Proefschrift Tübingen, 1970.

Studies on gender in medieval and modern Sufism have tended to posit two extremes: Sufism as an oasis for women, away from the strictures of ‘orthodoxy,’ or Sufism as a haven for misogynistic views of women as temptations, distractions, and necessary evils. However, these simplistic characterisations cannot encompass the full range of the evidence, as we find many positive representations of women, and indeed female saints, alongside brutal anti-woman declarations. This study attempts to nuance these prevailing characterisations of medieval depictions of gender by providing further evidence of Sufi attitudes towards women and femininity. It does so via a comprehensive consideration of a prominent Persian Sufi poet, Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār, in the context of select Persian and Arabic hagiographies, Qur’an commentaries, and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’. Analysis of the material reviewed suggests that gender representations are not fixed, even within the work of a single author. I argue that these texts exhibit a striking disconnect between their conceptions of ‘woman’ as a category and the depiction of narrative women, especially Sufi women. I suggest that this tendency reflects a Sufi philosophy of gender-egalitarianism and that philosophy’s inherent conflict with predominant social hierarchies of the medieval Islamicate context. This study shows the utility of engaging the classical Islamic tradition with contemporary theory surrounding gender and identity, including corporeality theory and intersectionality theory. It also employs more traditional formalist literary critiques using the lenses of defamiliarisation and paradox/apophasis. Ultimately, this research reveals the need for careful, critical studies of medieval views on gender, and contributes to the bodies of literature on Islamicate sexualities and the construction of sainthood in Islam.

This paper examines the anecdotes of ʿAttār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ʿAttār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 262-290). Also available on the Internet.

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The modern Arabic term for national homeland, waṭan, derives its sense from the related yet semantically different usage of this term in classical Arabic, particularly in classical Arabic poetry. In modern usage, waṭan refers to a politically defined, visually memorialized territory whose expanse is cognized abstractly rather than through personal experience. The modern waṭan is the geopolitical locus of national identity. The classical notion of waṭan, however, is rarely given much geographical content, although it usually designates a relatively localized area on the scale of a neighborhood, town, or village. More important than geographical content is the subjective meaning of the waṭan, in the sense of its essential place in the psyche of an individual. The waṭan (also mawṭin, awṭān), both in poetry and other types of classical writing, is strongly associated with the childhood/youth and primary love attachments of the speaker. This sense of waṭan is thus temporally defined as much as spatially, and as such can be seen as an archetypal instance of the Bakhtinian chronotope, one intrinsically associated with nostalgia and estrangement. The waṭan, as the site of the classical self’s former plenitude, is by definition lost or transfigured and unrecoverable, becoming an attachment that must be relinquished for the sake of virtue and glory. This paper argues that the bivalency of the classical waṭan chronotope, recoverable through analysis of poetic and literary texts, allows us to understand the space and time of the self in classical Arabic literature and how this self differs from that presupposed by modern ideals of patriotism.

O êxtase místico costuma ser estudado a partir da análise de rituais de incorporação, possessão de espiritos, transe de curanderia e outros processos que não raro envolvem música para propiciar estados alterados de consciência. Considerando que os rituais sufis integram música, dança e poesia com propósito extático, este trabalho aborda a relação entre a poesia e a dança mística em Rumi e Hafiz, propondo uma metodologia que utiliza noções de linguagem da dança para a análise de poemas. / The mystical ecstasy is usually studied from the analysis of rituals of incorporation, possession of spirits, trance curanderia and other processes that often involve music to provide altered states of consciousness. Whereas Sufi rituals integrate music, dance and poetry with purpose ecstatic, this work addresses the relationship between poetry and mystical dance in Rumi and Hafiz proposing a methodology that uses notions of dance language for analyzing poems.

The Political Aesthetic of the Medieval Persian Prison Poem, 1100-1200 traces the dissemination of the medieval Persian prison poem (habsiyyat) from South Asia to the Caucasus in the context of the contemporaneous developments in literary and political theory that shaped this genre. Varying attitudes towards figuration in Persian literary criticism are examined in terms of an aesthetics of incarceration that, I argue, extended the political boundaries of medieval Persian literary culture. Drawing on the pioneering works of Zafari (1985) and Akimushkina (2006), I elucidate the prison poem's strategies for making the medieval experience of incarceration available to literary representation. In documenting the dialectic between the sultan's material power and the poet's discursive sovereignty, I show how medieval Persian prison poetry critically engaged with medieval punitive practices. Ultimately, this dissertation traces the relation between the increased use of incarceration as a mode of punishment by regional sultanates and the discursive elevation of poetry that is Persian literature's greatest contribution to world literature. Concomitantly with investigating the twelfth-century aesthetics of incarceration, this dissertation documents how twelfth-century Persian poetry was transformed by idioms of literary knowledge articulated through a Persianized Arabo-Islamic rhetoric. Exegeses of specific prison poems by Mas'ud Sa'd Salman of Lahore (d. 1121), Khaqani Shirwani (d. 1199), and of other prison poets from these regions, are offered alongside documentary explorations into the status of non-Muslim minorities in Saljuq domains, the transformation of a predominantly panegyric genre into an instrument of political critique, and demonstrate the political importance of the habsiyyat to the historiography of incarceration as well as of Persian literature. By examining the literary archive of incarceration from Lahore in South Asia to Shirwan in the Caucasus, this study aims to expand the scope of investigations into the aesthetics of power as registered by literary form, to extend the temporal dimensions of the historiography of incarceration, and to contribute to classical Persian literary theory's conceptualization of genre. Chapter one offers a synoptic and global history of incarceration in the medieval world. Chapter two considers what the prison poem as a genre has to offer global literary theory. Chapter three studies the complex modulation of the qasida form through the prison poem's emphasis on the poet's lyric subjectivity. Chapter four traces the appropriation of the motifs of prophecy by Persian prison poets who aspired for a sovereignty that exceeding the boundaries of material power. Chapter five offers detailed exegeses of the two most significant texts in the medieval Persian archive of incarceration: Khaqani's Christian qasida and his qasida on the ruins of Mada'in. Chapter six documents the devolution of authority onto prison poetry and the reconstitution of material power through discursive sovereignty. Collectively, these chapters show that, just as medieval Persian prison poets protested the terms of their social contracts and thus suffered imprisonment, so did the prison poem genre contest the distribution of sovereignty in the medieval world by transferring prophecy, and prophecy's concomitant authority, to the poet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

O êxtase místico costuma ser estudado a partir da análise de rituais de incorporação, possessão de espiritos, transe de curanderia e outros processos que não raro envolvem música para propiciar estados alterados de consciência. Considerando que os rituais sufis integram música, dança e poesia com propósito extático, este trabalho aborda a relação entre a poesia e a dança mística em Rumi e Hafiz, propondo uma metodologia que utiliza noções de linguagem da dança para a análise de poemas. / The mystical ecstasy is usually studied from the analysis of rituals of incorporation, possession of spirits, trance curanderia and other processes that often involve music to provide altered states of consciousness. Whereas Sufi rituals integrate music, dance and poetry with purpose ecstatic, this work addresses the relationship between poetry and mystical dance in Rumi and Hafiz proposing a methodology that uses notions of dance language for analyzing poems.