Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th‒14th/20th Century provides for the first time, and in a coherent and comprehensive manner, a full reception history of the life and legacy of the towering figure of the Sufi master and poet ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492). But given his pivotal significance, and the widespread and long-lasting impact of his prolific contributions, the volume as a whole achieves far more.
Firstly, the book recognizes that by the fifteenth century Sufism was a global movement that enchanted a vast swathe of a large part of the globe, and that, secondly, its many micro-histories, similar and divergent in equal measure, deserve detailed attention in order to avoid the inevitable pitfalls of sweeping generalizations which frequently appear in general histories of Sufism. In their detailed introduction as well as in the overall structure of the volume, the editors, Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, have taken full note of these perennial pitfalls. As well as plotting the trajectory of the volume to explicate their approach, the introduction offers a retrospective survey and credits the work of previous scholarship, with due attention to non-western scholars who established the first critical editions of Jāmī’s oeuvre, paving the way for future studies.
The twenty-two chapters are divided into three parts. The first “axis” tracks Jāmī’s writings, to “show not only their continuous spread of the polymath’s works but also how they were read and used by different intermediaries and admirers across the Muslim world” (p. 3). The claim advanced here is that the afterlife of Jāmī’s writings was instrumental in shaping the Persephone cultural oikumene and beyond from the fifteenth century onwards. The second axis pivots around Jāmī’s contribution to the dissemination and development of Islamic, and specifically Sufi, doctrines. What may be gleaned from a close reading of Jāmī’s legacy in its collectivity, that is his own works as well as those of the myriad scholars and thinkers who were influenced by his writings and commented upon it? The focus of the third axis is on Jāmī’s impact on literary history, the last monumental figure of the so-called Classical age of Persian poetry, both as a poet and a commentator, as well as the harbinger of new beginnings.
The first section, “The Routes of Books,” begins with an overview of the reception of Jāmī’s poetry in the Islamic world by Francis Richard. Sunil Sharma discusses the spread of his Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā in the Persephone world, Hamid Algar writes on Jāmī’s reception in the Ottoman lands, Muzaffar Alam directs his attention to Jāmī’s influence in the Indo-Muslim world, while Florian Schwarz focuses on the reception of Jāmī’s Al-Fawāʾid al-ḍiyāʾiyya and al-Durra al-fākhira in Arabic literature, and Mohamad Nasrin Nasir does the same for Jāmī’s writings on Sufism in Malay.
In “Translating Islam and Sufism,” the second axis of the collection, Sajjad Rizvi studies the landscape of sectarianism in Tīmūrid Iran and Iraq, crucially before the conflation of sectarian rivalries with the political contention under the Safavid and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth century; Chad Lingwood investigates the historical significance of Jāmī’s panegyric qaṣīdas on the Āq Qūyūnlū leader Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (r. 883/1478‒896/1491); Ertuǧrul Ökten traces Jāmī’s contribution to the Ottoman linguistic tradition; Alexey Khismatulin interrogates Jāmī’s claim to the authorship of Anīs al-ṭālibīn; Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek considers the confluence of Naqshbandī practice, Mughal political doctrine and formal traits of the Persian mystical quatrain in Jāmī’s Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd; Paul Wormser examines the creation of a new literary idiom based on Jāmī’s Lavāʾiḥ by Ḥamza Fanṣūrī (d. 933/1527), the first Malay mystic poet; Alexandre Papas explores the scaffolding of individual sanctity in Jāmī’s collected biography, Nafaḥāt al-uns, and in its many localized iterations in Anatolia and Central Asia, that in their collectivity proved an effective tool of Islamization; and Yiming Shen tracks the afterlife of Jāmī’s writings in the Chinese milieu.
The final section, the third axis, examines the regional afterlife of Jāmī’s legacy in further depth. The focus is on his first readers: Iranian and Central Asian poets who since the early sixteenth century have dubbed the mystic poet khātam al-shuʿarā, and reworked his verses to make them the end as well as the beginning of a literary tradition (p. 6). Franklin Lewis writes on Jāmī’s manipulation of the Persian literary canon, what of it he chose to emphasize and what to discard; Paul Losensky explores Jāmī’s reception among Safavid poets and scholars; Marc Toutant looks for the same in the works of ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (d. 906/1551), Jāmī’s patron and disciple, and an acclaimed Chaghatay Turkish writer; Thibaut d’Hubert traces the trajectory of Jāmī’s Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in Bengal from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; Ayesha Irani focuses on Śāhā Mohāmmad Chagīr’s translation of the same text in sixteenth century East Bengal; C. Ryan Perkins studies its Pashto iterations; Luther Obrock writes on the life of Jāmī’s text in a Kashmiri context; and Rebecca Gould explores its influences on the Georgian literary landscape.
Among the many strengths of this collection is the foregrounding of Jāmī as a historical actor responsible, to a significant degree, for crafting a new ideational context that not only dominated the intellectual landscape of Persephone regions in the early modern period, but also allowed him to author his own legacy. Consider, for example, the long-held view (at least since J. Spencer Trimingham in the 1970s) that it was the Sufis who upended the monopoly of Arabic on Islamic theology by writing in Persian and fashioned Persephone Islam. Furthermore, the linguistic standoff was found to be multivalent: it also epitomized the standoff between the adamantine Islam of the sharīʿa-minded legists writing mostly in Arabic and the more caritative one offered by Sufis and in Persian (for a succinct critique of that historiographical tradition, see Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History, 2017). This ahistorical binary view has been attacked from different quarters. A more nuanced and analytically fecund thesis is proffered in the “Introduction” to the volume under review: “the pre-requisite for the spread of Jāmī’s works was the constitution of a space in which Arabo-Persian literacy was cultivated” (pp. 9‒10). Jāmī both “intervened in and wrote on” its most fundamental aspects, resulting in a “consciously designed blueprint” that “relied on both multilingualism and a vision of a trans-regional domain for the diffusion of his texts and reputation” (p. 10). In this manner, Papas and d’Hubert eschew nebulous categorization that rests on the appeal of Jāmī’s aesthetics, historical accidents and other such, and foreground instead authorial intention, the far-reaching consequences of authorship (pp. 15‒21) and the performative regard in Sufi writings, factors which, taken together, constitute the very essence of early modernity—that is, religious change. In their words, “Studying Jāmī’s multilingual reception is not about tracing the diffusion of a popular author, but observing the realization of a well-designed civilizational project” (p. 11).
The critical question of religious change is also taken up in Papas’ chapter, where Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns is scrutinized to explain its extensive appeal to Central Asian scholars. Whereas Jāmī’s collected biography is noted for its strategic omissions and elevated style, Turkic iterations eschewed elitism by simplifying the text, and adopting a more inclusionary and universal approach. Rather than producing inferior translations, Jāmī’s Central Asian interlocutors effectively used their collected biographies to intensify the process of Islamization (p. 379). Papas also points to the deft manipulation of space in the collected biographies by Jāmī and his continuators, which, when considered globally, may be taken to “trace a cartography of Islamic sanctity.” They translate Sufi sainthood into “an omnipresent marker of territory” twined with both sacred and mundane topographies, ranging from shrines, mosques and lodges to “the everyday environment of believers where miracles occurred” (p. 405). Both processes of individual sanctity and Islamization peak in Köstendillī’s late nineteenth century translation of Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt, where the last entry on the list of noteworthy saints is the author himself, and the vast expanse of space mastered by the holy men is made coeval with the frontiers of Ottoman imperial reach (pp. 418‒19).
The question of performative regard, this time in relation to Jāmī’s stance on sectarianism, is taken up in Sajjad Rizvi’s contribution. Rizvi’s political spectrum has at the one end the concept of hybrid religiosity—the Chicago School followers of Marshall Hodgson’s theory of ʿAlid loyalism as a prevalent feature of medieval religiosity current among all Muslims, Sunnī and Shīʿī. On the other end of Rizvi’s spectrum is Hamid Algar, who, according to the author, sees no evidence for an ascendant “hybrid philo-Shīʿī religiosity” (p. 229) in pre-Safavid Iran. Rizvi rejects both the transcendence of sectarian identity of the former and the anti-Shīʿism of the latter as definitive of Jāmī’s stance. Rather, seen in its proper ideational context, Jāmī’s anti-Shīʿī declarations emerge as political rather than religious positions, deciphered best by scrutinizing the intense rivalry between the various ruling houses, including Ottomans, Ṣafavids, Āq Qūyūnlū and Mughals, that vied for domination in the political sphere.
Hamid Algar’s own contribution attends to another valence of alterity, namely linguistic difference, and Jāmī’s interactions with Ottoman rulers and literati. In what must be a familiar trope to students of premodern history, the poet ostensibly eschewed association with the Ottoman Mehmet II Fātiḥ (r. intermittently 848/1444‒855/1451), while at the same time praising him in panegyrics and accepting his gifts (pp. 68‒72). He enjoyed a genuine affinity for Bayezid II (r. 886/1481‒918/1512), and penned encomia to the Āq Qūyūnlū and to their rivals, the Qara Qūyūnlū, although he was most sympathetic to the Tīmūrids of Herat. His widespread influence on classical Ottoman literature is evidenced by numerous emulators of his various works, each discussed at length. In comparison to his significant literary influence, Jāmī’s impact on Sufi confraternities in Ottoman realms was modest.
Marc Toutant takes the competition between Turkish and Persian to Central Asia, and ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī’s renderings of Persian poetry into Chaghatay Turkish. A close friend of Jāmī’s and his patron and disciple, Navāʾī translated Jāmī’s writings, in this instance his versified Khiradnāma-i Iskandarī, for a Chaghatay audience. A close reading of the two versions, however, reveals several instances where Navāʾī digressed from the original, to highlight the Naqshbandī concepts that are alluded to, but never made explicit in Jāmī’s text. Read as a commentary on Jāmī’s teachings rather than a simple translation, Navāʾī’s text is critical to the reception history of Jāmī’s oeuvre.
The reception of Jāmī’s poetry in the hyper-Shīʿī climate of early Safavid Iran is examined in Paul Losensky’s chapter, which begins with a vivid account of the torching of Jāmī’s tomb in Herat in 916/1510. The early Safavids felt a deep ambivalence toward Jāmī, a literary icon who was also a public symbol of Sunni chauvinism. But at the end of the day, it was the quality of Jāmī’s poetry rather than his divisive views that attracted criticism. While his reputation was soon restored, as evidenced by his inclusion in later collected biographies of noteworthy poets, it “was secured at the cost of irrelevance” (p. 593). The modernist poets of the mid-sixteenth century and after praised him for his learning, but found his poems bereft of all freshness. Jāmī’s greatest contribution to the history of Persian poetry, Losensky finds, is his “mapping of the literary tradition” (p. 595), which allowed later poets to innovate and move beyond the confines of classical Persian poetry.
“To Round and Rondeau the Canon” is the title of Franklin Lewis’ cogently argued chapter on Jāmī’s station in the canon of classical Persian poetry, and his own estimation of past poets. He carefully grounds his argument in the context of previous scholarship—medieval and modern—of Jāmī’s oeuvre. Lewis ventures that Jāmī played a conscious role in stationing himself in the canon of classical Persian poetry: His Dīvān emulates a good number of the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ while the arrangement of the text into chapters based roughly on chronological periods in his life follows Amīr Khusraw’s example; Silsilat al-dhahab resonates with Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa; and, finally, a Khamsa with five poems that is modeled on those by Niẓāmī (pp. 493‒4). But mirroring past poets must not be read as signaling a lack of creativity or innovation on Jāmī’s part. A close reading of his views on the canon of classical poetry—in his Bahāristān—juxtaposed against Navāʾī’s contemporary anthology, reveals how the two Tīmūrid poets “rounded and reshaped a forward-looking, rather than a backward-looking canon” (p. 559).
Éve Feuillebois-Pierunek explores Jāmī’s role in welding Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) Sufi theosophy on to the Persian literary tradition. The author also characterizes Jāmī’s contribution to Naqshbandī wayfaring (in his commentary on dhikr) as a type of “binding,” wherein the emphasis is an inner link (rābiṭa) between master and disciple that eventually leads the disciple to an interior state and the “contemplation of God in everything and seeing all creatures as mirrors of the Unique Beauty” (p. 359).
The traveling afterlife of Jāmī’s writings and views is the focus of the contributions by Alam, Nasir, Ökten, Wormser, Shen, dʾHubert, Irani, Obrock, Perkins and Gould. Characteristically, the great polymath played an important role in the diffusion of his own poetry. The focus in Alam’s chapter, to take one example, is on Jāmī’s role in shaping South Asian Muslim culture, a long process that began during the poet’s own lifetime. Jāmī was held in high esteem by Bābur (d. 937/1530), founder of the Mughal dynasty, who in his autobiography praised the poet for his unsurpassed command of esoteric and exoteric knowledge (p. 141). Jāmī’s popularity both at the Mughal court and among Indian Sufis only grew with time. So much so that even Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1034/1624), India’s greatest Naqshbandī master, who penned long diatribes against Ibn ʿArabī, wrote admiringly of Jāmī, this in spite of the latter’s well-known regard for theosophy and rich commentaries on Ibn ʿArabī’s views (p. 161). The same reverence is found among Qādirī, Chishtī and other Sufi confraternities, and remained unabated in the modern period. Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938) lauded not just Jāmī’s poetry, but his vision of Islam as a religious, political and cultural framework that was tolerant, flexible and accommodating, and at the same time offered individual believers a distinct and cohesive sense of identity. Ultimately, Alam writes, Jāmī was as influential as he was because “his idea dovetailed so perfectly with the great Mughal dream of a versatile Islam, one that could adjust to the realities of lived experience” (p. 172).
The indigenization of Jāmī’s legacy in varied cultural settings is the subject of several chapters. In Bengal, as Thibaut d’Hubert demonstrates, commentaries and translations of Jāmī’s works—Yūsuf u Zulaykhā in this instance—cast him as a mediating authority between competing local religious views, crossing the boundaries between “the Quranic text and the vernacular realm” (p. 686). A similar trajectory is observed in Yiming Shen’s chapter on the spread of Jāmī’s works in China, evidenced in acclimatizing translations dating to the mid-seventeenth century.
The leitmotif of this collected volume is the susceptibility of ideas and concepts to the vagaries of context. The cantankerous, divisive Jāmī, whose anti-Shīʿī rhetoric is analyzed in several chapters, faces off with the tolerant, pragmatic Jāmī found in Alam’s discussion. Likewise, his poetry is graded as less than stellar by some of the critics studied in Losensky’s chapter and valorized for its peerless command of style and beauty elsewhere in the volume. That multifarious legacy is the hallmark of a reception history that strives to foreground the tension between concept and social context without attempting to resolve it, thus proffering a fuller understanding of the past. Although this review has not done justice to all the impressive scholarship displayed in this volume, it should suffice to show that our understanding of early modern Islamic history has just become all the richer for it.
