Arab Mystical Poetry

Denis de Rougemont


It happens that as early as the ninth century there occured an 'unlikely' fusion of Iranian Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism, and Mohammedanism in Arabia, and the fusion was reflected in a religious poetry employing erotic metaphors that are strikingly akin to those of courtly rhetoric. In the twelfth century the chief writers of this kind of poetry were al Hallaj, al Gazali, and Suhrawardi of Aleppo. All three were troubadours of supreme Love, of the Veiled Idea, which they treated as beloved object but also as symbol of a longing for the divine.

Suhrawardi, who died in 1191, supposed Plato - whom he knew at second-hand from Plotinus, Proclus, and the Athenian school - to be a successor of Zoroaster. Indeed his Neo-Platonism displays marked Persian mythical features. In particular, the doctrines about an antithetical relation of the World of Light and the World of Darkness which he borrowed from the Zend-Avesta were those that had inspired Manes and that became the root of the Catharist faith. These doctrines - exactly as happened later with those of the Cathars were transmuted into a chivalrous love rhetoric, the nature of which is indicated by the titles of two mystical treatises, The Lovers' Familiar and The Romance of the Seven Beauties. Moreover, at the time these and other similar treatises appeared there arose in a section of Islam a theological controversy of the same kind as occured a little later in the medieval world in the West. It is true that the in the Mohammedan world the controversy was made more intricate by a denial that man is able to love God (as the evangelica summary of the Law commands him.) According to Mohammedanism, a finite creature can only love what is finite. In ordere therefore to express that love of the divine which they believed themselves to be experiencing, Arab mystics of the twelfth century had to resort to symbols having a secret meaning. But, apart from this peculiarity - not without parallel in the situation of courtly rhetoric - the problems set up by the poetry of the Near East and by that of the West are identical.

Orthodox Mohammedanism was no more able than Roman Catholicism to allow that there is in man an element which on being cultivated will bring about the fusion of individual souls with the Divinity. But it was precisely this potential union of Creator and creature that was being implied in the erotico-religious language of Arab mystic poetry. The symbolism employed by the poets caused them accordingly to be accused of holding a disguised Manichaeism, and the charge cost al Hallaj and Suhrawardi their lives. There is something poingnant in the discovery that the grounds of the controversy are those which reappear in the case of the troubadours, and, later on - in, mutatis mutandis, the case of the great Western mystics from Meister Eckhart to John of the Cross.

[to be continued]