Ferishtah's Fancies was a work of Browning's old age, the first of the three volumes he published after he turned seventy, before his death in 1889. All these volumes, but especially the first two, Ferishtah's Fancies (Reference Browning1884) and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887), are reflective works, in which Browning revisits the major themes and imaginative locations of his life and work. But they are also characteristically restless works, formally complex and innovative, and polemical in spirit. They contain some of Browning's least engaging writing: dense, prickly, mannered, full of a kind of late-Browning poetic lingo which is not quite demotic and not quite high art. Oddly enough, Ferishtah's Fancies was a success when it was published – it is the only volume Browning ever published to be reprinted twice in a year – but this success did not last beyond the First World War, and in modern critical terms it is probably the most neglected of all his work. There are good reasons for this. When you know that Henry Jones based most of his 1912 book, Browning as a Religious and Philosophical Teacher on Ferishtah's Fancies, you can guess what is coming. To Jones what was earnest, profound, and consoling about Browning's ideas was exactly what the next generation rejected with a kind of nausea. Since these ideas no longer came clothed in the verse that had enraptured the Pre-Raphaelites – the verse of Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864), and even The Ring and the Book (1868–69) – it failed utterly to make its way into the twentieth century, and has lain buried.

As a poetic entity, Ferishtah's Fancies might not have the artistic value of an unread masterpiece like Sordello (1840), or a queer, difficult, dangerous poem like Fifine at the Fair (Reference FitzGerald1872). But it is still a fascinating poem, full of thought, as opposed to thoughts, permeated with complex theological teachings and shaped by Browning's passionate undimmed creative intelligence. This imaginative creativity is spread across the poem but is least tangible when it comes to the poem's Persian (Oriental) fabric.Footnote ¹ This is mostly because Browning himself never claimed this facet of his work to be integral and authentic – which was unconventional at the time, as most of his contemporaries would state the opposite, however “Oriental” their work was. On 19 October 1884, only a month before the poem's release, Browning wrote to his friend, G. B. Smith: “Do not suppose there is more than a thin disguise of a few Persian names and allusions” (Dooley and Ewbank 295). Browning was telling the truth, though only in part: there is more to the Persian framework of Ferishtah's Fancies. But Browning's unpretentious attitude led many to take the Persian fabric of his poem to be threadbare. Most critics took him at his word and either ignored the Persian dimension altogether or treated it as a purely conventional backdrop, which does not deserve a separate study. Even critical scholarship on the influence of “Persia” and Persian poetry on English literature overlooked the Persian design of Ferishtah's Fancies. There exists virtually no criticism at all on the poem's “Persian-ness” in any of the more authoritative texts, including Gail's Persia and the Victorians (Reference Gail1951), Yohannan's Persian Poetry in England and America (Reference Yohannan1977), Jahanpour's “Western Encounters with Persian Sufi Literature” (Reference Jahanpour, Lewisohn and Morgan1999), and Javadi's standard modern work, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (Reference Javadi2005). Javadi deems the poem unworthy of critical attention because it “does not display a great Persian influence” (xii). But the presence of “Persia” in Ferishtah's Fancies is far more paramount and complex than has been acknowledged by critics or confessed by Browning.Footnote ² It is especially of great significance when it is studied in relation to Browning's attitude towards Edward FitzGerald and his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Reference FitzGerald1859), as it reveals itself to conceal another less demonstrative layer of Persian understanding, embedded in the poem by an unintended infusion of knowledge about Persian culture picked up from many sources, among them, of course, FitzGerald's own poem, to whose hero Ferishtah, the leading character of Browning's poem, is in fact polemically opposed. To explore the motives behind Browning's adoption of the Persian theme and the way the less perceptible layer of “Persian-ness” manifests itself in the poem is the primary purpose of this article.

Ferishtah's Fancies is a collection of twelve narrative poems, or “fancies,” about the life and teachings of an imaginary Persian sage, Ferishtah, a “dervish.” It consists of conversations between Ferishtah and his students and is framed by an authorial “Prologue” and “Epilogue.” The setting is medieval Persia, after the Islamic conquest but well before the modern period. Each of the narrative poems is followed by a lyric, printed in smaller type after the closing line yet not given a separate title, and not separately listed in the “Table of Contents.” The structure and physical layout of the volume make it hard to assign these lyrics either to the main character, Ferishtah, or to Browning as author. The twelve main poems in the volume fall into two uneven categories. The first two poems, “The Eagle” and “The Melon-Seller,” are set in Ferishtah's youth or early manhood, before he becomes a “dervish.” The other ten are narratives of occasions on which Ferishtah, now an established teacher, answers a question or solves a problem on theology and moral philosophy posed by one of his pupils. An unnamed narrator sets up the scene for each poem and sets up the dialogue between Ferishtah and his interlocutor, in which the sage always has the last word. This is however not quite true when we look at the volume as a whole, because in each poem, after Ferishtah finishes speaking, a different voice comes into play, the voice of the lyrics, which neither belong to the main poem nor are fully separate from it. Browning designed the interaction between these two voices to make visible and audible a clash between two kinds of authority in his own poetics, a divide which goes back to his earliest writings and which is truly representative of him in a way the one-dimensional theology of his Ferishtah could never be.Footnote ³ Besides the main text, the volume has two epigraphs, one from an entry on Shakespeare in a long-outdated eighteenth-century historical dictionary, and one from King Lear. The King Lear epigraph is from Act III, scene 6, when the mad king addresses Edgar as Poor Tom: “You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred, only I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.” Browning deploys this obscure contemporary joke as a comment on the process of cultural “translation,” or travesty, which has led him to put on Oriental dress in order to perform on the London literary stage in 1884.

Browning certainly had an interest in the Orient, as is evidenced by his numerous uses of Semitic themes in previous works such as “Holy-Cross Day” (Men and Women), “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (Dramatis Personae), and “Jochanan Hakkadosh” (Jocoseria, 1883). There are Oriental allusions and images scattered, sometimes rather insignificantly, in his other works too, for example the underground chamber in the castle of Goito in Sordello, which is covered in occult inscriptions in Arabic. Yet we know little about the extent of Browning's knowledge of Oriental (Arabic and Persian) languages and literatures. With Arabic, we know that he was in contact with Charles J. Lyall, a distinguished scholar of the Orientals since 1878. Lyall's first letter to him concerned Browning's accidental use of the tawil, a compound metre in Arabic poetry, in “Abt Vogler” (Dramatis Personae).Footnote ⁴ On 3 June 1878, Lyall sent Browning “some translations of old Arabic poetry,” which was his work on the Mo'allaqat (Armstrong 78).Footnote ⁵ A year later, on 10 June 1879, he wrote a following letter to Browning, thanking him for his “kind acknowledgment” of his “translations of ancient Arab verse” (81). Browning, too, made use of Lyall's scholarship, once in his Arabic-inspired poem “Muléykeh” (Dramatic Idylls, Second Series, 1880), and later in Ferishtah's Fancies. He made some small alterations in the third edition of Ferishtah's Fancies after receiving Lyall's letter of 13 December 1884, in which he had suggested six corrections “chiefly in Persian names” (100–01).

With Persian, Browning had little engagement prior to Ferishtah's Fancies. He had small (if any) knowledge of the Persian language, and his exposure to Persian literature was limited to only a few sources, one of which he in fact had read in his early manhood. As he explained to his friend and future biographer Alexandra Orr, the story of “The Eagle,” the second poem in Ferishtah's Fancies, “is from Pilpay's Fables: I read it when a boy and lately put it into verse: then it occurred to me to make the Dervish one Ferishtah and the poem, the beginning of a series” (Dooley and Ewbank 286).Footnote ⁶ The incident of the eagle is indeed taken directly from Chapter II, Fable III of Kalīla and Dimnah or The Fables of Bidpai, which was translated and published by Rev. Wyndham Knatchbull in 1818 (DeVane 476). But Browning had other, and more recent, encounters with Persian too. He studied Goethe's West-östlicher Divan (1819) whilst learning German, and he read Helen Zimmern's verse translation of Firdausi, The Epic of Kings, Stories Retold from Firdausi that was published only two years before Ferishtah's Fancies (Ryals 190). In Persian literary culture, the Shāhnāmeh is taken to be the greatest monument of Persian language and literature. Firdausi's book is an epic cycle, a versified chronicle that relates, in an elevated and splendid manner, tales of kings, heroes, and dynasties of ancient Persia. So however accurate and authentic Zimmern's translation might have been, Browning's exposure to the epic narrative and mythical substance of the Shāhnāmeh is likely to have triggered an interest in him towards Persian. Browning knew Zimmern well and had helped her with the book before its release. Zimmern acknowledges Browning's support in the first edition of her book. But the partnership appears to have worked for Browning too: the spelling of some of the foreign names in Ferishtah's Fancies, such as “Mihrab,” which is the name of the son of Zahhak (the Serpent) in the Shāhnāmeh, are from Zimmern's.

There remains a fourth source, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the very incarnation of nineteenth-century English literary “Persianism.” We have no biographical evidence to suggest that Browning consulted the Rubáiyát for writing Ferishtah's Fancies. There is also no mention of FitzGerald's book in relation to Ferishtah's Fancies in Browning's letters.Footnote ⁷ But we do know that Browning was mindful of FitzGerald and his work; he owned a copy of the third edition (1872) of the Rubáiyát in his personal library. There are also several allusions in the poem that parallel some of FitzGerald's in the Rubáiyát: for example, “Parwin” in “A Bean-Stripe: also, Apple-Eating,” and “Mushtari,” repeated three times in “Cherries” and once in “A Pillar at Sebzevar,” have been most likely borrowed from Quatrain LIV (Quatrain LXXV in the 1872 edition) of the Rubáiyát. The word “Rhuibayat” was even mentioned in the MS, 1. 133 of the poem “Mihrab Shah,” although it was later changed to “poetry” (Dooley and Ewbank 287).

The impact of the Rubáiyát on Ferishtah's Fancies, however, exceeds these outward influences. On the surface, the book may appear to be another source with Persian origin from which Browning might have borrowed a number of “foreign” elements to make his work visibly “Persian.” But in truth FitzGerald and his Rubáiyát have had a far greater influence on the conception of Browning's Ferishtah's Fancies than this, though the influence is of a peculiar nature; it is an influence that is stirred not by praise and admiration but by dislike and aversion. Browning seems to have never liked the Rubáiyát. He shows his dislike for the first time only a few years after the poem's release in one of his most popular works, “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (1864), which, in Maisie Ward's language, was his “reply of hope to FitzGerald's hedonistic but despairing Omar Khayyam” (17). Ironically, in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” Browning speaks to FitzGerald in his own language. He adopts the metaphor of the “Potter”: “Ay, note that Potter's wheel, / That metaphor!” (ll. 151–52) – which FitzGerald himself had borrowed from the Persian rubáiyát (quatrains) in the manuscripts – and looks at the “KÚZA-NÁMA” section of the Rubáiyát with a completely opposing perspective:

Here, Browning is contesting the principles that were put forward by FitzGerald's Omar. To him, the carpe diem philosophy of Omar (“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!” [l. 156]) is not really the solution to religious perplexity; nor is the drinking of wine. True, physical existence is ephemeral, but the soul remains. God is also undisputedly infinite: “That was, is, and shall be” (l. 162). But for Browning this was not an adequate response to Omar's Epicureanism; he comes back to the Rubáiyát almost twenty years later, though this time he seems to have had more reasons for revisiting this familiar territory.

Browning wrote Ferishtah's Fancies in a period of six months through the autumn and winter of 1883–Reference Browning1884, around three or four months after FitzGerald's death on 13 June 1883. The Rubáiyát was at the peak of its popularity in Britain and America by then in the nineteenth century. It was more popular than any poem that Browning had ever written, and Browning was aware of this. It is therefore possible that the celebrity of the Rubáiyát and the aftershock of FitzGerald's death prompted Browning to adopt FitzGerald's favorite theme in one of his poems. This assumption becomes more credible if we take into account Browning's knowledge of Tennyson's love for FitzGerald, his own peculiar relationship with Tennyson, and his unfavorable opinion of FitzGerald. Browning admired Tennyson, but he had complex, ambivalent feelings for him. Tennyson was always a step ahead of him. It was Tennyson who became the Poet Laureate in 1850. It was his poems that were being published in large print-runs, whereas Browning's writings had a smaller circulation. This is of course not to suggest that Browning was averse to Tennyson; on the contrary, he truly respected him. But there was a disparity here: Browning's adoration of Tennyson was incongruous with his unfriendly attitudes towards FitzGerald, to whom, as Daniel Karlin notes, Tennyson was close, “closer than Browning would ever be” (Karlin, “One” 4).Footnote ⁹

Browning's discovery of FitzGerald's callous comment about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death, which William A. Wright had thoughtlessly included in Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald (1889), and his furious response, “To Edward FitzGerald,” published in the Athenaeum on 13 July 1889, is obviously not a reason behind the Persian design of Ferishtah's Fancies.Footnote ¹⁰ But the language of Browning's fierce sonnet and, specifically, his use of “Fitz” in referring to FitzGerald, prove that Browning was aware of Tennyson's love for FitzGerald. “Fitz” was the abbreviation that was often used by FitzGerald's close friends. It was used as a term of endearment in the opening line of Tennyson's “To E. Fitzgerald,” published in Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885):

Browning borrowed the abbreviation and used it in his poetic response to FitzGerald's remark: he learns “That you, Fitzgerald, whom by ear and eye / She never knew, ‘thanked God my wife was dead.’ / Aye, dead! And were yourself alive, good Fitz, / How to return you thanks would task my wits.”Footnote ¹¹

To have a Persian sage as the leading character of the poem proves further that the formulation of Ferishtah's Fancies was influenced by Browning's unfriendly attitude towards FitzGerald and his book. “There was no such person as Ferishtah,” Browning wrote in his letter (of October 1884) to G. B. Smith (Dooley and Ewbank 295). He was telling the truth: Ferishtah was his creation, but the name was not. “Ferishtah” was his transliteration of the Persian word fereshteh, meaning angel, or to be more precise, a spiritual being believed to act as an attendant of God on earth. There is evidently a purpose behind Browning's choice of name; the definition of the word fereshteh in Persian fits perfectly well with what Browning wants the protagonist of his poem to embody. Ferishtah is designed to polemically oppose FitzGerald's Omar. He represents certain kinds of orthodoxies that are in absolute conflict with Omar's philosophy; he is a “fereshteh,” a profound Muslim, a spiritual teacher, who fundamentally believes in the nature and existence of God, whereas Omar is a sinner, a cynical drunkard who questions the existence of God while he carries the reputation of being a Muslim.

The lyrics at the end of the each poem, as mentioned in the beginning, are intercalated between the main narrative sections of the poem. Browning may have had in mind the songs with which Tennyson separated the sections of The Princess (1847), but more important for our purpose is the possibility that these songs are meant to be Ferishtah's compositions. Like FitzGerald's Omar, Ferishtah is a sage who composes lyric poems; a fragment of one of Ferishtah's lyrics, a love-poem, is cited in the tenth poem, “Plot-Culture”:

Ferishtah himself also “speaks” the last lyric, the one that follows the twelfth poem in the volume, “A Bean-Stripe; also Apple-Eating,” though in this case he is evidently Browning's own mouthpiece. There is no way of resolving this question; Browning left it deliberately ambiguous. But it is at least possible that Browning meant Ferishtah to challenge Omar on his own ground as a poet.

The more we explore Browning's characterization of Ferishtah, the more we see how Ferishtah has been purposefully put together to rival FitzGerald's Omar. Yet what makes Browning's imaginative characterization of Ferishtah fascinating is that in his fictional construction of an anti-Omar Persian sage, he seems to have enriched the Persian fabric of the poem. Whether this was a conscious act, or was done fortuitously by Browning's scattered knowledge of Oriental and, in this case, Persian sources, is hard to tell. But there is certainly more to Browning's seeming adoption of a Persian costume than meets the eye. Ferishtah's Fancies has an occluded engagement with “Persia,” but unlike other major “Persianized” works of nineteenth-century British poetry, such as FitzGerald's poem or its precursor, Matthew Arnold's “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), its engagement with “Persia” is with its religious culture, and not the prominent figures of Persia's poetic tradition. We see evidence of this, for example, in the poem's historical context, which is fictive but taken to be real in the poem's world. The overall setting in Ferishtah's Fancies is a medieval Persian world, resembling the conventional image of the Orient in which there is an old, unpopular Shah like Mihrab Shah, a prime minister, a vizier, who has fallen from favour like the wretched vendor in “The Melon-Seller” or a renowned “leech” who knows a cure for every pain in “The Family.” Yet there is more to the poem's setting. Persia is typically a Muslim country. Ferishtah is a spiritual teacher of Islam, and his disciples are adherents of Islam. But the understanding that the poem offers in constructing this image of a Muslim country implies that not only is Persia designed to resemble an Islamic state, but it is also intended to represent a Shiite country. For instance, the third poem in the volume is titled “Shah Abbas,” which is the name of one of the most prominent kings of the Safavids, the dynasty that made Shiism the official religion of Persia in the sixteenth century. It is also in this poem that Ferishtah delivers his first lesson as a “full dervish,” and the lesson happens to be on Ali ibn Abi-Talib, cousin and son-in-law of prophet Mohammad, known by Shiite Muslims as the rightful inheritor of the prophet:

“Shah Abbas” reveals more of the latent presence of “Persia” in Ferishtah's Fancies. The poem is Ferishtah's vindication of the truthfulness of the account of Ali's life. Ferishtah uses three anecdotes to argue that a fervent desire to believe, a desire that directly influences one's life, has more worth than an intellectual acceptance of belief, a state of mind in which belief becomes merely notional and does not affect one's actual behaviour (Jones 221). As in other poems in the book, the central argument is initiated by one of the disciples. As “Ferishtah pause[s] abrupt” (l. 4), the pupil asks:

The student is unwittingly voicing Keats's words in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) to challenge the premise of Ferishtah's argument in defense of the credibility of the account of Ali's life. Yet two points are unclear at this point: the name or the nature of the “roll,” from which Ferishtah is reading to his students, and the reason behind Ferishtah's pause. While the former remains unspecified, the latter becomes clear further in the poem: the interlocutor reveals that Ferishtah was “disabled by emotion at a tale” (l. 75), and the “tale” that he refers to is what Ferishtah was reading from: the narrative of Ali's death. Ferishtah weeps when he reaches the part in the “roll” that relates the assassination of Ali. But how do we know this, since the cause of Ferishtah's tears can be any other part of the “roll”? The student's opening question makes this clear, as he refers specifically to Ali's legendary death: “Was this life lived, was this death died – not dreamed?” (l. 14).

Ferishtah's emotional reaction to Ali's death is distinctively “Persian,” but it may not be visible to a reader who knows little about Persian (Shiite) religious culture. It is typical of Shiite preachers to burst into tears while relating the narrative of their Imams' deaths. Ali's death, and that of his younger son, Hosein, is the most valued martyrdom in Shiite tradition. Ali is the central component in Shiism. Shiite in fact means to follow and reverence Ali and his descendants.Footnote ¹² But how did Browning come across Ali? As Dooley and Ewbank explain, Browning “would have remembered that Ali is affectionately praised by Carlyle in the second lecture of On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, which he had heard delivered in 1840” (297). Carlyle describes Ali as

Carlyle's words might well have encouraged Browning to choose Ali as the cornerstone of “Shah Abbas.” But there might have been another source for the inclusion of Ali and Shiism in the poem: Matthew Arnold's “A Persian Passion Play,” first published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1871, and later included in the third edition of Essays in Criticism in 1875. Arnold's essay concerns the Shiite Muslim commemoration of the supreme martyrdom of their Imam Hosein (Ali's son) through a form of drama known as ta'ziye in Persia. Arnold was led to this topic by Les religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie Central (1866) by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat posted to Tehran from 1854 to 1864, beginning first as secretary to the embassy and from 1861 as minister. The “Persian Passion Play” gives a fairly detailed account of the historical events that led to the battle of Karbala in 680 CE. It contains a readable history of the early days of Islam. In his treatment of the topic, Arnold makes Shiism appear more attractive to Western sensibilities than its Sunni counterpart. He offers a moving account (in keeping with traditional literary treatments of this event) of the ta'ziye, the tragic story of the “Marriage of Kassem” and his subsequent martyrdom. Arnold opens his narrative with Ali, before going on to relate the tragedy of Karbala and the death of “Hussein” (Arnold's spelling), which, as Arnold himself describes, “will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader” (270). Arnold's tone is solemn and compassionate throughout the essay; it is elevating and moving, as though a grieving Shiite believer has authored it. He describes Ali as “the Lion of God,” Mohammad's “brother, delegate, and vicar”; Ali was “one of Mahomet's best and most successful captains” (264). The image that Arnold draws of Ali is that of a self-effacing, humble champion who righteously endures a great deal of agony after the death of the prophet:

Browning knew Arnold well. They had known each other for many years and were in regular contact after Browning's return to England in 1861, following the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Florence. They sent each other copies of their writings, poems, and queries. There are a number of instances in Arnold's essay, such as the narrative of Ali's assassination and the tearful reaction of the Persians upon seeing the reenactment of the murdering of their Imams in the ta'ziye, that suggest Browning might have taken some of his descriptions from Arnold's essay.

The student's opening question in “Shah Abbas” shows more of the inconspicuous Persian understanding that the poem retains. The question is multipart. The first part recalls an earlier enquiry: “it is beautiful / But is it true?” to which Ferishtah had responded: “In truth / Lives beauty.” The student refers to his first question as a daring one. But this time, before asking another audacious question, he first acknowledges his master's rationale and admits to his own trust in the account of Ali's life to avoid any accusation of infidelity: “‘Beauty – yes, / In thy mind and in my mind, every mind / That apprehends.” The second part is the kernel of the enquiry: “but outside – so to speak – / Did beauty live in deed as well as word, / Was this life lived, was this death died – not dreamed?'” The pupil is not convinced by his master's response to his earlier question; he is eager to know whether this beauty, which he suspects to be the outcome of religious partiality, can denote historical veracity. What is striking here is the understanding that has been incorporated in this exchange. The student knows about the bold nature of his query; he knows asking such a rebellious question can cast doubt on the strength of his belief in the eyes of others. So this time instead of expressing his apprehension verbally, he shows it with his pauses, indicated in the poem by the dashes.

The daring nature of the pupil's question becomes more notable, and more relevant to our discussion, when we take into account the nature of Ferishtah's role in the poem. Ferishtah is devised to represent a Muslim, Shiite preacher. But he is also a dervish master, who, besides being a Shiite Muslim, is very likely to be a Sufi. Although the term “dervish” is never clearly defined in the poem, there is enough evidence to suggest that Browning might have modeled Ferishtah on a Sufi dervish. The Dehkhoda Persian Dictionary (an invaluable source of etymological, historical, and literary analysis in Persian language) describes dervish as someone who solicits alms for a living. But in Persian, the word “dervish” is usually used to refer to Muslim mystics. Persian poetry, too, uses the word in a similar context; there are numerous examples of it in classical Persian poetry in the work of Sa'di and Hafiz. But there is an explanation for this semantic correlation: in Sufism, the spiritual purification that ends in the enlightenment of heart (known as safa in Sufism) is believed to be attainable through renunciation of earthly pleasure.Footnote ¹³ In order to be a Sufi, one needs to take a vow of poverty and endure extreme destitution until he reaches his (to use Browning's phrase) “dervishhood.” The Sufis are required to be selflessly committed to the service of others and to show no concern for the possession of wealth (Nasr, “Rise” 1–18; Mahjub 549–60). But this self-inflicted financial renunciation and the worldly deprivation that the Sufis are required to undertake inevitably affect the most external aspects of their economic and social life and, therefore, make them indistinguishable from beggars and mendicants. As a result of these outward resemblances, the term “dervish” has come to stand as a synonym for the Sufi in Persian language and literature. Even though it is unlikely for Browning to have known about the word's origin in Persian, his fitting deployment of it in the poem suggests that he might have learned about its contextual use from one of his sources.

There is also an ideological correspondence, a Sufi-Shiite correlation, in the poem that proves further that Ferishtah might be a Sufi. Ferishtah is a Shiite preacher with fervent veneration for Ali. He teaches his pupils by reading from Ali's life and then dedicates an entire lesson to defend the credibility of Ali's life. There is a strong link between Shiism and Sufism in Islamic tradition, and Ali happens to be the core of this connection. Roger Savory describes Ali as the “connecting link” between Shiism and Sufism. “True Shiism,” in Henry Corbin's language, “is the same as Tasavvuf [Sufism], and similarly, genuine and real Tasavvuf cannot be anything other than Shiism” (Savory 24).Footnote ¹⁴ Seyyed Hossein Nasr speaks of Ali in the same light: “in as much as Alī stands at the origin of Shi'ism, and is at the same time the outstanding representative of Islamic esotericism, the source of Shi'ism and Sufism are in this respect the same and they have many elements in common” (Ideals 127). There is also textual evidence in the poem that displays Ferishtah's adherence to Sufism. In “The Eagle,” Ferishtah appears to be an ascetic in the Sufi sense. This is a distinctive incident in the poem from which Ferishtah's journey to “dervishood,” both literally and metaphorically, begins. Ferishtah is “yet un-dervished” (l. 1) at this point in the grand narrative of the poem, and he shows signs of immaturity with a hasty judgment, an occurrence which happens rarely in the poem (only once after this in “The Melon-Seller”). Witnessing a raven's nest on a bough in which “youngling [ravens] gaped with callow beak / Widened by want” (ll. 8–10) while their mother is lying dead beneath the tree, Ferishtah wonders, “A piteous chance! / “How shall they ‘scape destruction?” (ll. 10–11). The narrator sees Ferishtah's question as a misstep and tells the reader of its immaturity. After Ferishtah shows his sympathetic bafflement, which seems to undermine God's wisdom, the speaker refers to him as a sage (“sighed the sage”); but then it appears that the narrator himself is being injudicious and hasty in calling Ferishtah a sage, as he immediately corrects himself in the following line: “– Or sage about to be, though simple still” (l. 12). Ferishtah subsequently witnesses an eagle, unexpectedly, feeding the starving ravens. Saddened at his hasty judgment, he realises that his earlier verdict was mistaken:

To expiate his sin, he then endures an intense phase of self-denial, resembling the phase of renunciation that Sufis undergo in their quest for the “annihilation” of selfhood. The ultimate goal for Sufis is union with God, and this depends on the Sufis' utter separation from all else and resolute devotion to God. This uncompromising dedication to God involves detachment from the world, abstraction from material things and flesh (tajrīd) and, ultimately, annihilation of the self (fana) (Mason 66–82).Footnote ¹⁵ Ferishtah seeks isolation in the “Woods” (l. 35) and abstains from food and drink. He famishes himself until he loses consciousness:

While unconscious, he goes through the revelation of witnessing a divine omnipotence in his dream that admonishes him for his earlier misjudgment: “Hast thou marked my deed?” But Ferishtah has made another misjudgment: the “unwise one” draws the wrong inference from witnessing the incident of eagle and ravens. He identifies himself with the “the helpless weakling” (ravens) instead of the eagle, “the helpful strength / that captures prey and saves the perishing” (ll. 28–29). But the divine being that appears in Ferishtah's trance disapproves of his judgment. It rebukes him for starving and isolating himself and orders him not to famish himself, not to waste his life in self-denial, but instead to “feed” himself so he would be in a condition to help others: “work, eat, then feed who lack!” (l. 30)

Despite his preliminary experience that results in the celestial revelation, Ferishtah does not repent or fast anymore, nor does he speak of the incident to any of his disciples. Quite the opposite: he completely abandons his former approach and follows his God's commandment. He in fact does it so fervently that one of his disciples, in “Two Camels,” accuses him of self-indulgence:

The pupil believes that to indulge in worldly pleasure cannot coexist with wisdom, and he uses Ferishtah's care of his self to make his critical point. But Ferishtah thinks otherwise, because he was ordered otherwise. His anecdotal response, the story of the two camels, symbolically echoes what he was told in “The Eagle”: the camel that feasted had “praise and patting and a brand / Of good-and-faithful-servant fixed on flank” (ll. 57–58), and the “carcass” of the other one, who preferred fasting to feasting, fed the vultures (l. 53).Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, to work and to feed others, one needs to eat. But Ferishtah's vindication of living joy as a gift of God is at odds with his persona as a “dervish” Shiite Muslim. In DeVane's language, the attribution of such notion to Ferishtah is “much more suited to a Protestant occidental poet than to an oriental sage” (485). There is, however, a justification for Browning's inconsistent characterization of Ferishtah: to fully conform to Western typology of Persian literary traditions or cultural models is not part of the design of Ferishtah's Fancies. That means the construction of Ferishtah, and that of almost every other Persian element in the poem, is partly imitative and partly innovative. Browning seems to have adhered to certain conventions, but he has also followed his own models.

Regardless of the issue of authenticity, the representation of Ferishtah as a Sufi is the result of Browning's resentment towards FitzGerald and his book. Since he had the third edition of the Rubáiyát in his library, he might have been familiar with FitzGerald's lengthy defense of Omar Khayyám against the imputation that he was a Sufi mystic, a defense which, though toned down from the polemical fire of the second edition (1868), was still strongly articulated. For FitzGerald, Khayyám was exactly what he professed himself to be: a sceptic and a pleasure-seeker. Browning's response was to create a Sufi sage who is not life-denying, as though to say to FitzGerald: “You see? It is possible to love life, to enjoy the pleasures of the body, while holding opinions diametrically opposed to those of your Omar.” Ferishtah's philosophy, for all its complex reasoning, is grounded in common life, and his parables are homely and concrete. He may not drink or make love, but he tolerates those who do. As a teacher who holds court, in his own way, “underneath the Bough,” he is the antidote to Omar, though there has been no great rush, among modern readers, at least, to take their medicine.Footnote ¹⁷