Austin O'Malley

Much Persian sufi literature is explicitly didactic, aiming to instruct its readers and motivate pious reform. Moving beyond a recapitulation of religious content, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction investigates the performative function of didactic poetry for mystical audiences, focusing in particular on the verse of Farid al-Din ʿAttar, a central figure of the tradition best known for long narrative poems imbued with edifying sufi themes. Through a series of sensitive and creative readings, O’Malley shows how ʿAttar uses frame-tales, metapoetic commentary, and allegories to think through his relationship with his readers, imagine and guide their reactions to his work, and perform his instructive authority. By teasing out this implicit, recipient-centred poetics, O’Malley recovers sufi didacticism’s participatory, interactive character and shows how the act of reading was invested with ritual significance as a spiritual exercise aimed at the purification of the soul.

This article examines the authorship of the Khosrow-nāma, a Perso-Hellenic romance traditionally attributed to ʿAṭṭār. Forty years ago, Shafiʿi-Kadkani laid out a complex argument against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship. He claimed that the attribution was a result of a later forgery, basing his argument on internal chronological evidence, religious and stylistic markers, and the manuscript tradition. The present article systematically evaluates this argument, showing it to be less persuasive than it first appears. First, I introduce new manuscript evidence to demonstrate that the poem was circulating under ʿAṭṭār’s name already before the time of the alleged forgery. I then reassess the internal evidence to show that the Khosrow-nāma could, in fact, fit into a plausible chronology of ʿAṭṭār’s oeuvre. Next, I critique the stylistic and religious arguments against ʿAṭṭār’s authorship, arguing that the romance does not deviate from ʿAṭṭār’s undisputed works nearly as much as is often supposed. I conclude by suggesting that the available data are explained more easily by accepting ʿAṭṭār’s authorship than by adopting the theory of a later forgery.

This paper examines the formation and development of the Abu Saʿid Abuʾl-Kheyr hagiographic tradition. It shows how reports about the eleventh-century saint circulated within a shrine community of his descendants and disciples, both orally and in ad hoc notes, before being set down in writing. It argues that the Asrār al-towhid, the largest and best-known hagiography devoted to Abu Saʿid, is not a natural outgrowth of this oral material, but a reworking for a broad audience of outsiders in light of the shrine community’s destruction by the Ghuzz Turks in the 1150s. In the case of the Asrār, textualization involved substantial rhetorical and linguistic changes in order to open up the material to a literary public of non-initiates; it also implied a new understanding of how Abu Saʿid’s blessings would manifest themselves in the world.

https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341330

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.

One of the most notable generic features of didactic masnavis is their use of narrative exempla. In the earliest examples of the genre, however, these exempla were not so pronounced. As de Bruijn has shown, some of the most beloved narratives in Sanāʾi's Hadiqat al-haqiqeh are not found in the oldest manuscripts, which contain fewer anecdotes than later copies. The present chapter expands on de Bruijn's analysis by quantitatively tracking the use of exempla in didactic masanvis by Sanāʾi, Marvrudi, Nezāmi, and Farid-al Din ʿAttār. It shows how ʿAttār used far more narratives—and far longer narratives—than any of his predecessors and introduced erotic themes into his exempla. After "zooming out" and establishing how ʿAttār innovated within the tradition, the chapter "zooms in" to re-read specific passages in his masnavis as expressions of authorial anxiety in which he defends his deviations from his models. The chapter concludes by suggesting that ʿAttār's innovative frame-tale structures may have also been intended as defensive maneuvers to ease the reception of his exempla-laden masnavis by creating fictive, explicitly didactic contexts in which the embedded exempla are imaginatively narrated.

Art, Allegory, and the Rise of Shiism in Iran, 1487-1565 is an innovative attempt to decode the meaning of those "emblematic figures"-including water carriers, thread spinners, wood cutters, and Sufis-that began to appear in Persian painting of the Timurid period and which often seem ancillary or even completely unrelated to the ostensible subject of illustration.