كعبة العاشق

Notes

1. Al-Tadamun (‘Solidarity’) was an Arabic weekly news magazine. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died on 3 June 1989, so the article appeared some three weeks after his death. Khomeini wrote mystical poetry in Persian in the manner of the classical Sufi poets, with its wine, tavern and beloved, and it became widely known only after he died. ↩
2. Istikhāra is the practice of seeking God’s guidance in a choice; in Iran and elsewhere it is often done with a rosary (subḥa), by counting off beads at random and reading the result as a sign. Subḥat ḥaqq, ‘a rosary of truth’, can also be read as ‘a rosary of the Real’ (al-Ḥaqq, a Sufi name for God). The paradox is deliberate and belongs to the Persian Sufi tradition: the ascetic’s rosary is to be strung from grapes, the stuff of wine, which in this poetry is the symbol of divine love and ecstasy. ↩
3. The ḥān, the tavern, is a central symbol of Persian mystical poetry: the place of the ‘wine’ of love and ecstasy, where the seeker abandons outward piety and reputation. Ḥabab are the bubbles that rise on the surface of wine. ↩
4. Wajjahtu wajhiya, ‘I set my face’, echoes the Qur’anic words of Abraham (6:79): ‘I have set my face toward Him who created the heavens and the earth.’ Even the schoolboy’s first steps are thus framed as a turning of the whole self toward the Beloved. ↩
5. After forty years of study the lover still cannot pronounce her name. The Sufi sense is that the true Beloved is beyond speech: the name can be spelled out letter by letter, but not truly uttered, and no form of address is adequate to call on Her. ↩
6. Mansur is al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, the Sufi mystic executed in Baghdad in 922, famous for his ecstatic cry ‘I am the Real’ (anā al-ḥaqq). Tradition relates that he went to his execution exulting. To become ‘a Mansur’ is to love so completely that one goes gladly to death for that love. The name also means ‘the one granted victory’, so the lover’s death is at the same time his triumph. ↩
7. Munshaʿib means branching, split into several paths. His love is single and undivided, directed to one Beloved alone, which in Sufi terms is also an expression of tawḥīd, the oneness of God. ↩
8. The verb asʿā, ‘I hasten’, is also the word for the saʿy, the pilgrims’ ritual walk between Safa and Marwa, and al-Bayt, ‘the House’, in the next verse is the usual name of the Kaaba in Mecca, which pilgrims circle seven times (ṭawāf). The lover’s visit to the beloved’s house is thus cast as a pilgrimage and her house as his Kaaba. The double exclamation with yā la- in the next verse is a cry of wonder and of pain at once: wonder at this Kaaba, pity for the lover who circles it. ↩
9. The contrast between the door and the one within is a Sufi commonplace: the true seeker wants the Lord of the house, not the house itself, the Beloved and not the outward forms and rituals that lead to Her. ↩
10. Jarab is mange or scabies, the contagious skin disease for which a camel was driven away from the herd; the pre-Islamic poet Ṭarafa describes himself shunned by his clan like a tarred, mangy camel. The beloved’s mild words cast the lover as an outcast whom everyone avoids; he answers that her kiss alone would cure him. ↩
11. Lam akhib, ‘I did not fail, did not come away the loser’. The lover has sold paradise for next to nothing and taken in exchange the ‘hell’ of her eyes, the burning of her glance, and yet he counts himself the winner. In the Sufi sense the lover seeks the Beloved herself, not the reward of paradise, and would rather burn near Her than be rewarded far from Her. ↩