Licit Magic — GlobalLIT Working Papers №15. Ṣā’in al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī’s Commentary on Ten Bayts
Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī
In a cryptic ode (qaṣīda), known as Mir’āt al-ṣafā (Mirror of clarity), the greatest Persian-writing poet of medieval India, Amīr Khusrow Dihlavī (d. 1325), writes:
ز دریای شهادت چون نهنگ لا برآرد سر
تیمم فرض گردد نوح را در روز طوفانش
The bayt can be roughly translated as:
[When the crocodile of “no [lā]” lifts its head out of the sea of testimony (shahādat),
Noah finds nothing but dust to ablute with in the midst of Flood.]
The translation is inadequate. The word “tayammum” in Amīr Khusrow’s second hemistich refers to a ritual of dry purification for Muslims in circumstances where they cannot find water for ablution (Wuḍū’). What is translated as the “crocodile of no [nahang-i lā]” makes little sense without understanding its allusion to the Shahāda (literally, “testimony”), which refers to the Muslim declaration of the belief in the oneness of God, according to the sentence “ashhadu ‘an lā ‘ilāha ‘illā -llāhu [I bear witness that there is no God but Allah].” You might find the bayt more pleasurable to read when you notice how Amīr Khusrow sees the shape of the Arabic word, لا (lā), like a crocodile lifting its head out of water, its mouth wide open and ready to swallow the whole sea. The image of a crocodile swallowing the sea in Amīr Khusrow’s poem echoes the following bayt from a ghazal by Rūmī:
نهنگی هم برآرد سر خورد آن آب دریا را
چنان دریای بیپایان شود بی آب چون هامون
A crocodile lifts its head, swallows the sea water;
the endless sea becomes waterless like a desert.
In Amīr Khusrow’s bayt, the utterance of the very first word of the testimony, “no,” becomes so decisive that turns everything to dust, annihilates everything. It is the absolute nothingness that devours everything. Like a huge crocodile, the negativity of death swallows all existence that engulfs us like a sea. This is reflected in the image of Noah in the second hemistich. Noah, who survived a devastating flood that drowned the whole world, finds nothing but dust for his ablution. Translation comes short. Commentary is needed for the appreciation of the full range of the poem’s delicacies. Interestingly, this single bayt has been famously subject to commentaries by Muḥammad Gīsūdirāz (d. 1422), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492), and Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Lāhījī (d. 1506).
Commentary writing (sharḥ), which has a particularly rich and vibrant tradition in Persian literature, involves the explication, interpretation, and analysis of a wide range of texts, from Qur’anic verses to ḥadiths to legal and theological texts, to mystical writings, to more secular texts such as philological and philosophical treatises and poetry.
Classical commentators adopted various methods ranging from simple inter-lingual word-by-word translations to expanded paraphrases, both inter- and intra-lingual, of poetry and prose texts. Through their commentaries, they explained the contextual meanings and clarified all kinds of transtextuality such as intertextual significations, extratextual esoteric meanings, and stylistic elements.
Read the full paper, for Kayvan Tahmasebian’s translation of a commentary on a poem by Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī. The commentary is written by Ṣā’in al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (d. 1432), a distinguished figure of intellectual millennialism in the early Timurid era: a productive scholar, commentator, and an occult philosopher, who is best known for his synthesis of Ibn Sīnā’s Peripatetic philosophy and Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī’s Illuminationism with Ibn ʿArabī’s theoretical mysticism.
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