletu and Ira Dworkin, have investigated some of the important but often overlooked moments of identification between contemporary Egyptian intellectuals, who selectively courted and rejected the idea of Egypt’s status as an African nation, and Black activism in the United States. In the article “A Complicated Embrace,” Coletu examines the reception and translation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots in the Arab world in the 1970s and 1980s, where it was enormously popular.[42] The plight of protagonist Kunta Kinte became a metaphor for the condition of Egyptians, especially Egyptians working in the Gulf, at the same time that Egypt was practicing racist policies directed at Sudanese refugees and Nubian Egyptians.[43] Coletu compares this use of Roots to Eve Troutt Powell’s powerful investigation of racial politics in Egypt during the period of the Sudanese condominium (1899–1956). Coletu comments that while the use of blackface in Egypt at that time was a way to “visualize stubborn resistance to the ‘civilizing mission’ of the British colonial project while reifying support for Egyptian cultural transformation under European influence [. . .] [t]he rhetorical plasticity of Kunta Kinte as a resistant figure and a slave marked by blackness resonates with this local history even as it conveys a distinct story about Atlantic slavery and diasporic survival in the United States.”[44] Coletu goes on to note that the use of Roots by Egyptian intellectuals such as Sonallah Ibrahim tended to exploit the metaphor of slavery elsewhere to explain the plight of intellectuals such as himself, rather than to shed light on contemporary practices of racism. She also points out that “legacies of slavery are also reworked over time and in Egypt, reference to slavery as debasement has been visually coded to blackness in the last century,”[45] a point echoed by Baghoolizadeh’s examination of racial artifacts and discourse in Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dworkin is concerned with the personal history and writings of Radwa Ashour (1946–2014).[46] Ashour, an Egyptian intellectual and writer married to prominent Palestinian poet, writer, and activist Mourid Barghouti, had long been interested in Black political movements before she began work on a doctoral degree in 1973 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dworkin argues that it was her long association with Shirley Graham Du Bois, who lived in Cairo for many years, that led her to choose UM Amherst’s Department of English, where she specialized in African American literature and was closely associated with the Department of Afro-American Studies. Ashour’s dissertation discussed in depth the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956, and specifically, the “applicability” of the “colonial thesis,” as put forward by writers like Aimé Césaire, to the situation in the United States. Dworkin uses Ashour’s 1983 autobiography and the later quasi-historical novel Siraaj: An Arab Tale (1992), which relates the tale of a slave rebellion on a fictional east African island, to argue that Ashour’s engagement of African American cultural politics influenced her fictional and autobiographical writing in Arabic in ways that had broader (but largely unexamined) consequences for the modern Arabic novel. Her profound interest in African American politics notwithstanding, Dworkin notes that Ashour was unable to endorse the critique made by her mentor and friend Du Bois of racism in contemporary Egypt. Dworkin also argues that—similar to Coletu’s findings regarding Roots in Egypt—“the particular appeal of African American culture [for Ashour] lies more in its broad-based engagement with colonial histories of oppression than with the particular contours of racism within the modern state.”[47]

Something similar is at work in Daneshvar’s engagement with the politics of race in the United States, and her attempt to translate what she sees for Al-e Ahmad. Daneshvar was not interested in opening a referendum on race in Iran, but she clearly did see the condition of Black intellectuals in the United States as having some parallel to the situation of intellectuals and artists in Pahlavi Iran, where any critique of the shah was censored and the author blacklisted or flagged for surveillance. However, insofar as Daneshvar did see the condition of Black Americans as a metaphor for some Iranian experiences, clearly Blackness for her meant degradation or abjection. While her writerly sympathies remained with the politically downtrodden, they did not always embrace those who were class or racially suppressed. Her representations of non-Persians (and specifically, Indians and Azeri Turks) in Savushun can be charitably described as “Othering,” and her treatment of lower-class woman, especially, was often contemptuous and deployed for satire.

In the summer of 1963, Daneshvar returned to the United States for a second extended stay, to participate in the Harvard International Seminar, and she would again record her impressions in letters to Al-e Ahmad. (The collection A City like Paradise had been published two years earlier, and while on her trip, she writes irritably to Al-e Ahmad of an unfavorable review of the book by a young man she doesn’t know.)[48] Notably, she writes on several occasions, and at length, about the civil rights movement in the United States, which was foregrounded in the seminar. The filmmaker Richard Leacock screened and discussed his documentary The Chair (1962), which follows the attempt to commute the death sentence for Paul Crump, who was convicted for his participation in the killing of a security guard during an armed robbery in Chicago. The participants were taken to a Boston “slum” (Daneshvar’s word) to see conditions of life there, and were offered social experiences in self-consciously integrated settings.[49] Daneshvar also records Ralph Ellison’s visit and presentation to the seminar, which was clearly an important part of her experience that summer.

Ellison, author of Invisible Man, made a profound impression on Daneshvar, and she speaks of his work with great respect and interest, recording quotations from his speech to the seminar, and observes that he is someone who has used literature to overcome the enormous obstacle of race, which “might otherwise have defined him.”[50] She describes to Al-e Ahmad how she has begun reading Ellison’s novel and is so impressed by it that she has ordered it for Al-e Ahmad in French (he could not read fluently in English).[51] She also discusses how Ellison, in spite of being made financially comfortable by the success of Invisible Man, continues to teach. She clearly sees him as a kind of comrade, viewing him as a model for herself and for Al-e Ahmad; later in the letters, having finished Invisible Man in its entirety, she indeed compares Ellison’s style to Al-e Ahmad’s.[52] In Ellison, the avowed engagé writer, Daneshvar recognizes a commonality.[53] She tries to explain how the struggle to deal with racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States is mirrored in their own struggle for greater freedoms in Iran, but falters.[54]

Daneshvar also comments on James Baldwin, whose work she had already come into contact with during her Fulbright year. On this later occasion, Jack Ludwig, whom she calls “our professor” at the Harvard Seminar, has given her a copy of The Atlantic. While Daneshvar doesn’t really care for Ludwig’s story, she admires a story by Baldwin in the issue (she doesn’t name it, but from her description and the date, it must be “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” 1960), calling it a “masterpiece” (shahkar).[55] Later, however, she compares him unfavorably to Ellison.[56] Again, both Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad seem to admire what they see as Ellison’s desire to transcend race: Al-e Ahmad comments that while he will always be Black, he doesn’t have to always be a Black writer like Baldwin; he can just be a writer.[57] Both are snide and superior about Baldwin’s open homosexuality, and refer to Ellison as mardak (little man, a derogatory term in Persian), which can simply be a highly colloquial expression, but feels unusual in Daneshvar’s language (if not in Al-e Ahmad’s).[58]

Daneshvar’s comments also suggest a sense of being above, and separate from, what she saw as an American problem. Since a large part of the program at the Harvard Seminar was about racial conflict in the United States, Daneshvar reflects: “In summary, right now the most difficult political issue in America is the solution of the case between whites and blacks, and the Don Juans of the [American] universities and colleges are thick-necked blacks, and the white and blonde girls who don’t have a black friend have lost their chance. But my dear, I’m sure you’re weary of hearing my explanations. . .”[59] The casual racism in this comment is profoundly disturbing. Yet at the same time, and in spite of making light of the situation as she does above, Daneshvar cared enough about what was happening in the United States to attend (without Al-e Ahmad’s permission!) the March on Washington. As she records it in the letters, she wanted to “be part of history, be a witness to history.”[60] She goes on to say that it had a profound effect on her: the march was organized and peaceful, and the police, both Black and white, were helpful. She observes that “the Black race is truly a beautiful one,” and that the Black and white people participating in the march, to her surprise, “were kissing each other.”[61]

Daneshvar was a self-stated critic of the injustice she saw in the world around her, and her engagement with race, both in these letters and in her post-Fulbright collection of stories, presents some uncomfortable truths about the contradictions of the politics espoused by Daneshvar and the Iranian left in the Cold War period.[62] She did not attempt to connect or critique her own contact with practices of enslavement, or the practice of enslavement and its legacy in Iran more broadly, with what she witnessed in the United States. Rather, Daneshvar’s (and Al-e Ahmad’s) representations of Blackness in Iran and the United States were deployed as metaphors for the victimization of suppressed classes, including the suppression of Iranian intellectuals, at the hands of the Pahlavi state. However, their deployment of Blackness in their writing did not enable them to see or critique their own racial thinking. For Daneshvar, in both her letters and her fiction, Afro-Iranians, Africans, and Black Americans remain an Other that cannot be remediated through narration. Instead, they become a way of “playing in the dark,” deploying Blackness to clarify and critique the position of non-Black Iranians in the Pahlavi era.

 

[1]I wish to thank Fatemeh Shams and Ira Dworkin for their helpful comments on this essay. This essay is offered in honor of Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, whose erudition and mentorship have guided so many of us. 

[2]I am using Willem Floor’s expression “clearing center” from his Encyclopaedia Iranica article “BARDA and BARDA-DARI: From the Mongols to the Abolition of Slavery,” 2000, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/barda-iv.

[3]This is on page 33 of Honar va adabiyat-e emruz:  goft o shenudi ba doktor Simin Daneshvar va Parviz Natel Khanlari (Contemporary Art and Literature: Interviews with Dr. Simin Daneshvar and Dr. Parviz Natel Khanlari), ed. Nasser Hariri (Babul, IR: Ketabsara-ye Babul, AH 1366/AD 1987).

[4]Simin Daneshvar, Shahri chawn behesht (Tehran: Kharzmi, AH 1381/AD 2002).

[5]Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993).

[6]William Saroyan, Payk-e marg va zendigi ya komedi-ye ensani (The Messenger of Life and Death, or, The Human Comedy), trans. Simin Daneshvar (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1954).

[7]Daneshvar’s letters to Stegner are housed in the Stanford University Library. Daneshvar writes to Stegner while she is at the Harvard Seminar in 1963 to ask for his help in finding work in the United States. She also invites Stegner to visit Iran (which he does), and generally praises the positive influence he has had on her writing.

[8]See her letters in English to Stegner, which are part of the collection “Wallace Earle Stegner Creative Writing Program : correspondence and manuscripts, 1949-1992,” and which are held at the Department of Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University.

[9]The story of Stegner’s association with ARAMCO is itself a fascinating story, as told by Robert Vitalis in “Wallace Stegner’s Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision,” Pacific Historical Review, no. 3 (August 2007):  405–38.

[10]Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is one such work.

[11]Simin Daneshvar, Nameh-ha-ye Simin Daneshvar va Jalal Al-e Ahmad (The Letters of Simin Daneshvar and Jalal Al-e Ahmad), vols. 1 and 3, ed. Mas‘ud Ja‘fari Jazi (Tehran: Nilufar, AH 1385/AD 2006).

[12]Beeta Baghoolizadeh, “Seeing Race and Erasing Slavery: Media and the Construction of Blackness in Iran, 1830–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018).

[13]Behnaz Mirzai, A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran 1800-1929 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

[14]Mirzai, History of Slavery, 19–25.

[15]Haleh Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery in and out of the Persian Harem: A Different Story,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, no. 5 (2000): 905–16.

[16]African slaves in Iran were often given the names of flowers or gems, possibly to connote value or beauty; these were not their birth names, which are most frequently erased from history. For a historical attestation to this practice, see Bahman Katiraˈi, “Yaddasht-hayi darbareh-ye Emsal o hekam (taˈlif ‘Ali Akbar Dehkhoda)” (“Some Notes on the Proverbs and Wise Sayings [Written by ‘Ali Akbar Dekhoda]),” in Miyan-e reshteh-ha: daneshkadeh-ye adabiyat va ‘olum-e ensani-ye daneshgah-e Tehran (Between Fields: The Faculty of Literature and Humanities of the University of Tehran), nos. 5–6 (AH 1347/AD 1968): 505–32.

[17]Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery,” 905.

[18]Afshar, “Age, Gender and Slavery,” 909. For a fuller discussion of how liberalism in the United States and Europe has been practiced as “racial liberalism,” see Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[19]Many words are used in Persian for slave, but not all of them have the same historical connotation relating to enslavement of Africans. Some terms used to denote African slaves include bardeh, dadeh siah, kaka siah, gholam, and khvajeh. As in English, “I am your servant [slave]” (bandeh-ye shoma hastam) is a common polite expression, and bandeh is used as a polite personal pronoun in certain types of discourse. For one discussion in English of this form of discourse, see William O. Beeman’s useful (if now dated) Politics of Language and Status in Iran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

[20]Pedram Khosronejad,  Qajar African Nannies  (Stillwater: Dr. Ali Fazel Visual Archive, Media Collection and Digital Resources, University of Oklahoma, 2018). Exhibition catalog.

[21]Khosronejad, Qajar African Nannies, vi.

[22]Pedram Khosronejad (lecture associated with photo exhibition “Qajar African Nannies” at UC Davis Alumni Center, Davis, CA, 10 May 2018).

[23]Khosronejad, lecture.

[24]Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

[25]Akhundzadeh, a major focus of Zia-Ebrahimi’s study, was himself a person of partially African descent through his mother (H. Algar, “AKUNDZADA,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2011, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/akundzada-playwright).

[26]Anthony A. Lee, “Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz,” Iranian Studies, no. 3 (2012): 417–37.

[27]Lee, “Enslaved African Women,” 429.

[28]Honar va adabiyat-e emruz, 11.

[29]Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Gender, Fiction and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

[30]Daneshvar acknowledged in several interviews that Mehrangiz was based on her own nanny.  See, for example, p. 11 of her interview with Hariri.

[31]Manijeh Nasrabadi deploys the terminology of affect, as articulated by Deborah Gould, to discuss the complicated engagement of Iranian feminists in the pre-revolutionary educational diaspora with leftist politics. Of woman members of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States, she notes, “women in the ISA were deeply invested in human liberation, including their own” (131). Some of what she attributes to these activists in that movement can also be said of Daneshvar, who, by virtue of her age, was not part of the wave of student mobilization abroad but may have anticipated some of their experiences. Manijeh Nasrabadi, “‘Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do:’ Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement, 1961–1979,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, nos. 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 127–45.

[32]For an important reading of the notion of “abjection” in Black diaspora discourse, see Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

[33]Simin Daneshvar, “The Iranians’ New Year” (“‘Ayd-e iraniha”), in Shahri chawn behesht (Tehran: Kharzmi, AH 1381/AD 2002): 37–44. Quote on p. 42. All translations are my own.

[34]Several scholars have insisted that Hajji Firuz’s blackened face has nothing to do with racial signaling, but is about the fading blackness of winter, since the Iranian New Year is the vernal equinox and many of its rituals have to do with banishing winter and welcoming spring (e.g., Chaharshanbeh suri, or “Burning Wednesday,” when celebrants jump over bonfires and shout “My yellowness for your redness,” meaning my jaundiced [yellow] color for your ruddy [red] color). Scholarship on this topic continues to attempt to distance its racial aspects from the history of enslavement of Africans in Iran; some scholars, indeed, make no note of this possible connection. See, for example, Niayesh Purhassan’s “Hajji Firuz: performans: barrassi va mo’arefi-ye ‘Hajji Firuz’ va negahiye- tatbighi beh namayeshgaran az manzar va didgah-e performans” (“Hajji Firuz: Performance: Research and Introduction to “Hajji Firuz” and a Comparative Look at the Performers/Actors from a Performance Perspective”), in Me’mari va honar (Architecture and Art): Namayesh, nos. 125–26 (AH 1388/AD 2009): 42–47. In contrast, and for an interesting discussion of the contemporary controversy in the Netherlands over Zwarte Piet and a comparison to the Hajji Nowruz tradition, see Angelita D. Reyes, “Performativity and Representation in Transnational Blackface: Mammy (USA), Zwarte Piet (Netherlands), and Haji Firuz (Iran),” Atlantic Studies, no. 4 (2018): 521–50.

[35]For discussion of this theatrical tradition, see Bahram Beyzai, Namayesh dar Iran (Drama in Iran) (Tehran: Chap-e Kaviyan, 1965); Baghoolizadeh, “Seeing Race”; and Maryam Khakipour’s 2010 film Siah Bazi: The Joymakers (New York: Icarus Films, 2010).

[36]See, in particular, Chapter 3 of Matthew K. Shannon, Losing Hearts and Minds: Iranian-American Relations and International Education during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017) for a fuller discussion of the Iranian student movement in the United States.

[37]The words historically used to discuss the practice of enslavement in Iran, bardegi; the people who were enslaved, bardeh, kaniz, gholam; and Afro-Iranians, siah, differ from the translations of terms used in the Iranian press to describe race, racism, or Black people when they occur elsewhere (nezhad, nezhad parasti/garayi, siah pustan). The latter terms have the quality of neologisms—they are not deployed in this way in historical documents (including literature) dealing with the trade in enslaved Africans or other peoples in Iran.

[38]See, for example, Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 284, 286, 291, 318. See also Judith Butler’s reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing for an interesting comparison: the protagonist of Passing, Clare, is married to a racist white man who ostensibly does not know her ancestry, but calls her by the nickname “Nig” (Butler, Bodies That Matter [London: Routledge, 1993], 167–86).  When I presented an early version of this work at UC Irvine in 2017, a participant in the seminar took me aside and told me that he had heard that Daneshvar herself had African ancestry, and that this would explain “the way she looked.” When I asked for evidence of this, the person promised to send it to me but did not. I mention this to suggest how Daneshvar has herself been racialized in ways that do not always make it into print.

[39]Black students did not matriculate at Stanford until ten years later, in 1962. Although there was not the violent hostility to Black matriculation that occurred at southern US universities, one student in this cohort, Sandra Drake, remembers, “Once a girl came up to me and said: ‘I’ve never talked to a Negro.’ We were ‘Negroes’ back then.” See Roy Johnson, “What It Was Like to Be an African-American Freshman in 1962,” Stanford Magazine, September 2017, stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-was-like-to-be-an-african-american-freshman-in-1962.

[40]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 1, 384–85.

[41]Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

[42]Ebony Coletu, “A Complicated Embrace,” Transition, no. 122 (2017): 138–49.

[43]Roots was published in a Persian translation by Alireza Farahmand in AH 1357/AD 1978 and has never been out of print. Recently, on the occasion of the publication of a new edition of the translation by Amir Kabir Press, Farahmand was interviewed by the newspaper Hamshahri. He mentions his own interest in the history of slavery in the United States, and how he had the opportunity to meet Alex Haley on two occasions; according to Farahmand, Haley was interested in him as a Muslim, since Haley had written The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “Farahmand: Risheh-ha yeki az hezaran ast,” interview with Alireza Farahmand, Hamshahri, AH Azar 1392/December 2013, www.hamshahrionline.ir/news/241770/%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%87%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AF-%D8%B1%DB%8C%D8%B4%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%A7-%DB%8C%DA%A9%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%87%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA.

[44]Coletu, “Complicated Embrace,” 143.

[45]Coletu, “Complicated Embrace,” 144.

[46]Ira Dworkin, “Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, no. 1 (2018): 1–19.

[47]Dworkin, “Radwa Ashour,” 6.

[48]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 257.

[49]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 396.

[50]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 381.

[51]Interestingly, Daneshvar never mentions the possibility of translating Invisible Man herself, though she did translate several other American novels, and Ellison’s novel has still not been translated into Persian, in spite of a flourishing translation industry in Iran that is not regulated by international copyright laws since Iran is not a signatory to the Berne Convention.

[52]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 395.

[53]An odd footnote to Daneshvar’s and Al-e Ahmad’s encounters with Ellison at the Harvard International Seminar is the fact that Ellison later dined with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2008), 447.

[54]On p. 395 of vol. 3 of their letters, Daneshvar tells Al-e Ahmad that she sees Ellison as a “serious” writer. She goes on to characterize Invisible Man as a work that is focused on the hopelessness and exhaustion of (American) intellectuals, who are worn down by the petty battles of right and left politics, implicitly reading their own situation onto that of the protagonist in Invisible Man, and eliding the racial component central to the novel. Al-e Ahmad later wrote a treatise on this theme, On the Service and Treachery of the Intellectuals (Tehran: Ravagh, AH 1343/AD 1964).

[55]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 366. Baldwin’s “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” first appeared in The Atlantic in the September 1960 issue (pp. 37–44).

[56]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 374. Both Daneshvar and Al-e Ahmad refer to Baldwin as Jimmy at times rather than James—an informality which, like their use of mardak to describe Ellison, may be a linguistic marker of friendly familiarity or an affectation meant to mirror American slang, but in context, reads as a kind of belittling. When I presented this work at the seminar “Roads Not Taken: Literary Translation in Iran” at UC Irvine in December 2018, it was pointed out to me that mardak is not always a sign of disregard, and that Al-e Ahmad often used this term much as contemporary American parlance uses dude. While I take the point, this is a usage unusual for Daneshvar and remarkable in her letters.

[57]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 543–44. Al-e Ahmad would later write “The American Husband” (1966), the only short story of his to actively engage an American setting. In this story, much of the plot revolves around an Iranian woman’s discovery of her American husband’s actual profession as a gravedigger, which is depicted as shameful not only because of its contact with the dead—a taboo—but also because his fellow diggers are Black (p. 77).  “The American Husband” (“Showhar-e amrikayi”), in Panj dastan (Tehran: Ravaaq, 1977), 67–82.

He would also write a series of ethnographies that included recording of racial aspects of the people of Kharg, an island in the Persian Gulf that was a major slave trading post. Dorr-e yatim-e khalij, jazireh-ye Khark (The Pearl of the Gulf, the Island of Khark) (Tehran: Majid, AH 1339/AD 1960).

[58]Al-e Ahmad would later meet Ellison when he himself participated in the Harvard International Seminar in 1965. Although Roy Mottahedeh mentions this meeting in passing (and more generally attributes Al-e Ahmad’s being chosen to his being one of the obvious intellectual leaders of Iran, rather than through his wife’s advocacy, which is clear to anyone who reads their correspondence), he does not, in my view, read Al-e Ahmad’s participation correctly and generally uses this to fit into his own view of Al-e Ahmad. Historical or biographical views of any individual may (indeed must) change over time, but I see Mottahedeh’s work as feeding into the hagiographical view of Al-e Ahmad, which sees him as a prefiguring martyr of the revolution. More recent research has sought to revise these views somewhat. Golnar Nikpour’s comparison of Al-e Ahmad’s hajj memoir Khasi dar miqat (published in English under the title Lost in the Crowd) with the account of Malcolm X’s hajj experience in The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an important comparative attempt, but misses out on Al-e Ahmad’s explicit engagement of Malcolm X’s ideas in his letters to Daneshvar and elsewhere. Golnar Nikpour,  “Revolutionary Journeys, Revolutionary Practice: The Hajj Writings of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Malcolm X,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, no. 1 (2014): 67–85.

[59]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 385.

[60]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 428–29.

[61]Daneshvar, Nameh-ha, vol. 3, 428–29.

[62]One of the most interesting implications of observing these changes in Daneshvar’s work and tracing their possible sources is that it makes us look in different ways at the nativism that Al-e Ahmad came to espouse in his late work. Even before Gharbzadegi, it is clear that Daneshvar’s accounts of the United States and race had an impact on Al-e Ahmad.

Abstract

As part of a broader postsecular historical investigation into the role of demonological discourses in the formation of Iranian modernity, this article seeks to account for the presence of the demonic in the works of two interbellum thinkers, the Marxist theoretician and physicist Taqī Arānī (1903-40/1321-59 gh.) and Arānī’s defence attorney during the Group of 53 trials, a religious reformist who was a major proponent of the anti-mystical rational theology, Aḥmad Kasravī (1890-1946/1308-65 gh.). What is unique about these two thinkers is that their respective commitments to materialist inquiry and the conceptualisation of a God of Reason accommodated the residue of “traditionalist” demonism in different functional forms. Primarily through the use of idioms, embodied evil was delineated in a manner that radically contravened long-standing demonological trappings. As seen in works such as “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),” Pisīkūlūzhī: ʿIlm-i Rūḥ (Psychology: The Science of the Spirit), Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. Taqī Arānī’s Final Defence), Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism), “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” and Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint), Arānī allowed the satanic to serve an instrumental role in scientific explanation, the crystallisation of proletarian-state relations, and the framing of irrationality even though he was swift in his dismissal of occult existence. Arānī’s major demonological contribution, his assertion of demonic irrationality, is one that he shared with Kasravī. In Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation) and Āyīn (Creed), the Shīʿī reformist elaborated the idea of demonic irrationality in his attempt to promote a universalised rational order, and this was done through the use of exclusionary logic.

 

Introduction

In his interbellum work, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),”[1] the Iranian Marxist theoretician and physicist Taqī Arānī (1903-40/1321-59 gh.) was inadvertently participating in a transformative mode of demonographical inscription that gave prominence to demonic irrationality. This is of note in three direct respects. Firstly, notwithstanding his inveighed assaults against religion and dismissal of demonic existence,[2] Arānī’s process of thinking by means of the demonic—even if ultimately tongue in cheek—illustrates how secularity was complicit in religious conceptual formations, and how a secular ethos was in part established through religious imaginaries. This observation is, of course, indebted to the postsecular impulse with its historiographical denial of religion as containing a “transhistorical essence,”[3] and its assertion that religion is “attached to specific processes of power and knowledge”[4] and dependent upon “historically distinctive disciplines and forces.”[5] Secondly, in Iran the extrusion of demonic irrationality points to the contemporaneous circulation of rationalisation nomenclature and debates concerning the place of rationality in social discourse. As “irreducibly stochastic,”[6] the demonism being described here coincided with and even encouraged the most concerted Iranian attempt to establish a universal rational order. Thirdly, the attempt to establish a closed rational order by so-called “anti-traditionalists” allowed demonic irrationality to enter a stage of autonomy and exteriority beyond logos—an unprecedented development in Iran’s Islamic history. The modernist confrontation with the “ancient or vestigial” autonomy of “pure irregularity”[7] is precisely the matter under consideration here.

The purpose of this paper is to explore these statements, along with their implications, as they are found in a series of interbellum works by Arānī and Aḥmad Kasravī (1890-1946/1308-65 gh.), Arānī’s defence attorney during the Group of 53 trials and a religious reformist who was a major proponent of the anti-mystical “rational theology”[8] that jettisoned demonic figures from the scope of order. During the first Pahlavī period (1921-41/1300-20 sh.) these two thinkers contributed to the processual break with the longstanding alliance between the satanic and the rational in Islamic thought. After all, it was during the formative stage of the religion that Qur’an commentators unequivocally linked Iblīs—Satan in angelic/jinn form, the “fiery primogenitor”[9]—to qiyās, or analogical reasoning. This attribution gave the Ẓāhirī school of jurisprudence an opening to redouble its critique against the futility of human reason without scriptural guidance, but it did not entirely diminish the importance of reason among other branches of law—for instance, qiyās holds a prominent place in Shāfiʿī thought.[10] What many commentators ultimately agreed upon was how satanic pride, narcissism, spiritual vapidity and the inevitable downfall that accompanied these traits were neatly nestled within an excessive reliance upon intellection.[11] Even when—in the style of “the sibling rivalry motif”[12]—it is conceded that Iblīs’ view regarding his essential superiority over Adam retains integrity and is the expression of a faculty that was bestowed upon him by God Himself, Satan’s tragedy is that he is lambasted for his sound rational judgment.[13] It is in this light that Satan as the tempter should be explained. Rather than focusing on the irrationality of the passion-driven carnal soul, of which Satan is construed as the proprietor, and demonic possession as “destroy[ers] [of] the rational structure of the mind,”[14] the accent should be placed on Iblīs’ rejected offering of reasons[15] as the precipitating moment behind the machinations for which he is most reviled. To top it off, he is considered the first to have ever exercised reason.[16] In other words, satanic temptation is based in rational proposals.

Often ridiculed by Sufi scholars such as al-Hujwīrī (c. 990-1077/c. 380-469 gh.), the eighth-tenth century rationalist movement known as Muʿtazilism partially evaded the consequences of a rational evil by associating the development of the rational faculties with true spiritual commitment.[17] In fact, the Muʿtazilites went so far as to conclude that the human mind is capable of grasping the reason(s) behind God’s dismissal of Iblīs’ antagonism.[18] To this extent, evil itself can be comprehended, a position that was embraced by Ibn Sīnā (c. 980-1037/c. 369-428 gh.) even though he was a known critic of Muʿtazilism.[19] All of this is to say that evil, the first figural expression of which was simultaneously the first appearance of reason,[20] is construed by rationally inclined Islamic thinkers as intelligible.

While we can thus far conclude that the demonic has traditionally been construed as both rational and intelligible, it has also common practice to situate him within the divine cosmic scheme. As the cleric and constitutionalist Āqā Najafī Qūchānī (1878-1943/1295-1362 gh.) put it in Siyāḥat-i Sharq (Eastern Journey), “All existents (mawjūdāt) are created (makhlūq) by, are the shadows (ẓil) of, and are dependent (mansūb) upon” God. Even though the degree of divine attribution (andāzah-yi intisāb) in Satan may be limited, he is nevertheless enclosed within the Islamic cosmological order.[21] As the “necessary instrument in [God’s] Hands,”[22] the archfiend “possesses powers only by extension.”[23] It is against this background of a contained and instrumentalised Satan that Arānī’s commentary of the demonic becomes piercing in its distinctiveness. There is tension between the demonic as it is situated within recognisable and coherent limits and that to which Arānī is referring. If demonological discourse during the early twentieth century teetered away from Qūchānī’s traditional conception towards one that is more lawless and impervious to disciplining, then how was this received, compounded and guided by literate culture?

 

Arānī’s Demonology

Let us first detail what Arānī actually said in “Jabr va Ikhtiyār.” After a brief deterministic account of causation, he states that without the benefit of laws or principles (qānūn yā nāmūs) it would not be possible to predict (pīsh’bīnī) any occurrences.[24] This mechanistic conception of reality lent itself to a positivistic and materialist worldview that came to inform revolutionary leftist theory in Iran for decades.[25] However, it is the logic of the following statement that has gone under the radar: “Today, bread is baked in an oven but it is possible (mumkin ast) that if Satan so desires (agar Shayṭān bikhvāhad), tomorrow bread can grow (sabz shavad) on trees like fruit.”[26] Is this desire of which Arānī speaks not reminiscent of the originary “passionate desire” of Satan in Paradise Lost that is subverted and made to be forgotten by God and Christ in their capacities as “reason and restraint?”[27] By being juxtaposed to a form of causal reasoning that can be traced back to Aristotle, Satan’s desire here escapes logical comprehensibility and coherence. Again, this is rather odd considering how, in the Islamic tradition, the fallen angel is associated with analogical reasoning (qiyās) and thus the “limitations and ultimate unreliability of human intellection.”[28]

What is implicit in Arānī’s conception is how similar Satan is to the Ashʿarite understanding of God as an Absolute Will that is purely arbitrary. In this view, “no contingent being or event can be rationally accounted for.”[29] The instrumentalised Satan falls by the wayside in favour of a sovereign Satan who assumes “the truest and most complete manifestation of God and his omnipotent freedom.”[30] The appearance of the latter satanic form should not be simply construed as a stale extract from a millennia-old depository of edifying turns of phrase, but rather the expression of an intellectual debate over the merits of determinative causation. Compare Arānī’s approach to determinism with that of the well-known lawyer Maḥmūd Sarshār (1901-1964/1280-1343 sh.), whose thoughts on the matter were written just over a decade after Arānī’s death. In the case of Arānī, a prominent figure within the religious imagination is transformed into a carrier of the torch of chance. For Sarshār, the prospect of discovering laws (qavānīn) and relations between phenomena and theories (bāyad ḥavādis̱ va qaz̤āyā rā mū’shikāfī kardah va irtibāṭ-i ānhā  rā bā yik dīgar paydā nimāyad) is at the basis of a determinative science. With this telos in mind, the veils of ignorance (pardah’hā-yi jahl va nādānī) can be torn, and he tables a Qur’anic verse to seal his position.[31] While Sarshār helps to incorporate scientific determinism into an Islamic framework, Arānī’s commitment to dialectical materialism separates it off from religion, leaving the latter with only fortuitousness.

Theorists who emerged after Iran’s far-left transition from social democracy to orthodox Marxism[32] advocated a certain “unswerving”[33] dogmatism that had the world’s disenchantment[34] at its basis. It is within this context that the demonic strangely emerges, not as the theoretical intelligence of the early determinists that is “capable of ascertaining the complete set of initial conditions of the world system at any one instant of time,”[35] but as a stochastic force that helps to stabilise the theory of determination through the production of chains of indeterminacy.[36] While Arānī used a disenchanted and aseptic materiality to disprove manifestations of idealist and religious discourse, he nevertheless preserved these manifestations—usually in the form of familiar but “irreverent idioms”[37] or metaphors—as the face of incoherence and lawlessness in the determinism vs. anti-determinism debate.

Though at times invoked as a relatively abstract principle, Arānī’s lawlessness is also localised in phenomenal entities, as detailed in Pisīkūlūzhī (Psychology). In his discussion of the psychological notion of “suggestion (talqīn),” Arānī uses an image of a satanic child (bachchah-yi shayṭānī) who, by biting into a sour lemon (līmū-yi turshī) in front of a military band (shaypūrchī´hā-yi niẓāmī), is able to disrupt its performance by inducing salivation.[38] Here, we observe lawless demonic exteriority intruding upon the world of laws without any direct physical causes (bidūn-i vujūd-i ʿillat).[39] Similar to the notion of religiously grounded satanic whispering (vasvasah) as the subversion of human fortitude and fidelity, demonic suggestion is pivoted upon the absence of physical causes. However, the question implicitly asked is not how to safeguard oneself from temptation, but how the outside enters the inside without resistance.[40] How could pure rational discipline (military band) be violated by unrefined arbitrariness (demonic child) when no clear physiological connection is apparent?

Arānī’s resolution comes by way of the meta-will (māvarā-yi irādah). This concept when an individual presumes that due to the lack of direct and discernible internal causes (bidun-i ʿillat-imustaqīm), certain external experiences are actually instigations of foreign stimuli, such as magic (siḥr va jādū) or spirits (arvāḥ), when indeed it is the meta-will that is the source of these actualisations.[41] This is similar to the way in which in capitalist production “the activity of the worker is [perceived as] not [being] his own spontaneous activity.”[42] For Arānī, the truth of the reaction is completely internal to the actors involved.[43] In comparing this discussion to his description of suggestion, it is clear that in the first instance, the distance between subjectivity and an invasive demonic irrationality is affirmed, while in the second, both the occult and its foreignness disappear in favour of the “blind circuit”[44] of reason.

In some of Arānī’s arguments, the demonic is alluded to in order for persuasive scientific points to be made. He goes beyond occultist logic but he also allows his rhetorical “resources”[45] to be partially derived from this very location. This resort to “local knowledge”[46] allows him to appeal to an audience invested in the scientific debates of the time, and in doing so he borrows from, as well as tinkering with, a reconfigured demonological discourse. What is remarkable is that scientific persuasion provided an outlet for this new demonological configuration to be transmitted. Thus, instead of nullifying the role of the demonic in the conceptualisation of actuality, Arānī “rehabilitat[es]”[47] it in the service of a relatively new genre concerned with polemic and scientific popularisation.

The dearth of demonic references in Pisīkūlūzhī and related texts can indeed be raised as a rejoinder to my position, but attention should be directed to their mere presence and what this says about the genre of scientific popularisation in Iran. In Arānī’s contribution to this literature, key explanations of scientific facts were “garnished”[48] with the demonic because he was attuned to the way his audience was in the midst of rethinking the role of the occult in society. Nature for him was devoid of all religious meaning and significance, and yet the “obfuscatory” element remained textually embedded. Not exactly a form of “fetishistic disavowal of belief” where, in this case, the demonic “enables the subject to accept [the] knowledge [of the demonic] without paying the full price for it,”[49]Arānī’s use of the demonic was part of a “textual strategy” meant to capture his audience’s full attention.[50]

In Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. Taqī Arānī’s Final Defence), Arānī’s partially transcribed 1938/1317 sh. public trial, in which he “spoke vigorously in his own defense,”[51] the demonic occult emerges in the social conflicts that crash like waves against the state,[52] specifically those concerning workers. By this time, the notion of an identifiable working class had a very short history in the country. Initially and primarily deployed by social reformers and democrats in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as a theoretical device, it was only in the 1920s/1300s sh. when the likes of Āvitīs Sulṭānzādah (1889-1938/1306-57 gh.) started speaking of workers (kārgarān) as an identifiable class.[53] This is not to say that there did not exist prior instances of proletarian organisation. During the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11/1323-29 gh.), workers (notably local tanners) coordinated strike actions and political parties championed the interests of workers. A boom in the Soviet oil sector during the 1910s/1330s gh. attracted many Iranian workers who became receptive to the didactic efforts of Russian Social Democrats.[54] The early 1920s/1300s sh. was also a time when a number of organisational efforts made headway, particularly by postal, telegraphic and educational workers.[55] The rise of Riz̤ā Shāh Pahlavī (1878-1944/1295-1363 gh./r. 1925-41/1304-20 sh.) and the shadow that his state casted[56] were obstacles for proletarian striving, and it was in this context that Arānī’s intellectual productions were nestled.

In Ākharīn Difāʿ, the physicist questions, rhetorically, how Iran’s toilers (ranjbarān), or workers, are able to provoke such great fear in the state.[57] He also expresses curiosity as to why the police (maʿmūrīn-i shahrbānī) violently tear apart any bulletin, leaflet or communiqué on which the word ‘toiler’ appears.[58] In Arānī’s discourse, the excessive sensitivity and supposed apprehension evident in the authorities was to be partially expected for they were dealing with the working class as the ‘universal redeemer of humanity.’[59] Though law enforcement during Riz̤ā Shāh’s reign had until that point been consistently and aggressively quelling union activities,[60] May Day festivities and strike actions, and maintaining networks of surveillance,[61] state authorities are said to be more frightened of workers than jinn confronted by the Qur’anic preamble ‘In the name of God’ (mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh).[62]

While the notion of fear is paramount in this formulation, it should be viewed as part of an irreconcilable opposition. In his Kitāb-i Kūchah (Book of the Street), poet Aḥmad Shāmlū (1925-2000/1304-79 sh.) defines mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh as “two things or individuals that will never come close to one another; mutual antipathy between two things.”[63] Through the use of this idiom, Arānī wishes to say that while the state is full of dread, a fully evolved proletariat is fearless, for the object of fear is always outside and ahead of the thing experiencing it: “The worker is not a proletarian by virtue of what-will-happen-to-him-tomorrow, but by virtue of what happens to him every minute of the day.”[64]Arānī’s declaration further revealed the Pahlavī state for what it was: an entity that never truly established the “legal-rational authority” proposed by the constitutionalist movement[65] and was thus fearful of its future. The facade of rationality that the largely traditional monarchy was able to erect through modern state institutions[66] was quickly turning to an irrational acting out (the destruction of every document on which the word ‘toiler’ appears), as per the dictum: “what the common human understanding finds irrational is in fact rational, and what it finds rational is irrational.”[67]

In fact, what was perhaps more disturbing for the state was the prospect of having the illusion of rational order exposed as an illusion. This is where the jinn in mis̱l-i jinn va bismillāh take precedence because like the state, their claim to being the harbingers and custodians of truth lose substance with the invocation of a single protective or apotropaic phrase.[68] The effect of bismillāh is instantaneous, and when combined with the Marxian eschewal of the criterion of existence from any theoretical discussion of the state,[69] the gaunt and even superfluous character of occult actuality becomes over-pronounced. To put it in a different way, the working class was capable of exposing the non-existence of the state and simply dispelling it with the slightest of gestures, before any self-reflection on the part of the state itself. After all, “[s]ince [its] strategy is […] often not known in advance within (and by) the State itself, it is not always susceptible to rational formulation.”[70] Thus, in this account, Arānī uses the jinn to describe the existential and rational limitations of the state and vice versa.

As such, the jinn became essentially homologous to the arguably defunct presuppositions of idealist philosophy in that they are “ideal figments of the brain.”[71] In Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism), Arānī asks that if the idealist position of the internality of movement, time, and space to the mind (ḥālāt-i ẕihnī-yi mā hastand) is affirmed,[72] meaning the “pure forms of sensible intuition as principles of a priori cognition,”[73] then the sensuous effects of, for instance, telephone calls, must essentially be attributed to miraculous or magical sources (muʿjizah va siḥr va jādū).[74] Accordingly, dragons, demons, Rustam, Satan and the jinn are said to be in contradiction to internal logic (taz̤ādd-i bāṭinī-yi manṭiqī),[75] for there are no materially based reasons for the supposition that spirit is constitutive of reality (rūḥ hamah jā mawjūd ast)[76]—an unfortunate stance that more often than not leads to the claim that our pockets are brimming with tiny slippery devils (shayṭānak´hā-yi rīz va līz).[77] Rather than the beings themselves, it is the belief in such spirits that is derivative of the material environment (ʿavāmil-i māddī-yi muḥīṭ). According to this position, and as Arānī illustrates in “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” there were specific material preconditions that historically necessitated jinn-worship (jinn’parastī).[78]

Arānī is here thinking of “natural religion,” the early adherents of which were alienated from a world that had “hardly been altered by history.”[79] This being so, in Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk Arānī is careful to remind his readers that they are living in a time during which causes (ʿillat) are no longer based on belief in the effects (iʿtiqād bi taʿs̱īr) of idols and the insidious Ahrīman,[80] meaning those “mental projections” that thwart a scientific theory of knowledge.[81] Indeed, it was his Marxian commitment to “objective law, causality and necessity in nature”[82] that allowed him to maintain this position. In another section of the text, he expands upon his approach to the occult through a discussion of contradiction, which is worth quoting in full:

It is usually said that any statement that does not engender a logical   contradiction is true, for contradiction is a sign of error. If we were to carefully study this definition of truth, we would find it to be false. For instance, it has until   recently been said that there exist only three dimensions in nature—length, width   and depth. In physics, we now know that time is another dimension, meaning that    the physical properties of nature consist of four dimensions. With this in mind, is  there a logical contradiction in the statement that nature consists of five dimensions?

If someone were to claim that nature must comprise of five dimensions in the same way that it has four, we would say that they are mistaken. Hence, though there is no internal logical contradiction in our thinking when we refer to dragons, demons, Rustam, Satan, jinn, etc., all of these imaginings are nevertheless false. Now, let us consider the other side of the coin: It is possible that, in reality, a contradiction can exist without the presence of an error—meaning that there is no logical contradiction—and that from an existing contradiction we can deem a certain position to be egregious. For instance, a three dimensional world apparently contradicts the notion of nature being comprised of four dimensions, but it cannot be said that the first case is false. If it were, none of the discoveries made on this spurious foundation could have been true and practical, meaning that the notion of three dimensional space has had a certain truth to it.

This being said, the fundamental sign in the recognition of truth is one’s connection to experience. We remarked that recognition is the relation between thought and nature, so if we want to pay attention to recognition then thought and nature must be related in actuality, and not simply have relations created between words in thought. We say that statements that affirm the existence of fantasies, jinn [and] dragons […] are erroneous because dragons, etc. cannot actually be shown. However, we say that Kepler’s statements regarding planetary orbit have truth to them because in every instance the orbit of the planets can be made subject to study as a way to assure the accuracy of Kepler’s law. The natural and material sciences of today have truth to them because according to theirown principles they are being actualised in factories where the necessities of life are being produced. It is enough for you to pay attention to the light of the electric bulb that surrounds you, the sound of the radio, and the automobile that gives you motion. You will then see that the principles of these sciences are in orderly relation to real events.[83]

To put it succinctly, though there is no logical contradiction in the assertion that demonic beings exist, the inability to empirically test this existence (or experience it in nature) compels Arānī to completely dismiss the possibility of occult existence. However, the crux of the matter is that although he relegated the belief in the demonic to the realm of non-existence, he nevertheless contributed to the movement that was positing the nature of the demonic as irrational. While early-modern Europe was witness to forms of experimentation that united witchcraft theory with scientific inquiry,[84] here Arānī derides the absence of experimentation in occult thought while simultaneously using the demonic in the service of scientific explanation. It can be argued that Arānī’s allusions to the demonic were intended to be purely tongue-in-cheek or that they semantically transcended their constituent meanings, but this detracts from the way that language “recommends” itself to the user, that it is possible to be “surprise[d]” by certain vernacular invocations.[85] Thus, in a moment of scientific explanation, a demonological expression, which is possibly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, is actually presented to the user by the prevailing lexicon. The demonological offering is arguably the once missing variable that makes the explanation finally work. The science that needed to be accounted for was beholden to a demonological framework that was being re-worked at the time, and by embracing the offering Arānī was also participating in its diachronic reformulation.

It is in light of Arānī’s demonology that his critical remarks against Shīʿī mujtahids should be examined. Clerics of his time are said to have ignored the precision of technical terms in the hard sciences. Instead, their loose and flexible handling of these terms emptied them of any empirical weight (magar īn ki mā kalamāt rā bi har maʿnī ki khvudimān khvāstah bāshīm). The example Arānī draws on in “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī” was the much discussed notion of how the European discovery of microbes (mīkrūb) was actually the disclosure of Satan’s deceptive spite (gharaz̤ az Shayṭān ki mīgūyand shumā rā gūl mīzanad).[86] Part of what Tavakoli-Targhi has called the “Pasteurization of Islam,” the microbial conception of the demonic emerged during a crisis in religious knowledge, particularly as it pertained to ritual purity. The identification and spread of contagious diseases allowed many skeptics to question pre-microbiological methods of maintaining cleanliness, but coupled with this were attempts to redeem the role of Islamic jurisprudence in governing hygiene. A few prominent medical professionals began reconciling microbiological facts with religious ordinances, and it is out of this that the identity of the jinn—the demonic more generally—and microorganisms began to take shape.[87]

Consistent with his criticism of the “spirit worship and Spiritism of America’s old women (rūḥ parastī va Spīrītīsm-i pīrzan´hā-yi Āmrīkā)” and the dictates of jinn-catchers (jin’gīr´hā) in Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint),[88] the occultist narrativisation of microbiology represented another form of mystification for Arānī. However, based on what we have demonstrated, it can be argued that while in the case of the medical practitioners studied by Tavakoli-Targhi the demonic is explained by science, Arānī’s demonology deploys an irrational demonism in the service of scientific explanation even though it is simultaneously relegated to non-existence.

Besides his unique approach to scientific explanation, Arānī also contributed to the way the occult sciences developed an enduring “epistemological legacy”[89] at the heart of scientific discourse. This is seen in “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” where Arānī differentiates the prognostications of the social sciences (ʿulūm-i ijtimāʿī) from the fallacious and flattering (durūgh va tamalluq) forecasts of occult practitioners,[90] or the so-called “men of faith” who set up shop (dukān) to deceive their customers.[91] However, he uses the same term, pīsh’bīnī (forecast), to account for the activity of each field of investigation. To paradoxically both deepen and rupture the association between the two, he then deploys the term ghayb’gūʿī (divination/prognostication) and allows for its double meaning to flourish. This case expresses how some elements of demonic and occult nomenclature were wrenched away from their traditional abode and integrated into scientific discourse while others were more deeply engrained into the fibre of lawlessness, as was the case with the satanic.

On account of these examples, one would be tempted to declare Arānī to have been devoutly idiosyncratic, but his uniqueness laid in the way his demonology, along with his contribution to the discursive structure of modern Iranian scientific discourse, were embedded in a deep commitment to materialist methodology and sensibility. Similar to the notion of over-identification where the “exaggeration of gestures” reveals a certain distance from the identity that those gestures embody,[92] Arānī’s intense fidelity to materialism betrays a certain distance from this mould insofar as he was beholden to the offerings of language, which made almost necessary the inclusion of the demonic in scientific explanation.

Thus, take note of the foregoing in light of the more orthodox and historical passages in Pisīkūlūzhī: According to the materialist critique, jinn, spirits and gods were engendered as personifications of human qualities and mediated by a distinct class of practitioners equipped with skills in fortune telling (fālgīrī), divination (az ghayb khabar dādan), magic (siḥr), and geomancy (raml). “However, slowly but surely, this profession (ḥirfat) came to serve as the basis of the group’s material life (zindagānī-yi māddī)” and was able in large part to structure popular opinion (ʿaqāʿid-i ʿumūmī).[93] Before dialectical materialism was said to be able to adequately explain the social function of devotion (fadākārī), it was once thought that an individual’s social powers (quvā-yi ijtimāʿī-yi yik fard) were rooted in the influence of beings like Ahrīman the Ignorant (jahl).[94] According to Arānī, during periods of religious reformation (maẕāhib-i iṣlāḥ) when the space for scientific inquiry was permitted (maydān rā barā-yi ʿaqāyid-i ‘ilmī āzād mīguẕārad), practices such as divination (ghaybgū’ī) become naturally inhibited.[95]

Because of this form of progress and man’s repudiation of his former incapacitation (dar ibtidā bashar ʿājiztar būdah),[96] he no longer needs to feel compelled to act based on the injunctions of jinn and devils (ḥukm-i ajinnah va shayāṭīn),[97] engage in apotropaic rituals—such as tribal tattooing (khāl’kūbī)—to distance himself from their insidiousness,[98] or submit to Mawlavī’s (Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 1207-73/604-672 gh.) periodisation model that describes the progressive perfection of existents (takāmul-i mawjūdāt) in contradistinction to the findings of the natural sciences (ʿulūm-i ṭabīʿī), such as fossil-based paleontological mapping,[99] for he understands that to cleanse one’s heart through illusory mystical instructions (dastūrāt-i mawhūm) is equivalent to wanting to dominate the skies by means of a flying carpet (qālīchah) or Sīmurgh, the ancient mythical flying creature of Iranian lore. “Not only has materialist thinking and methodology (ṭarz-i tafakkur va uslūb-i māddī) in reality effaced (maḥvkard) such illusions,” it has also offered man the conditions and instruments to realise goals such as flight.[100] Above all, it is the dialectical materialist thinker (mutifakkir-i māddī-yi diyāliktīk) who, with the precise and absolute laws of physics and chemistry (qavānīn-i fīzīk va shīmī-yi daqīq va jabrī) in his possession, is capable of brushing aside (pusht-i pā bizanad) the fallacious power of the geomancer’s breath (nafas-i rammāl).[101]

 

Kasravī’s Demonology

Besides their equal disdain for mystical thought,[102]Arānī’s notion of an irrational demonism also corresponded with Shīʿī reformer Aḥmad Kasravī’s approach to the topic. To understand Kasravī’s demonological contribution, it must be recognised that late-nineteenth century Iran was a period of immense religious transformation that radically altered the structure of Shīʿī inquiry and the sect’s understanding of reason. In addition to the (debatably) crippled state of scholastic rationalism[103] and the Orientalist exhortation that Iranians replace “their myths with facts,”[104] the reformist writings of ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Mīrzā Āqā Khān Kirmānī (1851-95/1270-1314 gh.) and Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn Afghānī (1838-97/1257-1316 gh.), which were rejuvenated a few decades later by the likes of Riz̤ā Qulī Sharīʿat Sangilajī (1890-1944/1309-63 gh.), ʿAlī Akbar Ḥakamī’zādah (d. 1988/1367 sh.) and Kasravī marked an attempt to reverse what they perceived to be a steep decline in thought (inḥiṭāṭ-i tafakur).[105] These thinkers and their supporters shared a desire for a rationally-inspired Islamic renaissance that would finally relinquish the dependency on the hadith-centrism of the Majlisī School.[106] The accompanying critique of fanaticism, superstition, and traditionalism was construed by the clerical establishment as a serious affront to its socio-political standing.[107] In spite of this, the reformers persisted in their efforts, and in so doing contributed to the complexity of the period’s demonological configuration.

In Kasravī’s Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation), not only is the necessity of religion declared (jahāniyān bī’dīn natavānand zīst), the central place of reason (āyīn-i khirad) in the endurance of dispensational unity is also underlined. By allowing rationality to be the internal guide of religion, every element that contradicts this precept becomes situated beyond the normative bounds of the creed (rāhnamā-yi dīn khirad ast va har ānchah bā khirad durust nabāshad az dīn bīrūn ast).[108] As Kasravī puts it, let the past be the past (guẕashtah’hā guẕashtah).[109] With reason at its helm, religion serves to inhibit dispersion (parākandagī) and the groundless thoughts (pindār’hā-yi bī’pāyah) that underpin this scattering. One of these thoughts is the hypostatic Ahrīman.[110]

What is ultimately betrayed in Kasravī’s line of thinking is his adherence to a crude and skeptical form of phenomenological bracketing[111] that jettisons the demonic from determined frontiers of reality for the purpose of focusing on the rational kernel of actuality. Kasravī says that if one accepts the reality of Ahrīman, there is a simultaneous misunderstanding (nimīshināsand) of religion.[112] In other words, like many ancient Greeks who “relapsed with a sigh of relief into the pleasures and comforts of the primitive” in the midst of great philosophical and medical advances,[113] Kasravī asserts that a regressive segment of Iranian society is attracted to Ahrīman’s fallacious advances during a time when rationalised religious discourse is most available for observance.

Like Arānī who renounced demonic existence but simultaneously used it for scientific explanation, Kasravī coerced the demonic into the realm of irrational non-existence, all the while allowing it to remain an integral part of his explanatory apparatus. To put it differently, for Kasravī the conceptualisation of a rational religion hinged upon the inclusive exclusion of the demonic. This is seen when Ahrīman is presented in a roundabout way as the product and producer of a multiplicity of polluted unknowings (ālūdah-yi ṣad nādānī),[114] forms of idleness (bīkārī),[115] as well as a renewed commitment to idol worship (but’parastī’hā-yi nuvīnī āghāz kardah’and) and the generational perversions (ān gumrāhī’hā-yi mardumān ast ki har zamān chīz-i dīgarī bāshad) that spring up unfailingly[116]—the consequence of such nescience being the scattered focus of obedience (dar barābar-i ānhā gardan kaj mīsākhtand).[117] He goes on to say that the idol worshippers (but’parastān) who pursue these avenues will end up in a shoreless field of thoughts and suppositions (maydān-i pindār va ingār-i bīkarān ast)[118] similar to the pre-Socratic Apeiron in that its limitlessness cannot be reduced to anything but itself.[119]

Kasravī’s realm of degenerative sliding (laghzishgāh) is said to be due to the abandonment of Islam’s simplicity (dīn-i sādah) in favour of Greek philosophical (falsafah-yi Yūnān) debates put forth by the likes of Plato (Aflāṭūn) and Aristotle (Arasṭū). Independent thoughts were appended to ancient Greek ideas (īnhā pindār’hā’ī nīz az khvud bi pindār’hā-yi kuhan-i Yūnānī afzūdand) and this led to the creation of Sufism (Ṣūfī’garī), esotericism (bāṭinī’garī), and kharābātī’garī (doctrine of frequenting taverns).[120] What resulted from all this activity of diluting truths with crookedness (rāstī’hā rā bā kajī’hā dar ham āmīkhtah’and)[121] was the production of empty and meaningless texts (nivishtah’hā-yi pūch-i bī’maʿnāʿī).[122] Though this meaninglessness has limitless potential, it is essentially based on a perceptual limitation (andāzah nigāh nadārand), particularly among those considered to be the most learned (dānishvarān).[123] They insist upon bringing forth self-circumscribed truths through the weaving of incantations (munājāt’bāfī), verse construction (āyah’sāzī), and sleight of hand (shu’badah’bāzī), while absolute certainties are left to languish.[124] This being so, there is a bestial (chahārpāyān va dadān)[125] quality to all these doctrinal constructions in that they are rooted in irrationality.

In his account of the bestial in Āyīn (Creed), Kasravī places stress on necessity (nāchār va nākhvāh)[126] and because the bestial is situated outside the bounds of the rationalistic religion he is advocating (kasānī ki dīn rā kinār mī’guzārand hamtā-yi chahārpāyān va dadān’and),[127] Natural necessity begins to intermingle with the demonic, since Ahrīman is also located in the beyond. Kasravī states that “most Europeans do not separate humans (ādamī) from other creatures (jānivarān),” and this leads to their support of human emulation of animal existence (bih gumān-i īshān ādamī mītavānad balkah mībāyad hamchūn dadān va chahārpāyān zindagī kunad).[128] By endorsing this crosspollination, scholars and philosophers (dānishmand va fīlsūf) are said to be enemies of humankind (gūyī dushman-i jins-i ādamī būdah’and) and envious (rashk) of animals,[129] even though (to Kasravī’s unbeknownst) the truth may be more ambivalent than this, for they also “refuse […] to be like […] animal[s].”[130]  All the same, the function of reason is to reject man’s integration with the bestial and to thus guide him away from irrationality (ādamī bāyad khirad rā rāhnamā-yi khvud sākhtah)[131] through the rise of prophets (payghambarān bi dushmanī-yi ānhā barkhvāstah’and).[132]

Running parallel to the wave of self-doubt that swept over segments of the Western intelligentsia just prior to and during the Second World War when “technical rationality” simply became synonymous with the “rationality of domination”[133] and “the Enlightenment […] eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness,”[134] was Kasravī’s assertion that modern European contributions to science—which, one could say, is of Ahrīmanic origin insofar as they are not rooted in a rational kernel—directly led to the creation of hellish instruments (abzār’hā-yi dūzakhī) of war. According to him, prior to the European takeover as the vanguard scientific civilisation, the sciences offered humanity more benefit than harm (sūdash bīshtar az zīyānash būdah), but that this has now reversed. Similar to the way Islamic philosophers and mystics supplement unalloyed truisms with self-circumscribed propositions, European scholars likewise pervert objective scientific findings with trifling ideational (pindār’hā) additives. This tendency is rooted in their insubstantial core (bīmāyah’and) and illusory claim to mastery (da’vī-yi ustādī mī´kunand). The connection between economic motive (vasīlah-yi tavāngarī)[135] and technology’s social ascendance[136] enters the demonological landscape when Kasravī equates profit maximisation with the increased production of hellish instruments (shumārah-yi abzār’hā-yi dūzakhī rūz’afzūn ast).[137] Though the Europeans have acquired a great wealth of knowledge (dānish-i bīkarān andūkhtah) and talent (hunarmandī zamīn rā bi āsimān dūkhtah), it is due to their irreligiosity (bī’dīnī) that the world has transformed into hell (dūzakh).[138]

Confused by the hypnotic grip the hellish instruments have on man (ākhar īn abzār-i dūzakhī chi arzishī dārad kih jahān īn hamah giriftār-i āsīb’hā-yi ū bāshad?!),[139] Kasravī leaves us off with the strong impression that it was not simply Riz̤ā Shāh who was “fascinated by technological aspects of modernisation.”[140] The wicked acts of the authorities (riẕālat’hā-yi ma’mūrīn)[141]—which he speaks of in Qānūn-i Dādgarī (The Just Law)—an almost obvious place to look for the demonic, is not the operative location of Iranian demonology during this time. It cannot even be said that his charge against the European scientific intervention is part of a critique of reason. For Kasravī, much of lived experience is rooted in demonic irrationality, to the point where bestial anti-humanism and modern instruments of war enter its orbit. In so doing, both the Shīʿī modernist and Arānī, the hardened dialectical materialist, contributed to the transformation of a discourse they are rarely—if ever—associated with, thus sending the demonic into a deeper state of lawlessness.

[1]Taqī Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār (Determinism and Free Will),” in Ās̱ār va Maqālāt (Œuvre) (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977), 146-57.

[2]In this regard, my approach, which at times incorporates the views of thinkers who categorically denied the existence of demons but obliquely contributed to the evolving longevity of demonism through their demonographical inscriptions, departs from those studies that focus on the “convictions of those who believed in its very possibility.” For the latter position, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 28.

[3]Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29.

[4]Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 42.

[5]Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 54.

[6]Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.

[7]Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 2.

[8]Lloyd Ridgeon, Sufi Castigator (New York: Routledge, 2006), 45.

[9]Whitney S. Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 239.

[10]Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983), 35.

[11]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 95.

[12]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 239.

[13]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 25-6.

[14]Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 1: 114.

[15]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 139.

[16]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 163.

[17] Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 95.

[18]Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs, 264.

[19]Wilferd Madelung, “Al-Ghazali’s Changing Attitude to Philosophy,” in Islam and Rationality, vol. 1, ed. Georges Tamer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 28.

[20]What gives credence to this statement is Satan’s association with the jinn, subtle beings thought to possess rational faculties. In the same way that Qur’an commentators link Iblīs’ rational follies to that of humans, the holy text reprimands humans and jinn in equal measure for their egregious use of reason and free will. See Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 13-5.

[21]Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥasan Āqā Najafī Qūchānī, Sīyāḥat-i Sharq (Eastern Journey) (Mashhad: Chāp-i Tūs, 1972/1351 sh.), 14.

[22]Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 194.

[23]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 147.

[24]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtīiyār,” 147.

[25]FarzinVahdat, God and Juggernaut (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 97.

[26]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” 147.

[27]Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Satan, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2005), 8.

[28]Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 35-6.

[29]R.M. Frank, “Currents and Countercurrents,” in Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought & Society, ed. Peter G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 133.

[30]Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103.

[31]Maḥmūd Sarshār, “Ṭarīqah-yi Kashf-i Jaʿldar ʿAsr-i Ḥāz̤ir (The Path to Unveiling Forgeries in the Present Era),” Kānūn-i Vukalā 32 (1953/1332 sh.): 22.

[32]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 64-5.

[33]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 66.

[34]“… increasing intellectualization and rationalization does not mean increasing general knowledge of the conditions under which we live our lives. It means something else. It means the knowledge or belief that if we only wanted to we could learn at any time that there are, in principle, no mysterious unpredictable forces in play, but that all things–in principle–can be controlled through calculation. This, however, means the disenchantment of the world. No longer, like the savage, who believed that such forces existed, do we have to resort to magical means to gain control over or pray to the spirits. Technical means and calculation work for us instead. This, above all, is what intellectualization actually means.” See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations, ed. John Dreijmanis, trans. Gordon C. Wells (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 33.

[35]Karl Popper, The Open Universe (New York: Routledge, 2000), 30.

[36]This is my modification of Alfred Landé’s statement that the deterministic impulse “may have its roots in a feeling of being ourselves demons who can deliberately start deterministic chains.” See Alfred Landé, “The Case for Indeterminism,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: Collier, 1961), 85.

[37]Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 48.

[38]Taqī Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī: ʿIlm-i Rūḥ (Psychology: The Science of the Spirit) (N.p.: Intishārāt-iĀbān, 1978/2537 sha.), 259.

[39]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 259.

[40]“[…] versagt sie sich zugleich jedem Eindringen in sie.” See Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/36),” in Gesamtausgabe, I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1914-1970, Band 5, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 33.

[41]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 260-1.

[42]Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 327.

[43]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 260.

[44]Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), 167.

[45]R.W. Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133.

[46]Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” 145.

[47]Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” 160-1.

[48]Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), vii.

[49]Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 300.

[50]Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, 16.

[51]Zabih, The Communist Movement in Iran, 67.

[52]Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 1.

[53]Asef Bayat, “Historiography, Class, and Iranian Workers,” in Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, ed. Zachary Lockman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 192-3.

[54]Habib Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 5-6.

[55]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 14.

[56]Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 1.

[57]Taqī Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī (Dr. TaqīArānī’s Final Defence) (N.p.: Intishārāt-i Ḥizb-i Tūdah-yi Īrān, n.d.), 17.

[58]Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī, 17.

[59]In response to the question of whence German emancipation will arise, Marx says, “… in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not a class of civil society, of a social group that is the dissolution of all social groups, of a sphere that has a universal character because of its universal sufferings and lays claim to no particular right, because it is the object of no particular injustice but of injustice in general. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only a human one.” See Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81.

[60]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 17.

[61]Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran, 20-2.

[62] Arānī, Ākharīn Difāʿ-i Duktur Taqī Arānī, 17.

[63]Aḥmad Shāmlū, in collab. with Āydā Sarkīsiyān, Kitāb-i Kūchah, B, Daftar-i Duvvum (Book of the Street) (Tehran: Maziyār, 1998/1377 sh.), 1318.

[64]Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings,” in The Spectre of Hegel, ed. François Matheron and trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 25.

[65]H.E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), 17.

[66]Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran (New York: Routledge, 2007), 51.

[67]Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991) 3: 914.

[68]Alireza Mohammadi Doostdar, “Fantasies of Reason: Science, Superstition, and the Supernatural in Iran” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012), 61.

[69]Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 49.

[70]Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 2000), 33.

[71]Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique, trans. R. Dixon (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 73.

[72]Taqī Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk (Dialectical Materialism) (Tehran: Mu’assisah-yi Intishārāt-i Ātash, 1946/1325 sh.), 16.

[73]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 157.

[74]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 16. If we are to suppose that Arānī is referring to Kant’s transcendental idealism by virtue of his quip against his distinctive theory of time and space, then the argument concerning the questionable sources of sensuous effects was raised by others as well. Like Jacobi, Arānī is suspicious of the place of matter and its determinacy in the idealist system, but their ultimate arguments are at variance. According to Jacobi, “what we realists call actual objects or things independent of our representations are for the transcendental idealist only internal beings which exhibit nothing at all of a thing that may perhaps be there outside us, or which the appearance may refer. Rather, these internal beings are merely subjective determinations of the mind, entirely void of anything truly objective.” See F.H. Jacobi, “On Transcendental Idealism,” in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 334. The problem is that Kant admits to the existence of matter and its permanence, and simply states that “outer sense” is tied to “inner sense” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 122.). This connection makes the supposed idealist bewilderment of external incidents quite dubious. Furthermore, Kant had a specific understanding of miracles and their relationship with rational comprehension. As he puts it, ” [in] practical affairs, […] we cannot possibly count on miracles, or in any way take them into consideration in the employment of our reason (which is necessary in all circumstances of life).” See Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, trans and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998), 101.

Notice how remarkably similar Arānī’s critique of idealism in this one sentence is to the example of the satanic child used to explain the concept of suggestion. In both cases, an inexplicable evil bursts forth from the external world. In his critique of idealism, he rebukes what he had acceded to earlier, thus alienating himself from his true association with the demonic. For a homologous example concerning religion, see Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 99.

[75]Arānī, Mātirīyālīsm-iDīyāliktīk, 31.

[76]It can be argued that Arānī is here presenting another skewed interpretation of the idealist tradition. It is not simply that mind or spirit constitute what appears to be the material world. After all, Kant himself was careful to point out that matter is “something permanent, which must therefore be a thing distinct from all my representations and external” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 122.). External objects, matter, or to put it in Kant’s term, “outer appearances,” are only grounded by the mind (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 158.). Certain “subjective condition[s]” need to be met before the intuition of these appearances (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 161.), which hold particular “shape[s] and position[s] (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163.).

This being said, Arānī might as well be referring to Berkeley’s subjective idealism which, at times, staggered close to objective idealist territory, particularly in his argument that the world is “the product of a single supreme spiritual cause.” See V.I. Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” in Collected Works, 45 vols., trans. Abraham Fineberg and ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 14:32.

[77]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 51.

[78]Taqī Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī (Mysticism and the Principles of Materialism),” in Ās̱ār va Maqālāt (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977), 140.

[79]Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1976) 5: 44.

[80]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 54.

[81]Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” 78.

[82]Lenin, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” 155.

[83]Arānī, Mātiriyālīsm-i Diyāliktīk, 30-1.

[84]Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 146.

[85]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 88.

[86]Taqī Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī,” 119.

[87]Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam,” Iran Nameh 30 (2015): iv-xix.

[88]Taqī Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī (The Human from a Material Standpoint) (Tehran: Majallah-yi Dunyā, 1944/1323 sh.), 34.

[89]Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 236.

[90]Arānī, “Jabr va Ikhtiyār,” 156.

[91]Rahnema, Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics, 113.

[92]Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), 355.

[93]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 270.

[94]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 30-1.

[95]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 272.

[96]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 275.

[97]Arānī, Pisīkūlūzhī, 275.

[98]Taqī Arānī, “Hunar va Mātiriyālīsm (Art and Materialism),” in Nivishtah´ha-yi ʿIlmī, Falsafī, va Ijtimāʿī (Scientific, Philosophical, and Social Writings) (Florence: Intishārāt-i Mazdak, 1975/1354 sh.), 32.

[99]Arānī, “ʿIrfān va Uṣūl-i Māddī,” 119.

[100]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 31.

[101]Arānī, Bashar Az Naẓar-i Māddī, 57.

[102]Ridgeon, Sufi Castigator, 191.

[103]John Walbridge, God and Logic in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 169.

[104]Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17.

[105]Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29.

[106]Ali Rahnema, Shi’i Reformation in Iran (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 112.

[107]Sohrab Behdad, “Utopia of Assassins: Navvab Safavi and the Fada’ian-e Eslam in Prerevolutionary Iran,” in Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Ramin Jahanbegloo (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2004), 73-4.

[108]Aḥmad Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī (The Path of Salvation) (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Majīd, 1378 sh.), 26.

[109]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 117.

[110]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 26-7.

[111]Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 61.

[112]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 27.

[113]E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 193.

[114]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 28.

[115]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 152.

[116]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 76.

[117]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 28.

[118]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 37.

[119]Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 9.

[120]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 37-8.

[121]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 76.

[122]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 39.

[123]Kasravī, Rāh-i Rastgārī, 41.

[124]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 76-7.

[125]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 51.

[126]Kasravī, Rāh-iRastgārī, 51.

[127]Aḥmad Kasravī, Āyīn (Creed) (N.p.: Chāp-i Rashdīyah, 1977/2536 sha.), (Part I) 52.

[128]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 56.

[129]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 5.

[130]In respect to historical memory, it is said, “Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60.

[131]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 57.

[132]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 10.

[133]Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95.

[134]Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.

[135]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 38.

[136]Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95.

[137]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 38.

[138]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part I) 52.

[139]Kasravī, Āyīn, (Part II) 18.

[140]Atabaki and Zürcher, “Introduction,” 11.

[141]Aḥmad Kasravī, Qānūn-i Dādgarī (The Just Law) (Tehran: N.p., 1340 sh.), 34.

 

Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is an associate professor of Persian at Leiden University. In addition to many articles, blogs, and chapters, he has authored, edited, and translated several books on Persian literature and culture. His latest publications include the edited volumes Pearls of Meanings: Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, Sufism and History of Iranian Studies in Europe by J.T.P. de Bruijn (Leiden University Press, 2020) and The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis (Mage, 2019). He is the founding general editor of the Iranian Studies Series at Leiden University Press.

ابریق می مرا شکستی ربّی
بر من در عیش را ببستی ربّی
من می خورم و تو می‌کنی بدمستی
خاکم به دهان، مگر تو مستی ربّی

O Lord! you broke my wine jug;
O Lord! You barred the door of pleasure to me.
I am drinking wine while you like a drunkard behave badly
O Lord! May I perish [for asking], but are you drunk?[1]^,[2]

This quatrain is part of an anecdote recounting how God broke Omar Khayyam’s (ca. 1048–1131) wine jug when he wanted to drink. It is said that Khayyam composed this quatrain extemporarily to protest against God.[3] Immediately after these blasphemous words, his face turned black. To apologize to God, he composed the following quatrain:

 

ناکرده گنه در این جهان کیست بگو!
آن کس که گنه نکرد چون زیست بگو!

من بد کنم و تو بد مکافات دهی
پس فرق میان من و تو چیست بگو!

Tell me, who in this world has not sinned?
Tell me, how does one who has not sinned live?
I do wrong while you punish wrongly,
Tell me, what is then the difference between you and me?[4]

 

God accepted his apologies, and his face returned to normal.

This is one of the dozen anecdotes in which Khayyam is associated with wine and blasphemy. It is cited by two eminent scholars of Persian literary history, Qasem Ghani (1892–1951) and Mohammad-ʿAli Forughi (1877–1942), to highlight the problematic reception of Khayyam in Iran. They write:

it is disappointing that although these quatrains have made Khayyam famous, our people, both learned and uninformed, have not appreciated his worth and have created imaginings about him . . . Dry mystics and clerics have considered his words soaked with heresy, while people in general think of him as a wine drinker. They look at his poetry from the perspective of praising and prompting wine drinking. For the same reason, another group presupposes that he had no beliefs in the soul’s Origin (mabda’) and the soul’s Return (maʿad) and have, therefore, become his enthusiasts, while the divines discredit him for the same ideas.[5]

In this paper, which is dedicated to my teacher, colleague, and friend Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, I would like to examine several social implications of Khayyam’s poetry. Dr. Karimi-Hakkak’s fascination with Persian poetry as a living tradition is a leitmotiv in his publications, examining the powerful artistic appeal of this millennium-old literary tradition in modern times.[6] This essay is just a droplet in the reception history of the Persian sage (hakim) Omar Khayyam, who has become a personification of transgressive ideas in Persian literary history.[7] The fascination I share with Dr. Karimi-Hakkak is due not only to Khayyam’s poetic genius (although he is not the author of the majority of quatrains attributed to him), but also to his problematic reception in twentieth-century Iran and how he has been connected to the notion of modernity. Both religious and secular intellectuals have tried to position Khayyam in the modern intellectual history of Iran in their own ways.

An exhaustive treatment of this topic would include a review of the ways in which influential figures in the modern cultural history of Iran have treated Khayyam’s philosophy. Briefly, Khayyam’s contemporary reception in Iran differs from the appreciation of other classical Persian poets such as Saʿdi (ca. 1210–92), Rumi (1207–73), Hafez (1315–90), and even Ferdowsi (ca. 940–1029), although the latter has also been connected to modern nationalism and Iranian identity. This essay concentrates on two aspects of Khayyam’s reception: First, it investigates how Khayyam’s faith and ideas on life and the afterlife are perceived by Iranian intellectuals of modern Iran in general, and by scholars such as ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush in particular. Second, it analyzes how Khayyam’s quatrains dealing with bacchanalian themes and motifs have been received by several Persian literary scholars who try to contextualize them in Islamic ethics. In articles on Khayyam and in introductions to his quatrains, they have sought to defend Khayyam’s religiosity and mitigate his allusions to wine.

In today’s Iran, Khayyam has the reputation of a cynical unbeliever. This reputation is constantly buttressed by both medieval Persian and modern Western evaluations of Khayyam. An example of the latter is a tourist guide about Iran by Maria O’Shea, published in the series Culture Shock! In one chapter, “The Language of Poetry and Sugar,” the author examines the role of poetry in daily life in Iran, emphasizing that Persian poets have confirmed “the Iranian concept of poetry as a necessity of life rather than an abstract art form.”[8] She emphasizes the “startling degree of erudition” in classical Persian poetry and names a few classical masters: Omar Khayyam, followed by Saʿdi, Rumi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi. O’Shea describes Khayyam as follows: “Like many poets, his work protests against the established articles of faith and contains many possible blasphemies as well as exhortations to hedonism.”[9] O’Shea is not simply repeating a Western appreciation of Khayyam; she is informing her potential travelers to Iran about the reactions they may receive if they mention Khayyam. This image of Khayyam as a blasphemous poet dates from the twelfth century.

Khayyam’s Reception in Medieval Persia 

In the medieval period, there is little criticism of wine in Persian poetry. Wine drinking, carpe diem, hedonism, and similar motifs and themes occur extensively in the works of other poets and authors. Bacchanalia is not only an indispensable part of Persian poetry; it was an essential part of Persian courtly culture and Persian Sufism, as chapters in the “mirror for princes” genre and mystical manuals testify.[10] Khayyam’s name is heavily associated with wine and is included in several anthologies of quatrains. In this respect, there is no disapproval at all. Criticism is directed rather at Khayyam’s philosophy concerning God, his creation, and the hereafter. These issues were also addressed by other Persian philosophers and poets before and after Khayyam, but their discussions did not generate such persistent condemnation. The criticism is directed at Khayyam as a philosopher who discusses thorny theological issues, planting doubts in the hearts and minds of Muslims. Jamal al-Din Yusof Qifti (1172–1248) refers to Khayyam’s deviant ideas in his poetry, characterizing them as serpents for the Sharia.[11]

I limit myself here to two medieval authors who criticize Khayyam for his nonconformist opinions on God and as a materialist philosopher—namely, Farid al-Din ʿAttar (died about 1221) and Najm al-Din Daya (AH 573–654/AD 1177–1256).[12] In his Elahi-nama, ʿAttar tells an anecdote about Khayyam in his grave. A seer comes to his grave and sees that the soul of the learned Khayyam is covered with perspiration, for he has realized that despite all his wisdom, he cannot rely on his philosophical knowledge in the hereafter. ʿAttar’s message is that any knowledge, especially intellectual discursive reasoning, that does not contain trust in God cannot save humankind in the hereafter, even if one is as learned as Khayyam. In ʿAttar’s opinion, intellect is part of the whole and can never fully understand the whole. He compares it to a person who by the aid of a candle wants to see the sun. The anecdote removes Khayyam from mysticism and connects him to philosophers who are characterized as natamam, “incomplete,” “deficient,” or even “faulty”:[13]

 

یکی بینندهٔ معروف بودی

که ارواحش همه مکشوف بودی

دمی گر بر سر گوری رسیدی

در آن گور آنچه می‌رفتی بدیدی

بزرگی امتحانی کرد خردش

به خاک عمر خیّام بردش

بدو گفتا چه می‌بینی درین خاک

مرا آگه کن ای بینندهٔ پاک

جوابش داد آن مرد گرامی

که این مردیست اندر ناتمامی

بدان درگه که روی آورده بودست

مگر دعویِ دانش کرده بودست

کنون چون گشت جهل خود عیانش

عَرَق می‌ریزد از تشویر جانش

میان خجلت و تشویر ماندست

وزان تحصیل در تقصیر ماندست

بر آن دَر حلقه چون هفت آسمان زد

ز دانش لاف آنجا کی توان زد

چو نه انجام پیداست و نه آغاز

نیابد کس سر و پای جهان باز

فلک گوئیست و گر عمری شتابی

چو گویش پای و سر هرگز نیابی

Once, there was a famous clairvoyant

to whom all souls were visible.

He had only to approach a tomb for a moment

to see what was happening in that tomb.

A great man tested the ability of this clairvoyant;

He brought him to the grave of ʿOmar Khayyam

and said to him: “What do you see in this grave?

O pure seer, make me aware.”

The honourable seer gave him answer:

“Here lies a man who is incomplete,

because of the court to which he turned.

Although he claimed to have knowledge,

now, when his ignorance has become clear

he is perspiring out of shame for his own soul.

He is caught between sweating and shame.

The pursuit of knowledge has left him open to blame.

He made circles at the Gate like the seven revolving heavens.[14]

How could he boast of knowledge in the hereafter!

Since neither the beginning nor the end can be seen,

no one can solve the riddle of the world.[15]

The heavenly sphere is a ball, and like a ball,

A lifetime of haste won’t ever discover its head or its foot.”[16]

 

The second author is Najm al-Din Daya, who cites two quatrains in his mystic manual Mersad al-ʿebad and uses them to criticize Khayyam for his materialist thoughts and his skepticism about the creation of the world. As a Hanafite, adhering to Ashʿarite rationalist theology, Daya was “an enemy of the philosophers because of their claim that the intellect (ʿaql) could reach gnosis.”[17] Intellectual ratiocination fails to perceive the truth. Daya cites Khayyam’s quatrains to attack philosophers. The first is an example of Khayyam’s agnosticism about human purpose, while the second is cited to condemn his doubt about God’s purpose in creating humankind:

 

در دایره‌ای که آمدن و رفتن ماست

او را نه بدایت نه نهایت پیداست

کس می نزند دمی در این معنی راست

کاین آمدن از کجا و رفتن به کجاست

We come and go in a circle

whose begin and end are invisible

In this world, no one speaks a sincere word

about where we come from and where we are going.

دارنده چو ترکیب طبایع آراست

از بهر چه او فکندش اندر کم و کاست

گر زشت آمد پس این صورعیب کِراست

ور خوب آمد خرابی از بهر چراست

Why did the Owner who created the arrangement of nature

cast it to include shortcomings and deficiency?

If it was ugly, who is to blame for these flawed forms?

And if is beautiful, why does he break it again?[18]

 

The second quatrain is a popular one as it appears for the first time in Fakhr al-Din Mohammad b. ʿOmar Razi’s (d. 1209) exegesis of the Koran entitled Resala fi ‘l-tanbih ʿala baʿḍ al-asrar al-mawʿdah fi baʿḍ al-surah al-Qur’an al-ʿazim and is cited in connection with the concept of maʿad or the place of the soul’s return.[19] During Khayyam’s time and later, there was a heated discussion as to whether the soul returns to the body on Resurrection Day. Philosophers generally believed that human beings would return to their original spiritual state after death.[20] The purpose of this temporal material life was to prepare oneself for eternal life in the hereafter. Humans were expected to purify themselves through ascetic training and to acquire knowledge of the world in order to know the Creator. The more one knows about the Creator, the more one knows about oneself, since the individual is created in the image of God and is a microcosmic representation of the universe. As de Bruijn explains, “according to this theory, life is to be conceived as a cyclical process which offers humans the opportunity to perfect their pre-eternal souls.”[21] Theologians gave a different interpretation of maʿad, as “the idea of a separation between body and soul in the afterlife was unacceptable to them because it contradicted the dogma of the resurrection of the dead held to be one of the foundations of Islamic orthodoxy. In their view, maʿad could only mean the return of the souls to their resurrected bodies, which shall take place on the Day of Judgement.”[22]

This difference of opinion between philosophers, Sufis, and orthodox theologians created the image of Khayyam the blasphemer, which has persisted to this day. While the accusations made against Khayyam in his own time and soon after suggest that he may be the author of these quatrains, the unauthentic quatrains found in later collections, in which Khayyam defends himself against the accusation of heresy, show how a tradition was formed around his character. This tradition of accusing him of heresy also created a countermovement for those who identified with Khayyam to defend themselves. The authenticity of the apologia quatrains is most questionable:

 

دشمن به غلط گفت که من فلسفی‌ام

ایزد داند که آنچه او گفت نیَم

لیکن چو در این غم آشیان آمده‌ام

آخر کم از آنکه من بدانم که کی‌ام

The enemy wrongly accuses me of being a philosopher.

God knows that I am not what the enemy says.

But since I find myself in this house of sorrow

The truth is, should not I know who I am?[23]

As previously noted, a reception history of Khayyam in the medieval Persian world is certainly a desideratum, as it would clarify the function of transgressive ideas in discussions of thorny theological issues. But that is beyond the scope of this essay.

 

Khayyam in Twentieth-Century Iran

Attar and Daya’s evaluations of Khayyam have certainly contributed to his image among religious people in Iran. Even those religious people who furtively read him have mixed feelings. As the following anecdote shows, the first acquaintance of many Iranians from a traditional Islamic background with Khayyam is ambivalent. The prominent Persian scholar ʿAbd ‘l-Hosayn Zarrinkub (1923–1999) recalls:

I can never forget my first acquaintance with Khayyam. I was eleven years old when I was first introduced to this grey old man. I do not know which of my father’s friends gave me a cheap edition of his quatrains with a lot of spelling mistakes, but I know very well that my father’s strict and thorough approach to rearing and educating me could neither exclude this book (which is from end to end unbelief, scepticism and apostasy) from our house, nor withhold me from having the book and reading it. In those days, there was nothing else in our house but the sound of daily prayer and recitations of the Qur’ān. In those days, I was a frail child who sought pretexts [to go my own way] and I was just recovering from a long illness. I do not know how many times I read the book, on that Friday at the end of February, but I do know that at the end of the day, many of the heart-ravishing, melodious poems had been engraved on the blank tablet of my mind. [. . .] I remember that one day I recited the quatrains for my grandmother. Tears filled her eyes, she cursed the poet, and then she went out of my room. Perhaps it was the same attitude [on her part] that had made my father an enemy of Khayyam.[24]

This candid recollection reveals several aspects of Khayyam’s reception. Although Zarrinkub does not say so directly, it is clear that his father feared that the book would sow seeds of doubt and unbelief in the heart of his young son. On the other hand, his father allows a friend—someone who values the poems—to give a cheap edition to his son. The father perhaps feels a paradox: on one hand, Khayyam reminds his readers that life is brief and the world is vanity, while on the other, he problematizes theological issues such as the role of the Creator, and the nature of the hereafter, in a way that disturbs readers with a religious disposition.

Another example of an ambivalent appreciation of Khayyam is ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush’s discussion of death in his chapter “The Services and Benefits of Religion (khadamat va hasanat-e din).”[25] This is a long chapter covering several topics. In treating the question of human existence on earth, he says, “If we have come to this world as guests, what does the descending mean?” The author explains that humans are guests of God, both originally in paradise and now on earth. He contrasts the views of Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–73) to the philosophy of Khayyam by citing the following quatrain of Khayyam comparing humans with a cup of wine, a plaything of destiny:

 

جامی است که چرخ آفرین می‌زندش

صد بوسه مهر بر جبین می‌زندش

این کوزه‌گر دهر چنین جام لطیف

می‌سازد و باز بر زمین می‌زندش

 

It is a cup that is struck by the elevated Wheel.

It gives the cup a hundred loving kisses on his forehead.

The pot-maker of Time makes such an elegant cup,

He makes it and smashes it again to the ground.[26]

 

Here God is depicted as a pot maker who creates humans and smashes them into pieces again. Sorush rejects Khayyam’s view, stating that those who consider the shortcomings and bitter experiences of this world as disappointments cannot see God and cannot have a loving relationship with God. Sorush observes that it would be senseless to create such a convoluted creature as a human being only to break that creature into a hundred pieces. Rational reasoning can never find an explanation for this. Sorush cites Rumi, who, like many other Persian mystics such as ʿAttar and Daya, considers death as eternal life, a union between the lover and the beloved. He cites the following piece from Rumi’s Mathnavi, in which he depicts death as the soul’s union with the Creator:

 

مرگ دان آنک اتّفاق امّتست

کآب حیوانی نهان در ظلمتست

همچو نیلوفر برو زین طرف جو

همچو مستسقی حریص و مرگ‌جو

مرگ او آبست و او جویای آب

می‌خورد والله اعلم بالصواب

ای فسرده عاشق ننگین نمد

کو ز بیم جان ز جانان می‌رمد

سوی تیغ عشقش ای ننگ زنان

صد هزاران جان نگر دستک‌زنان

جوی دیدی کوزه اندر جوی ریز

آب را از جوی کی باشد گریز

آب کوزه چون در آب جو شود

محو گردد در وی و جو او شود

وصف او فانی شد و ذاتش بقا

زین سپس نه کم شود نه بدلقا

Know death, as agreed among the Islamic community,

As the Water of Life hidden in the Land of Darkness.

Grow like the water-lily from this side of the river-bank,

Like one who suffers from dropsy be greedy and crave for death.

To him, the water is death, yet he seeks the water

He drinks it — and God best knows the right course.

O frozen lover, in the felt garment of shame,

Who, in fear of his life, flees the Beloved!

O you disgrace to women! Behold a hundred thousand souls

clapping their hands, [running] towards the sword of His love!

When you see a river, pour your jug in the river:

how could the water flee from the river?

When the jug’s water is in the river-water,

it is dissolved in it, and the river becomes it.

Its attributes have disappeared, while its essence remains.

After this, it does not dwindle or become ill-favoured.[27]

 

Sorush uses Rumi’s poem to argue that death is not like the pot that is fractured (gosastan), but like the water in it being united (peyvastan) with a flowing stream and then the ocean.[28] Sorush observes that in this context, religion serves to reconcile humans with this world. As humans cannot do anything about death, religion offers a vision of the meaning of death. In this line of reasoning, religion comes to help when ratiocinating, intellectual deliberations fall short.

Sorush appropriates the mystical philosophy of Rumi for his political ideology, but whenever he feels that the philosophy of Khayyam’s quatrains fit his own ideas, he cites him. Khayyam is so much part and parcel of Persian culture that even scholars and politicians who disagree with his philosophy on life, death, and the hereafter cite him as rhetorical buttressing. Discussing the topic of “Ideology and Worldly Religion” (ide’olozhi va din-e donyavi), Sorush posits that those who have not acquired the right perception of this world and the hereafter cannot claim to have fully understood the implications of religion for this world and the hereafter. He then demonstrates the relationship between this world and the hereafter through the metaphor of an embryo and the world, again citing Rumi:

چون جنین بد آدمی بد خون غذا

از نجس پاکی برد مؤمن کذا

[…]

گر جنین را کس بگفتی در رحم

هست بیرون عالمی بس منتظم

یک زمینی خرمی با عرض و طول

اندرو صد نعمت و چندین اکول

کوه‌ها و بحرها و دشت‌ها

بوستان‌ها باغ‌ها و کشتها

آسمانی بس بلند و پر ضیا

آفتاب و ماهتاب و صد سها

[. . .]

او به‌حکم حال خود منکر بدی

زین رسالت معرض و کافر شدی

When man was an embryo, his food was blood:

Likewise, a believer finds some purity in the “unclean” thing.

[. . .]

If anyone were to tell the embryo in the womb,

“Outside, there is a well-ordered world,

A pleasant earth, broad and long,

containing a hundred delights and so many things to eat,

with mountains and seas and plains,

fragrant orchards, gardens and sown fields.

A sky that’s very lofty, full of light,

sun and moonbeams and a hundred stars.”

[. . .]

The embryo would deny this, because of its present state, and would reject this message and be an unbeliever.[29]

 

Sorush cites these lines to explain humankind’s position in this world, and the reasons for human birth and death. He develops a mystic interpretation, stating that a human is separated from the world of non-existence through a set of veils in the same way that a fetus is concealed in the womb. Before citing the second couplet of one of Khayyam’s quatrains, Sorush explains this metaphor:

A foetus is both in the womb and in this world. This world has two phases: a prenatal and a postnatal phase. Only a veil separates these two phases. When we were still in the womb, we could not see the world and we did not know that we were in this world and that our mother was in this world and that our food was also from this world, etc. There was a veil between us and this world. We saw only the outward, i.e., we saw only ourselves, and the little world of the womb, but inside this embryonic world, which stands for this large and expanded world, was unknown to us and was veiled to us. As Khayyam says,[30]

 

[اسرار ازل را نه تو دانی و نه من

وین حرفِ معمّا نه تو خوانی و نه من]

هست از پس پرده گفت‌وگوی من و تو

چون پرده برافتد، نه تو مانی و نه من

[Neither you nor I know the secrets of pre-eternity,

Neither you nor I can read these enigmatic letters.]

Our dialogue takes place behind the veil:

When the veil drops, neither you nor I remain.[31]

 

Although this quatrain shows a good deal more agnosticism about the hereafter than either Rumi’s poem or Sorush’s reading, Sorush uses only the last couplet to emphasize the need for gnostic knowledge to understand the hereafter. Immediately after his citation, Sorush adds:

When this veil falls, we will enter into another world and the previous world falls away. At the moment we live in this world and [then] we are living in the Hereafter. We are the same embryos who are in the womb of this world, but this whole world and the embryos are together in the world of the Hereafter, which is the inner (baten) of this world. But the people who see the outward (zaher-bin), only see the life in the outward world and are ignorant of its inside (baten) which is the Hereafter. You know that God says to people, especially the Prophets, on the Resurrection Day, ‘Certainly you were heedless of it, but now We have removed from your veil, so your sight today is sharp’ (Qur’ān 50:22). When you had not experienced this situation, you were ignorant of this. We removed the veil from your eyes, we tore apart the veils. Today, your eyes are sharp and seeing. This means that your eyes were not seeing previously, because a veil and a curtain were put before them. It is just enough to tear them, and in that case, all our eyes will be opened, and see the inner world (bateni) which we were barred from seeing.[32]

While in the previous example, Sorush positions Khayyam and Rumi in an oppositional binary, representing two medieval belief systems, here he is integrating Khayyam’s poem entirely in a mystical and Koranic context. For Sorush, the idea of removing the veil (i.e., dying) is attractive and suits perfectly his argument, while Khayyam’s doubt about the existence of the hereafter is ignored here; even the first couplet is not cited. In a literal interpretation of the last couplet, Khayyam observes that “when the veil drops, neither you nor I remain,” which implies that it is not clear what happens with a human soul after death. As I have analyzed elsewhere, the philosophy of this particular quatrain is not mystic, because in mysticism, the purpose of creation is defined.[33] God has created humankind out of love. In the first encounter between God and the souls of humankind, God asked Adam’s souls, “Am I not your Lord?” to which the souls answered, “Yes, we witness you are.” Mystics interpret this affirmative answer as the souls’ being spellbound by God’s beauty. The souls had become drunk by the beauty, and therefore, they answered positively. It is this moment of union with the Creator that the human soul craves. Orthodox Muslims may read Khayyam’s quatrain as sheer blasphemy, as the poet is claiming that humans cannot understand the reasons for God’s creation. From an orthodox point of view, God’s purpose for humankind on earth is evident: humans are temporarily on this earth to sow the seeds of good acts in order to harvest them in the eternal hereafter.

Even more provocative assertions are expressed in a series of quatrains attributed to Khayyam. In his prose work, Khayyam follows the critical ideas of Ebn Sina (Avicenna, about AH 370–428/AD 980–1037) about God’s knowledge of the particulars of what humans do and say, bodily resurrection on Judgment Day, and the existence of paradise and hell.[34] In several quatrains ascribed to Khayyam, he complains about a Creator who has dumped human beings in a deprived world with many responsibilities and without interfering with their affairs:

یارب تو گلم سـرشته‌ای من چه کنم

این پشم و قصب تو رشته‌ای من چه کنم

چون خار بلا تو کشته‌ای من چه کنم

خود بر سـر من نبشـته‌ای من چه کنم

O Lord, You have kneaded my clay, what can I do?

You have spun this wool and linen, what can I do?

When you’ve planted the thorn of affliction, what can I do?

You yourself have written my destiny on my forehead, what I can I do?[35]

The topic points at the heated debates between the Muʿtazilite and the Ashʿarite schools of theology during the poet’s time, on theological issues such as God’s unity, justice, reward, and punishment.[36] The Muʿtazilites rejected predestination and affirmed individual responsibilities, while the Ashʿarites took the opposite view.[37]

Some editors of Khayyam’s quatrains, especially in the introductions of critical text editions, make these philosophical ideas more palatable in an Islamic context by framing them as part of Khayyam’s inquisitive spirit and his longing to know God. For instance, the eminent Persian scholar Ziya al-Din Sajjadi writes: “Khayyām is not a pessimist, not a sceptic and also not a denier of God, he does not belong to Islamic mystics, Sufis, neither does he belong to Esmaʿili sect, and all these have their own arguments.”[38] To prove Khayyam’s sincere belief in God, Sajjadi refers to the report of Imam Mohammad Baghdadi, one of Khayyam’s sons-in-law, as recounted in ʿAbu ‘l-Hasan Bayhaqi’s Chronicle. When Khayyam was reading Ebn Sina’s chapter “Theology” from his famous Ketab al-shefa, he was cleaning his teeth with a golden toothpick. When he came to the section “Unity and Multiplicity” (al-wahid wa al-Kathir), he placed the toothpick in the book, asking for a pious person to come and write his will. After writing his will, he performed a prayer and started his fasting. Late in the evening, during his evening prayer, he knelt and directed his attention to God, saying:

یا رب به قدر قدر تو نشناختم تو را

در حدّ فکر کوته خود ساختم تو را

دردیست رنج غفلت و رنجیست درد جهل

افسوس با تو بودم و نشناختم تو را

O God! I have not known you to the degree you are worth.

I have made a ‘You’ within the small bounds of my thought.

My neglect is anguish, my ignorance is my grief.

Alas, I was with you but was unable to know you.[39]

 

After this prayer, Khayyam died. He had predicted that his grave would be in a place covered with blossoms in spring and autumn.[40] By citing the anecdote and emphasizing that Khayyam did not have any religious or mystical affiliations, Sajjadi absolves Khayyam of heresy, presenting him as a pious believer, who used his knowledge to know God.

Another Persian literary scholar, Baha’ al-Din Khorramshahi, defends Khayyam through an extensive commentary on controversial quatrains. He explains the quatrains within the Perso-Islamic framework, citing poetry from Khayyam’s predecessors to explain that specific ideas and opinions knitted to Khayyam actually belong to the Persian cultural and literary heritage, as in the following quatrain:

گر می نخوری طعنه مزن مستان‌ را

بنیاد مکن تو حیله و دستان‌ را

تو غره بدان مشو که می مینخوری

صد لقمه خوری که می غلام‌ست آن‌ را

If you’re not drinking wine yourself, do not despise the drunk.

Do not prepare the ground for trickery and fraud.

Be not proud that you’re not drinking wine,

You eat a hundred morsels, far, far, worse than wine.[41]

 

In Khorramshahi’s opinion, the reason the poet invites people to drink wine is not the wine itself; he wants to explain that hypocrisy is a sin.[42] Khorramshahi conjectures that there are two types of wine in Khayyam’s quatrains: grape wine (bada-ye anguri) and literary wine (bada-ye adabi). He says:

If we take Khayyam’s allusions to, and themes of, wine, his praise of drunkenness, and his ignorance [of the hereafter] in his quatrains in a literal way, we will have a portrait of an irresponsible man, a vagabond, an alcoholic, a hedonist, a worshipper of wine, a waster of time, someone who throws away the fruits of his work and life, instead of a sagacious Khayyam who was an eminent sage and a mathematician, who was very possibly a student of Ebn Sina [and otherwise a follower of his philosophy].[43]

Khorramshahi rejects such ideas and bases his own on Mohammad ʿAli Forughi, who interprets Khayyam’s use of wine in the same vein as Hafez’s. According to Forughi, when Hafez refers to “two-years-old wine” (may-ye do sala) and a “fourteen-years-old beloved” (mahbub-e chahardah sala), he is using metaphors: the former refers to the Koran and the latter to the Prophet Mohammad.[44]

Many contemporary Persian scholars try to contextualize Khayyam in a Persian mystic tradition. The eloquent Iranian scholar Hosayn Elahi-Qomsha’i defends Khayyam by placing him in Persian and Indian mystic traditions. In his opinion, the image of Khayyam as a heretic has been created in the West. He writes:

It is a pity that in the opinions of many western readers he is a heretic, a lustful drunk, who has become a famous poet busy only with wine and worldly pleasures. This is the same current misinterpretation that people have about Sufism. The West looks at Khayyam from its own perspective. But if one wishes to appreciate the essence of Eastern literature, the reader should look at how indigenous readers interpret their own literature. It may be astonishing for the western public to hear that in Iran there is no discussion and difference of opinion about the true meaning of Khayyam’s poems, and that everyone considers him as a great spiritual poet and a true believer.[45]

Although Qomsha’i later admits that there are a wide range of opinions about the quatrains in Iran, he puts Khayyam’s actual Persian quatrains aside and offers a purely mystical interpretation of Edward FitzGerald’s (1809–83) version in Rubaiyat.[46] For Qomsha’i, Khayyam’s quatrains are so permeated by Islamic mysticism that even their English adaptations possess spiritual elements. To show this mysticism, he translates the English quatrains back to Persian and gives a commentary based on the philosophy of the Indian mystic and yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952). Afterwards, Qomsha’i gives his own mystical interpretation. Here I give one example of Qomsha’i at work:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.[47]

Yogananda interprets this quatrain as follows:

Awake and leave the sleep of ignorance and simple-mindedness, because the dawn of wisdom and knowledge has arrived. Rise and throw the hard stone of asceticism in the dark cup of ignorance, and make the faded light of the stars that manifest your desire and endless worldly lusts take flight.[48]

Qomsha’i adds:

O inhabitants of the city of deceit and imagination, awake, because my sun of the mystic and Gnostic message, which awakes the sleeping people, can be seen on the horizons of your towns. Rise and break the scales of ignorance with the spiritual stone of asceticism. Divest yourself of this worldly and ephemeral pleasure which shines only for one moment and is extinguished again.[49]

Khayyam and the Antinomian Movement 

What is perhaps most intriguing about this brief reception history of Khayyam is why he in particular has been the locus of accusations of heresy, although other philosophers and poets expressed the same ideas in a philosophical context. For later medieval mystic poets, he was an example of a rational and materialist philosopher whose ideas opposed mystic views on the Creator, creation, and the hereafter. There was (and is) an adversarial relationship between theologians and philosophers: while the letter of the Koran was enough for the religious scholars, philosophers problematized key notions of theology such as the soul’s origin (mabda’), living in the material world (maʿash), and the return (maʿad). Why then would mystic poets and religious scholars focus their critique on Khayyam? He formulated complex theological issues in a simple style comprehensible to people of all walks of life. He was quotable, and a poet to whom dozens if not hundreds of “heretical” quatrains were attributed from the thirteenth century onwards. While some of the quatrains narrated in anecdotes show him as remorseful, there are other contexts in which such quatrains are read in an antinomian context. But is this fair to Khayyam?

The antinomian (qalandari) movement started to take shape gradually during Khayyam’s life. Central motifs of the qalandari poetry are wine, homoerotic love, and the censure of outward piety. To provoke religious scholars, these qalandars drank wine publicly and criticized the most sacred rites and rituals (such as the pilgrimage to Mecca), the mosque, and even Islam itself; they preferred winehouses, Zoroastrian temples or Christian churches, and unbelief (kofr). This antinomian poetry is deeply religious, reflecting a paradoxical piety that rejected any show of religiosity. While this poetry is a provocative response to the theologians, the strength of Khayyam’s poetry lies in its personal tone, in which the poet wonders about the mysteries of the universe, who the Creator is, why the universe was created, what the purpose of humankind is, and what the destination of the soul in the hereafter is. Khayyam’s wine poetry is a means to mitigate the pain and frustration of humankind’s inability to perceive the imperceptible.

ʿAttar is one of the prominent qalandari poets, who criticize the holiest tenets of Islam, emphasizing the individual’s spiritual growth, but he does not take Khayyam as a qalandar; rather, as we have seen, he sternly criticizes him. Much of the poetry of other Persian poets such as Hafez, Saʿdi, and Rumi embodies a qalandari philosophy, both in its emphasis on wine and in criticism of the holiest Islamic tenets. Yet even qalandari poets such as ʿAttar looked with a suspicious eye at Khayyam’s ratiocinative worldview.

The growing body of heretic poetry attributed to Khayyam probably did not help to make his Robaʿiyyat seem unequivocally spiritual. Any poet could write a quatrain and use Khayyam’s name as a cover, making the corpus grow to some thousands of quatrains. Several qalandari quatrains are attributed to Khayyam. One appears in the thirteenth-century collection of quatrains Nozhat al-majales by Jamal Khalil Shervani. In this collection of some 4,000 quatrains, he devotes a chapter to dar maʿani-ye ʿOmar Khayyam. This heading is ambiguous because it may be understood as “On the Ideas of ʿOmar Khayyam,” referring to a popular genre in which poets write on the same themes and motifs, such as carpe diem, bacchanalia, and complaints about fate. The heading can also be understood as “On the Meanings of ʿOmar Khayyam,” which refers to the readings of his poetry. As the authorship of several of the poems cited in Shervani’s chapter is unclear, Shervani is probably referring to poems with the themes and motifs for which Khayyam had become the personification. The chapter also includes quatrains by other poets, such as Sana’i, Sayfi, and Mujir, which reinforces my interpretation of the chapter heading. Shervani also cites quatrains attributed to Khayyam elsewhere in the collection. The following quatrain on the qalandari way appears in the first chapter “On Unity and Gnosis” (towhid va ʿerfan), but it is hard to accept it as authentic, based on the above line of reasoning:

 

تا راه قلندری نپویی نشود

رخساره بخون دل نشویی نشود

سودا چه پزی تا که چو دلسوختگان

آزاد به ترک خود نگویی نشود

So long as you do not walk the path of qalandari, it may not be;

So long as you do not wash your cheeks with the heart’s blood, it may not be.

Why boiling your passion like those with burnt hearts,

unless you freely renounce your own ego, it may not be.[50]

Rahim Rezazada Malik dismisses the attribution of this quatrain to Khayyam, stating, “the composer of this quatrain is so distanced from the logic of scholasticism and he is so unfamiliar from such tradition that he does not explain what it means to say [the lines above].”[51] Rezazada continues his criticism, stating that the composer of this poem is not at all clear about what he wants to say and the usage of the “gargantuan” word qalandar points to the author’s vagabond (qalandari) origin.

 

Conclusion

The popularity of Edward FitzGerald’s adaptation of the quatrains in the West initiated a new evaluation of Khayyam and the quatrains in Iran. While influential intellectuals such as Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) saw in Khayyam the rebellious Arian spirit who fought against Semitic beliefs, other less-well-known authors such as Siddiqi Nakhjavani published books and articles condemning Khayyam for giving unbridled advice to drink wine and disrespecting religion.[52] Sorush’s application of Khayyam’s quatrains in modern religious-political contexts exhibits this oppositional binary. In one place, Sorush cites Khayyam as an opponent of Rumi, to convey the functionality of religion and how religion does help humankind understand death and the hereafter; in others, he simply cites Khayyam to strengthen his arguments about death, without going into Khayyam’s views on the hereafter. In the latter cases, Khayyam’s poetic memorability and popularity count more than his critical philosophy of the origins of creation.

Scholars such as Sajjadi, Khorramshahi, and Qomsha’i seek to create an Islamic context for both Khayyam’s personality and his quatrains, so that his poetry can be viewed within the bounds of Islamic ethics. It remains fascinating that, despite all these heated discussions on the “Islamic” or “heretical” nature of Khayyam’s quatrains, he has been among the best-selling authors in Iran, perhaps the most translated medieval poet in the world,[53] and a symbol of Persian spirits, philosophizing the mysteries of the universe in poetry while drinking wine and loving his friends.

 

[1]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. M.ʿA. Forughi and Q. Ghani (Tehran: Nahid, AH 1373/AD 1994), 54; also see Sadiq Hidayat, Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam (Tehran: Ketabha-ye parastu, AH 1353/AD 1974), 15. The phrase khakam ba dahan means literally “may dust be at my mouth,” implying remorse.

[2]All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

[3]On composing poems extemporarily in Persian literary tradition, see A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Improvisation as a Chief Pillar of the Poetic Art in Persian Literary Tradition,” in Images, Improvisations, Sound, and Silence from 1000 to 1800 – Degree Zero, ed. B. Hellemans and A. Jones Nelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 131–44.

[4]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, 55. This quatrain with a different first couplet is also attributed to Rumi. See Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, Kolliyyat-e Shams ya Divan-e kabir az goftar-e Mowlana Jalal al-Din Mohammad mashhur be Mowlavi, ba tashbihai va havashi, 3rd ed., ed. Badiʿ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, 10 vols. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, AH 1378/AD 1999), 8:266, quatrain 1579:

ای جان جهان جز تو کسی کیست بگو

بی‌جان و جهان هیچ کسی زیست بگو

من بد کنم و تو بد مکافات دهی

پس فرق میان من و تو چیست بگو

In English, it runs thus:

Tell me, O soul of the world! Who else is there?

Tell me! Could anyone live without a soul and the world?

I am doing bad and you punish badly,

Tell me, what is then the difference between you and me?

[5]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, 54.

[6]See, for instance, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Continuity and Creativity: Models of Change in Persian Poetry, Classical and Modern,” in The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, A Celebration in Honor of Dick Davis, ed. A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers), 25–54.

[7]M. Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 18–66.

[8]Maria O’Shea, Culture Shock! Iran, 1999. (London: Kuperard, 2001), 88.

[9]O’Shea, Culture Shock, 90. Chapter three is devoted to poetry, 72–95.

[11]See A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Khayyam’s Universal Appeal: Man, Wine, and the Hereafter in the Quatrains,” in The Great ʿUmar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Rubaiyat (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2012), 11–38, reference on p. 12;  A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “The Flourishing of Persian Quatrains,” in A History of Persian Literature: Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era 800-1500: Ghazals. Panegyrics and Quatrains, vol. 2, ed. E. Yarshater (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 488–568.

[12]Mohammad-Amin Riahi, “Daya, Najm-Al-Din Abu Bakr ʿAbd-Allah,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2011, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/daya-najm-al-din. For an overview of these medieval critics on Khayyam, see Aminrazavi, Wine of Wisdom, 40–66.

[13]For an excellent study of ʿAttar’s philosophy, see H. Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid al-Din Attar (trans. of Das Meer der Seele: Mensch, Welt und Gott in den Qeschichten des Fariduddin Attar), ed. Bernd Radtke, trans. John O’Kane (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2003).

[14]This line can also be translated as “He knocked at the Door like the seven heavens.” I have chosen the above translation to allude to the poet as an astronomer, drawing circles to measure heavenly bodies.

[15]Literally, sar-o pa-ye jahan, “the head and the feet of the world,” referring to the beginning and the end of the world.

[16]Farid al-Din ʿAttar, Elahi-nama, ed. H. Ritter (Tehran: Tus, AH 1368/AD 1989), 272, lines 8–18. Also see Ritter, Ocean of the Soul, 83–84; Aminrazavi, Wine of Wisdom, 62.

[17]Riahi, “Daya.”

[18]Najm al-Din Daya, Mersad al-ʿebad men al-mabdaʾ ila’l-maʿad, ed. M.A. Riyahi (Tehran: Scientific & Cultural Publications Company, 1992), 31. For an English translation of this book, see Razi: The Path of God’s Bondsmen, Persian Heritage Series 35, trans. H. Algar (New York: Caravan Books, 1982). The quatrain appears with some alterations in Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 112 (quatrain 34) and 108 (quatrain 31), respectively.

[19]See my discussion of Khayyam’s quatrains in the unique miscellaneous manuscript Safina, which contains 209 works, copied between AD 1321 and AD 1323: A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Literary Works in Tabriz’s Treasury,” in The Treasury of Tabriz: The Great Il-Khanid Compendium, ed. A.A. Seyed-Gohrab and S. McGlinn (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers and West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007),  126–30. Also see Sayyed-ʿAli Mir-Afzali, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam dar manabeʿ-e kohan (Tehran: Nashr-e daneshgahi, AH 1382/AD 2003), 23–25.

[20]See J.T.P. de Bruijn’s discussion on this topic: J.T.P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1997), 88–90.

[21]de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 89.

[22]de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 89.

[23]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 149, quatrain 129.

[24]ʿAbd ‘l-Hosayn Zarrinkub, Ba karavan-e holla (Tehran: ʿElmi, AH 1372/AD 1993), 127–28.

[25]ʿAbd al-Karim Sorush, Mudara va modiriyat (Tehran: Toluʿ-i Azadi, AH 1376/AD 1997), 227–76.

[26]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 268. Also see Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed.  Forughi and Ghani, 143, quatrain 115.

[27]See Jalal al-Din Mohammad Rumi, The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddín Rumi, vol. 3, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson  (London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1925–40). My translation is based on Nicholson’s, using the critical Persian text edited by M. Esteʿlami, Mathnavi-ye Maʿnavi, vol. 3 (Tehran: Zavvar, AH 1372/AD 1993), 180, lines 3909–16.

[28]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 268–69.

[29]My translation is based on Nicholson’s (p. 7), using Esteʿlami, Mathnavi-ye Maʿnavi, 11, lines 50, 53–56, 60.

[30]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 184–85.

[31]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 185. This quatrain is included in neither Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed.  Forughi and Ghani, nor Omar Khayyam,  Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam dar manabeʿ-e kohan, ed. Mir-Afzali (Tehran: Nashr-e daneshgahi, AH 1382/AD 2003).

[32]Sorush, Modara va modiriyat, 185.

[33]A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “There Was a Door to Which I Found No Key,” Leiden Medievalists Blog, leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/there-was-a-door-to-which-i-found-no-key (accessed 10 March 2020).

[34]For a discussion about the Islamic nature of such provocative ideas, see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 11–13.

[35]This quatrain appears in neither Forughi and Ghani’s nor in Mir-Afzali’s edition of Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam. The quatrain was probably written by Sharaf al-Din Shafarva of Isfahan (in the twelfth century) and later attributed to Khayyam. On Sharaf al-Din, see Safa, Tarikh-e adabiyyat dar Iran, vol. 2 (Tehran: Ferdows, AH 1368/AD 1989), 740–43; Lotf-ʿAli Beyg Adhar Bigdeli, Tadhkera-ye atashkada adhar, ed. Sayyed Jaʿfar Shahidi (Tehran: AH 1337/AD 1958), 182–83. However, this quatrain is not mentioned in these sources, and I do not have Sharaf al-Din’s Divan in my possession.

[36]See M. Aminrazavi, “Reading the Rubaʿiyyat as ‘Resistance Literature,’” in The Great ʿUmar Khayyam: A Global Reception of the Rubaiyat (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2012), 39–53. Aminrazavi gives many examples of quatrains attributed to Khayyam and reflecting the disputes between these schools.

[37]D. Gimaret, “Muʿtazila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

[38]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e ʿUmar Khayyam, ed. Ziya al-Din Sajjadi (Tehran: Karun, AH 1370/AD 1991), 5.

[39]This quatrain is included in neither Forughi and Ghani’s nor in Mir-Afzali’s edition of Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam. Sajjadi summarizes this quatrain in prose on p. 5, and the poem appears on several Internet pages, but the authenticity of this weak poem is questionable.

[40]See Nezami ʿAruzi, Chahar-Maqala, ed. E.G. Browne (London: Gibb Memorial Series, Luzac & Co, 1921), 71–72: “In the year A.H. 506 (A.D. 1112-1113) Khwaja Imam ‘Umar-i-Khayyami and Khwaja Imam Muzaffar-i-Isfizari had alighted in the city of Balkh, in the Street of the Slave-sellers, in the house of Amir Abu Saʿd Jarrah, and I had joined that assembly. In the midst of our convivial gathering I heard that Proof of God (Ḥujjatu’l-Ḥaqq) ʿUmar say, “My grave will be in a spot where the trees will shed their blossoms on me twice a year.” This thing seemed to me impossible, though I knew that one such as he would not speak idle words. When I arrived at Nishapur in the year A.H. 530 (A.D. 1135-6), it being then four years since that great man had veiled his countenance in the dust, and this nether world had been bereaved of him, I went to visit his grave on the eve of a Friday (seeing that he had the claim of a master on me), taking with me one to point out to me his tomb. So he brought me out to the Ḥira Cemetery; I turned to the left, and found his tomb situated at the foot of a garden-wall, over which pear-trees and peach-trees thrust their heads, and on his grave had fallen so many flower-leaves that his dust was hidden beneath the flowers. Then I remembered that saying which I had heard from him in the city of Balkh, and I fell to weeping, because on the face of the earth, and in all the regions of the habitable globe, I nowhere saw one like unto him. May God (blessed and exalted is He!) have mercy upon him, by His Grace and His Favour! Yet although I witnessed this prognostication on the part of that Proof of the Truth ʿUmar, I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great [scientists] who had such belief.”

[41]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 99, quatrain 4.

[42]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 175.

[43]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 11.

[44]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 12.

[45]Omar Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-i Nayshaburi, ed. Hosayn Elahi Qomsha’i (Tehran: Khushrang, n.d.), 3.

[46]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5, note 4.

[47]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5; P. Yogananda, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Explained, ed. J. Donald Walters (Nevada City, CA: Crystal Clarity, 1994), 2–5.

[48]These are not Yogananda’s literal words but a summary made by Qomsha’i. See Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5.

[49]Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam-e Nayshaburi, ed. Qomsha’i, 5.

[50]Jamal Khalil Shervani, Nozhat al-majales, ed. M.A. Riyahi, AH 1366/AD 1987. (Tehran: Maharat, AH 1375/AD 1996), 145, quatrain 33. The chapter on Khayyam appears as chap. 15, pp. 671–76. This chapter consists of thirty-eight quatrains, twelve of which are attributed to Khayyam. Also see Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Mir-Afzali, 39–48. Sadeq Hedayat includes one of these qalandari quatrains in his collection. See Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam, 99; Khayyam, Robaʿiyyat-e Khayyam, ed. Forughi and Ghani, 126, quatrain 72.

[51] Rahim Rezazada Malik, ʿOmar Khayyam: Qafela-ye salar-e danesh (Tehran: Maharat, AH 1377/AD 1998), 125–26.

[52]Hedayat, Tarana-ha-ye Khayyam, 27; R. Seddiqi Nakhjavani, Khayyam-pendari va pasokh-e afkar-e qalandarana-ye u (Tabriz, IR: Sorush, AH 1320/AD 1931).

[53]See Jos Coumans, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: An Updated Bibliography (Leiden, NL: Leiden University Press, 2010). Coumans’s bibliography lists 1,015 editions of the translations and is the first bibliography of the Rubaiyat since 1929, when A.G. Potter published his A Bibliography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1994). Also see Jos Biegstraaten, “Khayyam, Omar xiv. Impact on Literature and Society in the West,” in Encyclopædia Iranica, 2008, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khayyam-omar-impact-west; A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Edward FitzGerald’s Translations of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Appeal of Terse Hedonism,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie (John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 2059–70.