Poetry and Poetics: the Sufi Eye and the Neoplatonic Vision in Jāmī’s Salāmān u Absāl

This doctoral thesis focuses on a fifteenth-century masnavī (narrative poem) of Salāmān and Absāl by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492), the “seal of the poets” of classical Persian literature. It is a long, mystically and philosophically complex, narrative. Despite its importance, the poem’s challenging philosophical material and difficult themes (including incest) led to its neglect by the intelligentsia of the pre-modern Islamic dynasties in Iran, Afghanistan, and India, as well as in contemporary scholarship. My thesis is the first-ever study of this poem within the two important contexts from which it emerged; these are the broader Greco-Roman, Arabic, and Persian intellectual traditions and the complex medieval courtly and social reality. I was able to reveal a world of textual, cultural, linguistic, and religious exchanges that, when viewed with this broader perspective, has important ramifications for the way in which we speak about the relationship of East to West, of Islam to the Greco-Roman and Christian European worlds, and of the circulation of philosophy and images. My two theories, ‘Poetry of the Eye’ and ‘Poetics of Vision’ examine Jāmī’s mystical-philosophy on the interaction of bodies and minds, spaces, and even time in the purely corporeal world through the sense of sight, employed in the search for love and knowledge, and how he intermingled his emanation theory borrowed from Neoplatonic tradition with the Sufi concept of imagination. Jāmī’s self-reflective message, which conveys the poet’s mental, physical, and spiritual states, is yet another interesting addition to understanding this long-forgotten and presumably morally problematic story of Salāmān and Absāl.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Fayyaz, Parwana

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• van Ruymbeke, Christine

• Persian Poetry
• poetry and poetics
• vision and the eye
• love
• Jami
• Sufism
• Neoplatonism
• Islamic philosophy

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/742aa718-6d24-4872-881d-ab27a5bfb485/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0001-6504-9161

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/315739