Ecotheology and Love: The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin 1793642761, 9781793642769

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Note on Dates
Introduction
1 Love
2 Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet
3 Ecotheology and Ecojustice
4 Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Ecotheology and Love

Environment and Religion in Feminist-Womanist, Queer, and Indigenous Perspectives

Series Editor Gabrie’l Atchison   Environment and Religion in Feminist-Womanist, Queer, and Indigenous Perspectives is a series that explores the subject of ecofeminism from feminist-womanist, queer, and indigenous perspectives. The governing assumption of the series is that ecofeminism is not only a mode of scholarly discourse and analysis, but also a hub for social formation and action. What distinguishes this series in particular is that it focuses on ecofeminism as a disciplinary matrix through which the voices of women, particularly women of color, and indigenous peoples can speak from their religious and spiritual traditions and practices to address the environmental challenges and concerns of the age. Volumes in this series will attend to the environmental and ecological issues that impact women, people of color, and indigenous populations, as these communities are, in almost all respects, the most immediately threatened by contemporary climate and ecological changes and catastrophes. Works in the series will focus on the history; scholarly resources and perspectives; constructive practices; religious, spiritual, and natural traditions from which these voices speak; and how these can provide alternative narratives, illuminate hidden agendas, and generate resistance to environmental and religious racism and exploitation. Titles in the Series Ecotheology and Love: The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin, by Bahar Davary Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics, by Sofía Betancourt Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism, edited by K. Melchor Quick Hall and Gwyn Kirk In the Name of the Goddess: A Biophilic Ethic, by Donna Giancola

Ecotheology and Love The Converging Poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and James Baldwin Bahar Davary

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86–90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Sohrab Sepehri, “Va Payam-i Dar Rah” [“And a Message on its Way”], Hasht Ketab [The Eight Books] (Tehran: Tahuri, 1376 HS/1997 AD), 338. Rights owned by Zehnaviz Publishers, used with permission. Text is in Farsi. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Davary, Bahar, author.   Title: Ecotheology and love : the converging poetics of Sohrab Sepehri and     James Baldwin / Bahar Davary.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Environment and     religion in feminist-womanist, queer, and indigenous perspectives |     Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022011685 (print) | LCCN 2022011686 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793642769 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793642776 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Sipihrī, Suhrāb--Criticism and interpretation. | Baldwin,     James, 1924-1987--Criticism and interpretation. | Ecocriticism. |     Ecotheology. | Poetics. | Spirituality in literature. | LCGFT: Literary     criticism.  Classification: LCC PK6561.S559 Z638 2022  (print) | LCC PK6561.S559      (ebook) | DDC 891/.5513--dc23  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011685 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011686 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

“And a Message on its Way” Sohrab Sepehri, Hasht Ketab (1376 HS/1997 AD) I shall come, and I shall deliver a message. I will pour light in the veins. And I will call out: O! You! your baskets full of sleep! I have brought apples, the red apple of the sun I shall come, I shall give a jasmine to the beggar . . . I shall express to the blind: What a sight is the garden! I will become a peddler, and shall roam the streets . . . A passerby will say: It is a dark night, for the truth, I will grant him a galaxy. On the bridge, there is a little girl without a leg, I shall string the stars around her neck I shall wipe curses from the lips. I shall take down the walls. To the bandits I will announce: A Caravan has come, its load, smile! . . . I shall tie eyes with the sun, hearts with love, shadows with water, branches with the wind . . . I shall come to the horses, cows, and shall bring them the green grass of caress . . . I shall offer every crow a tree I shall declare to the snake: How magnificent is the frog! I shall reconcile. I shall acquaint . . . I shall love.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Note on Translation and Transliteration

xi

Note on Dates Introduction

xiii 1

Chapter 1: Love: A Way of Knowing and Being in Islamic Contemplative Tradition

7

Chapter 2: Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet: Beyond Nature Poetry



41

Chapter 3: Ecotheology and Ecojustice: Beyond The Green Expanse

73

Chapter 4: Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

109

Conclusion

141

Appendix: Timeline of Sepehri’s work Bibliography Index





145

149

163

About the Author



167

vii

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to Julie Lind and to the staff at Rowman and Littlefield for their help in editing and for bringing this project to fruition. I am grateful to the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego for awarding me the Steber Professorship that provided the time for my research and writing. I began writing this book in the spring of 2021in London, at the height of the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus, in quarantine with my sisters, Negar and Maryam, who were the first readers of the early versions of each chapter. Their love and wisdom has never failed me, even though we have lived on three separate continents for most of our lives. While in quarantine, we provided virtual support to my lovely niece, Mina, who was courageously battling cancer alone. This book was written with love and with gratitude for her recovery. A greater part of the book was written in San Diego, with much love for my Leila (and David), my Issa (and Karely), my nephew Sina, my wonderful friends and colleagues in the THRS department and at USD, and the unwavering friendship of our neighborhood cricket, poetry, and chai group, with whom I shared parts of the earlier version of the manuscript. Finally, I finished the book in Tehran at the end of 2021, with gratitude for the city of my birth and its people, most of all my mother, and my father who instilled in me the love of poetry and the joy of learning and discovering ways of knowing, and never stopped being my source of encouragement, inspiration, and insight. I am forever grateful. I dedicate this book to my students, past and present, who dare to cultivate their minds without forgetting to nourish their heart.

ix

Note on Translation and Transliteration

The translations that appear in this volume are mine unless otherwise stated. I have adopted only the title Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab as it had been translated by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati’s: Water’s Footfall (2011) as “The Sound of Water’s Footfall.” I have also used David Martin’s translation of the title of Hajm-e Sabz as The Expanse of Green (1988). This provides consistency for readers who may wish to refer to full translations of those works. In rendering Persian and Arabic names and terms in the English alphabet, I have used the transliteration scheme set by the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS). No diacritical marks are used to distinguish between long and short vowels. The letter eyn is represented by an apostrophe. The ezafeh is written as-e after consonants—for example ketab-e—and as-ye after vowels and the silent final h—for example khane-ye and parvaneh-ye. The silent final h is written as an h—for example setareh. The tashdid is represented by a doubling of the letter—for example mo’allem. The plural ha is added to the singular as in pelk-ha. The letter ‫( غ‬ghein) is transliterated as gh, and the letter ‫( ق‬qaf ) is transliterated as q. All transliteration or spelling in quotations are kept as they appear in the original text. In reference to the original language of Sepehri’s work, and other Persian poets, I have used Farsi and Persian interchangeably throughout the book.

xi

Note on Dates

The dates mentioned in references of publications in Persian, published in Iran, are according to the Jalali calendar. I have indicated those dates as HS, Hijri Shamsi, and have provided the equivalent date in the Gregorian calendar as AD, Anno Domini, for example, 1400 HS/2021 AD. In the timeline of Sepehri’s life and work, I have converted the original HS dates to AD dates.

xiii

Introduction

One should not ask the poet. Is it love poetry? Is it religious poetry? Is it a dialogue of the soul with itself? The poet doesn’t know. –Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan1

Starting from the beginning of the human exodus from Africa around fifty thousand years ago, there has always been a connection between religion and art. If we accept, as some scientists do, that Neanderthals were cognitively indistinguishable from homo sapiens, the date goes back even further. The contemporary philosophy of religion has been, for the most part, encompassed in the philosophy of art in the works of many philosophers, particularly after Hegel, including Heidegger, Gadamer, Agamben, and Ricœur. Some connect the beginning of religion with the beginning of language. This book is a study on the works of Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), a twentieth-century Persian poet/painter whose Hasht Ketab begins with a symbolic connotation of the connection between language and infinity. Hasht means eight and ketab means book, rendering the title of his book in English Eight Books and linking it to sacred texts such as the Qur’an, which has been referred to as al-Kitab, The Book, and to the Bible from the Greek τὰ βιβλία, (ta biblia) the books. In its form, however, Hasht Ketab does not give the impression that it equates itself to sacred texts. Rather, it implies that it is comparable to such texts in its mission of provoking an awakening. In choosing the number eight, Sepehri links his text with many cultures, emphasizing the plurality of worldviews that it seeks to include. Eight is the number that indicates speech or the spoken word, among the indigenous people of West Africa. It is also the first cubic number, a symbol of perfection and of infinity, and represents the Earth. In Chinese mythology, particularly in Taoism, eight immortals are believed to know the secrets of nature. 1

2

Introduction

In Christianity, the number eight corresponds to the New Testament; it is a symbol of new life and resurrection. In Judaism, eight evokes the letter H, is pronounced hay, in Hebrew, and means life. In Islam, eight is the number of the gates of heaven. In this manner, beginning with the title of his book, Sepehri, who is widely recognized simply by his first name, Sohrab, connects the world together in a simple numeric symbol, a symbol that represents the Earth and life.2 Sepehri’s poetry is totally centered around love, yet it is not love poetry. It expresses a rich ecotheology with a pluralistic view of the universe, yet it is not religious poetry. It is a constant dialogue of the soul with itself and, at the same time, a call to a better way of being, and of living, in and with the world. The Hasht Ketab, which includes his seven previously published books between 1951 to 1967, in addition to the last book, We Nothing, We Gaze (1976), is his major volume. It is meticulously organized and is the major source for my exploration of his ideas. It has been reprinted over and over and translated into many languages including English, French, Turkish, and Spanish. A new and the only complete translation of it into English has recently been published by Brill (2021). Essential to my analysis of Sepehri’s poetry are his three essays, published posthumously under the title, The Blue Room, as well as his letters to family and friends, memoirs written by his sister and friends, and two documentaries, all in Persian.3 Sepehri was an introvert who shied away from interviews and photo-ops; as a result, today, we have no audio or video recordings of him. He started composing poetry in the aftermath of WWII, when the Declaration of Universal Human Rights reiterated the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of humans. Eleanor Roosevelt held up the Declaration in 1949, surmising it to become a magna carta of the future. Yet, as Giorgio Agamben states: “The rapid growth of declarations and agreements on the part of international organizations have ultimately made any authentic understanding of the historical significance of the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet, it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, meta-juridical values binding the legislator (in fact without much success) to respect eternal ethical principles.”4 Today, some seventy years later, a large number of people in the United States and around the world still live precarious and disposable lives severely marked by poverty, war, and discrimination. What is more is that it is not only human populations that are suffering. Forests are disappearing at an alarming rate: 420 million hectares or about a billion acres since 1990. The destruction of the Amazonian rainforests has risen to 21 percent in 2020.5 The loss of biodiversity resulting from global climate change, ozone depletion, chemical pollution, acid rain, the introduction of alien species, overhunting, and the destruction of habitats has led to the extinction of plant and animal species at a high speed all over the world, endangering the

Introduction

3

stability of the Earth’s ecosystem. In the year 2000, expert predictions estimated that if we continued at the then current rate, 25 percent of all living species might be extinct in fifty years’ time.6 Addressing the climate crisis, Joseph Meeker’s search for an environmental ethics led him to admit that “anthropocentric humanism has been a stronger force in Western philosophies, laws, and arts.”7 He argued that “the majority report of Western civilization has consistently judged mankind to be superior to and separate from nature, and mankind has gladly accepted the flattering implications of that judgement.” As a solution to those who might see the “Western intellectual tradition as bankrupt,” those “who have discovered how deep are the lies and distortions it has propagated” and who feel a desire to study “Oriental or primitive alternatives to the unsatisfactory heritage of Western culture,” he suggests reading what he refers to as the “minority report”: Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, and the literary tragedy/comedy.8 In the vast debates about the histories of Orientalism that have been taken up by intellectuals from Raymond Schwab to Edward Said, “most fail to take into account the contribution of native, Oriental scholars to the formation of Oriental studies.”9 Like many others, Meeker seems to render the intellectual influence of what he calls the “Oriental or primitive” futile, not realizing that any given single system of knowledge can be “pernicious to the well-being of human species and to the life of the planet.”10 As an introduction to Sepehri, this book focuses on a poet of the Orient with a profound understanding of the Occident. From dominant European traditions to those of China and India, and incorporating the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas, Sepehri’s poetry integrates the symbols and myths of various religions, cultures, and traditions. It foregrounds the connectedness of humans with other beings, including animals, insects, trees, and so forth. In his particular attention to Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and to the Hindu philosophy of the Advaita Vedanta, Sepehri is deeply rooted in his native Persian Zoroastrianism and in Islam. His reflections have blossomed from the well of wisdom of Rumi, ‘Attar, and other Persian Muslim sages, along with inspirations from the Vedas, Tao Te Ching, and other classics considered sared. His familiarity with the literature of the West connects his Eastern canon with the ideas of romantics, transcendentalists, and existentialists, and to figures such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Freud, Yung, and many others. In the many books, edited volumes, articles, and MA and doctoral dissertations on Sepehri’s work, he has been compared to romantics like Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, thinkers who were, for their part, greatly influenced by the poetry of the East, particularly the Persian tradition from which Sepehri emerges.11 Sepehri has also been described as rooted in Islamic spiritual tradition and Eastern mysticism and compared to figures such as Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986).12

4

Introduction

Sepehri’s deep understanding of spiritual traditions around the world was a major influence on his art. Both an astute art critic and an artist himself, his compositions, both in painting and poetry, focused on nature in a way that reflected not only lyrical beauty but spiritual contemplation. His paintings have a “running commentary in his delightful poetry.”13 It is this connection with nature, along with his solitary character, that has gained him the title of modern mystic. His mysticism was nourished by his vast education. He graduated from the faculty of fine arts at Tehran University in 1953 before heading to École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1957. He went on to Tokyo to study Zen methods and styles of painting in 1960, where he particularly learned woodblock printing from Japanese master artist Un’ichi Hiratsuka (1895–1997). Upon his return to Iran, via Kashmir, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, with a few month sojourn in India, it was not only his art that had been transformed, but his philosophy of life. Sepehri travelled in pursuit of art, knowledge, and experience. Introspective yet always observant of his context, he created art in response to the oppressive, bleak atmosphere surrounding him. Even as he wrote about fundamental change, he did not choose the path of direct political opposition. As he wrote in a 1951 letter to Sadeq Barirani cited by Ilya Dianoush, he was a firm believer that “just as the artist cannot be forced to follow a particular technique, the artist cannot be pressed to follow an ideology.”14 He was a poet-philosopher whose artistic passion and integrity led him to give up all formal positions, including teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. Instead, he focused on painting. With its earnings, he travelled to Japan, Greece, Egypt, Kashmir, Pakistan, and India, as well as to various European countries, where he attended biennials, held exhibitions, studied new painting techniques, and observed people, cities, fields, mountains, water, soil, light, darkness, plants, and animals. Sepehri’s poetry blends his observation of nature and his view of our connectedness to nature, defining his approach to non-duality. An ecopoet, his verses have strong mystical overtones that easily cross the boundaries into exoteric religion. He introduced existential politics, environmental politics, cosmopolitics, and bio-politics into contemporary Persian art. His poetry is a rejection of self-idolatry, anthropocentrism, androcentrism, colonialism, capitalism, consumerism, and militarism.15 His mission was to wipe away evil by seeing and describing beauty and love. It is for their shared focus on beauty and love that I have juxtaposed Sepehri to James Baldwin in chapters 1 and 4. Both Sepehri and Baldwin saw the world as a mystery that humbles us. They both believed that understanding the self is the first step to understanding this world and re-establishing a connection with one’s self and with each other. The two lived to be exemplars of goodness, but also to reflect goodness in a world attracted to what

Introduction

5

Toni Morrison describes as the theatricality of evil: “Goodness in literature is mute . . . Goodness seems to be equated with weakness. Evil has a blockbuster audience. Goodness lurks backstage.”16 This rang true particularly after WWII, when being a good person became trivial; thereafter goodness was not portrayed as clever, but rather vaguely as stupid: “Evil has vivid speech, goodness bites its tongue. It is Billy Bud who can only stutter, it is Coetzee’s Michael . . . communication with whom is nearly impossible . . . it is Melville’s Bartleby, confining language to repetition, it is Faulkner’s Benjy, and Idiot. Contemporary literature is not interested in goodness on a large or even limited scale. When it appears, it is with a note of apology in its hand and has trouble speaking its name.”17 Here, I speak of goodness through James Baldwin, who spoke of love as the only human possibility. I speak of it through Sohrab Sepehri, a poet who attested that “goodness did not see the light of durability,” yet goodness called us to leave “the salt-marsh of good and evil” because he knew that “life is not empty: there is kindness, there is apple, and there is faith.”18 NOTES 1. Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who are You?” and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 68. 2. This is generally—with a few exceptions—the case for women poets who are known by their first names, e.g., Parvin for Parvin E’tesami (1907–1941), Forough for Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), and Simin for Simin Behbahani (1927–2014). 3. “Mostanad-e Sohrab: Zendegi va She’r-e Sohrab Sepehri” [“Sohrab Documentary: Life and Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri”], September 22, 2016, YouTube video, 0:43:52, accessed January 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rG6z9QCJqrQ, in Farsi. 4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 127. 5. Christina Nynez, “Climate 101: Deforestation,” The National Geographic, accessed January 5, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ deforestation. 6. Eric Chivian, “Environment and Health: 7. Species Loss and Ecosystem Disruption—The Implications for Human Health,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 164 (2001): 66–69. 7. Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: In Search of an Environmental Ethic (Los Angeles: International College Guild of Tutors Press, 1972), 33–34. 8. Meeker, 33–34. 9. Mohammad Tavakoli Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiagraphy (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 23.

6

Introduction

10. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), xii. 11. See Massud Farzan, “Whitman and Sufism: Towards ‘A Persian Lesson,’” American Literature 47 (January 1976): 573–82; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Persian Poetry,” The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1929), 799. 12. Sirous Shamisa, Negahi be Sepehri, 10th ed. (Tehran: Sedaye Mo’aser, 1393 HS/2014 AD). 13. Ehsan Yarshater, “Contemporary Persian Painting,” in Highlights of Persian Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen and Ehsan Yarshater (New York: Westview Press, 1979), 363–77. 14. Ilya Dianoush, Berahne ba Zamin [Naked with the Earth], (Tehran: Morvarid Publishers, 1390 HS/2011 AD), 19, 195, in Farsi. 15. Mehdi Rafi’, Masahat-e Ehsas: Sohrab Sepehri va Honar-e Erfani dar Jahan-e Mo’aser (Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1394 HS/2015 AD), 56. 16. Toni Morrison, “Goodness, Altruism, and the Literary Imagination” (Annual Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, December 6, 2012), YouTube video, 0:26:48, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PJmVpYZnKTU&ab_channel=HarvardDivinitySchool. 17. Morrison. 18. Sepehri, “Kharab” [“Desolate”], “Sayeban-e Aramesh-e Ma Ma-yim” [“We, Are the Awning of Our Tranquility”], and “Dar Golestaneh” [“At Golestaneh”], Hasht Ketab [The Eight Books] (Tehran: Tahuri, 1376,) 33–35, 172–74, text in Farsi. Rights owned by Zehnaviz Publishers, used with permission. )‫ (خراب‬.‫خوب زمانه رنگ دوامی به خود ندید‬ )‫ (سایبان آرامش ما ماییم‬.‫بیایید از شوره زار خوب و بد برویم‬ )‫ (درگلستانه‬.‫ مهربانی هست سیب هست ایمان هست‬:‫زندگی خالی نیست‬

Chapter 1

Love A Way of Knowing and Being in Islamic Contemplative Tradition

And love, and only love, Carried me to the vastness of the sorrow of lives Delivered me to the possibility of becoming a bird –Sohrab Sepehri, Seda-ye Pay-e Ab1

THE UNIVERSALITY OF LOVE Love transcends the limits of history, geography, ethnicity, culture, race, gender, and every other distinction we can imagine. There is no single culture, religion, or people that can claim a monopoly over it. Love has long been one of the major themes in the poetry and literature of the world, with origins in various parts of the globe from ancient Greece to India to Islamic cultures and beyond.2 It radiates through literary traditions, expressed by writers as diverse as Plato, Rumi, Cervantes, Sa’di, Shakespeare, Hafiz, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Rilke, Garcia Lorca, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Forough Farrokhzad, and many more. Yes, love is universal, in that it is a value for all people, but universal love is something else. It comes with a heightened level of consciousness. That is why James Baldwin declares, “love has never been a popular movement.”3 He describes love as a movement, an act. In particular, it is an act of changing: a process, an evolving. It is not a static state of being, as in “being in love” as an end or as having reached the finish line. “No one’s ever really 7

8

Chapter 1

wanted to be free,” he continues.4 According to Baldwin, love has everything to do with freedom—with having the power and the right to speak, to act, and to think—not with restraint or hinderance: “The world is held together, really, it is held together by the love and passion of a very few people.”5 The sentiment that Baldwin conveys indicates the impression that the biblical take on love has made on much of his work. His words seem to offer new meaning to the verse in Lamentations: “Through the Lord’s mercies, we are not consumed, Because His compassion fail not.”6 Along with his biblical influences, the meaning of Baldwin’s articulation of love seems to have been reverberated in the following verse from the Qur’an: “With the remembrance of the virtuous, mercy descends.”7 The idea that the world is held together by the love and passion of a very few people has been noted in the writings of the Sufis. They saw the awliya (s. wali) often translated as friends of God, but also means protectors, or as Todd Lawson puts it “highly accomplished spiritual heroes,”8 as intercessors of mercy.9 In fact, it is actually God who is first and foremost, referred to as wali in the Qur’an (repeated about fifty times). The human spiritual heroes or the walis are those who have made effort to become god-like. A saying attributed to the Prophet declares: “when the beloved of God are discussed, abundant mercy descends on all.”10 THE ROAD TO KONYA Love as a way of knowing, being, and becoming is abundantly featured in contemplative Islamic tradition, particularly in poetic form, most spectacularly in the works of mowlana Jalal a-din Rumi. The thirteenth-century theologian turned poet and mystic is by no means a marginal voice in defining what Islam is. Rumi’s verses not only influenced the path of Muslims from Balkh to Konya and as far as the borders of Bengal, but caused a type of Rumi-mania in the West as well.11 His ontology of love, as described by Annemarie Schimmel, seems to particularly reverberate in what is known as the “road to Konya,” an Islamic journey “led through a series of seemingly empty hilly stretches where the houses were almost indistinguishable from the soil.”12 The human connection with the soil of this earth, and with everything that grows and lives on it is clear in this description which is echoed in the paintings of Sepehri. “He was in love with the soil, in love with the earth.”13 In his landscape paintings, houses which are the color of the soil make up only a small, far away part, glimpsed through the thick, close-captured branches of the trees. Rumi’s influence on Sepehri’s work is found both in modest imitation in style, and more in content and meaning, in understanding of self and the world. A twentieth-century formulation of love through Sepehri’s works reflects a renewed expression of the idea of love in

Love

9

contemplative Islamic tradition and its poetic discourse. This chapter shows how a renewed vision of love—seen for instance in Sepehri’s vision of the earth, the mountain, the sea, the tree, the spider, and the ant—is an active participant in the overall work of love. By contextualizing love in Islamic tradition, this chapter shows that the idea of love and unity rejects decoloniality and idolatry, revealing the connection between the two. For instance, Sepehri and James Baldwin’s search of utopia—οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”), or “no place”—helps delineate the association between the two. As in Rumi’s verse, their “place, was the placeless,” their “trace, the traceless.” No body, no soul, as they were from the soul of the beloved.14 They were advocates of decoloniality in the way in which they addressed the notion of “self ” and “other,” in their respective ways, in a denunciation of the structures of colonial modernity. METHODOLOGY OF LOVE Within Abrahamic traditions, research on love requires a study of the historical development of respective hermeneutical traditions. Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), known for his work reforming the contemporary study of religion, taught that through getting to know people, it is possible to understand religions other than one’s own. This can be achieved by engaging in what he calls “interreligious friendship,” where differences are articulated rather than dissolved in the name of unity. At the heart of this way of knowing is love as a normative and conceptual approach. This version of love is constitutive of rationality and, according to Smith, suggests a shift in understanding the religious other from “they” to “you” and, finally, “we.”15 This pedagogy suggests that through generosity, empathy, and respect, love creates authentic connections in the discovery of self and other. In a different context, Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010) used the term adab (interpersonal ethics and behavior) in his approach to paideia;16 he identified adab as Islamic humanism that leads to a new ethos.17 The culture of adab, which connotes courtesy, civility, and refinement, plays a great role in shaping and interpreting Islam alongside the law. Ibn Miskawayh (932–1030 AD), a Persian neo-Platonist, whose work On the Refinement of Character was the most important ethical treatise of Islam and is a “major representative of this humanist tradition.”18 He proposed a practical ethical framework instructing a highly inclusive ethics by stating that “each of us is necessary to someone else’s perfection, and all of us must cooperate to provide the material base necessary to humanize our existence.”19 Far from the theologies of reciprocal exclusion, Miskawayh’s theory reflects an early stage in Islamic history. It facilitates an understanding of how Islam settled in parts of the world

10

Chapter 1

where Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism were predominant—for example, in Indonesia—without chasing out its first occupants.20 The belief held that traditional common law could stand side by side with Qur’anic legislation. In this context, it is not surprising that in parts of Asia and Africa, Islam played a major role in anticolonial struggles. Undoubtedly, there are irreducible differences between the religion of love and the religions of a God/gods who are distant, vengeful, and inaccessible. These differences, however, subsist within each religious tradition and do not necessarily come between them. That is, in each religion, there is a religion of love and a religion of exclusion. Francois Bonjean (1884–1963) offers an interpretation of Islam that is shared within all religions, when he describes the Muslim focus on moral improvement. For a Muslim, he wrote, revelation is a guide for improving moral behavior and practice rather than a search for new truths.21 As difficult as the imposition of the axiology of common values seems to be in various religions, Arkoun views the “aspirations and hope for justice, love, peace, legitimate order, and eternal salvation” as “the universal needs developed by all religions in various forms of expression.”22 A pedagogy and a methodology of love also requires awareness of dominant economic, political, and social systems of hegemony, some of which are perpetuated, legitimized and implemented in part through what Maria Zambrano (1904–1991) calls “sterile reason” and in part through education and the institution of religion. Zambrano, who wrote at the same post–World War II time period when thinkers like Frantz Fanon were confronting decolonization on all fronts, suggested that there is another “form of knowledge not conceivable solely by the mind of the Cartesian subject” present in a poetic form of language. Zambrano views language as the mark of humankind’s failure of consciousness. She argues that poetry can open the way; philosophy alone would not. According to Zambrano, poetic language is closer than traditional philosophical discourse in capturing “la revelación,” or intuition. Unlike poetic language, she theorizes, philosophical discourse is often accompanied by an epistemology that can give way to colonization and a geopolitics of knowledge that privileges certain strains of thought and excludes others; it is with these discourses rather than with the specific political and historical instances of decolonization that she is concerned.23 Zambrano’s “epistemology of liberation” points to the shortcomings of the dominant form of rationality spurred by the enlightenment. It supports a life-affirming, poetic reason that is deeply rooted in love, as she attempts to bring together philosophy, poetry, and the sacred so that they might overcome their limitations.24 The connection between Zambrano’s philosophy and decolonial theory opens up a space for debate about the role that reason has played in conceptualizing subjectivity and community, suggesting a different approach to

Love

11

understanding the notion of self, relationality, and the realization of an inclusive community through the poetic tropes of void, symbols, and metaphors. Decolonial love raises awareness on the role of imperialism and colonialism in the theft of not only information but of ways of knowing, imagery, creation, production, and identity, while simultaneously rejecting the people who created and developed those ideas.25 As stated by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, the problem regarding the accepted idea of rationality is that “only European culture is rational, it can contain ‘subjects’—the rest are not rational, they cannot be or harbor ‘subjects.’ As a consequence, the other cultures are different in the sense that they are unequal, in fact, inferior by nature . . . the relation between European culture and the other cultures was established and has been maintained, as a relation between ‘subject’ and ‘object.’”26 Decolonial approaches and pedagogies seek to preserve and restitute all that have been destitute in the name of change, progress, and development. To decolonize the senses, one has to manage the knowledge that controls them, which comes through epistemology and aesthetics, the latter manifest in fine art.27 The idea that modernity reduced all of life except for humanity to “nature” and turned “nature” into “natural resources” in order to control it is one of the major points of decolonial theory. Decolonial love aims to reestablish the lost relationship in the face of this continual disconnection and separation. LOVE DOCTRINE Within Christian liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez speaks of “God’s gracious love” as “the source of everything else and a power that sweeps us along with it.”28 Within Islamic spirituality and contemplative tradition, love is central as a way of knowing, of identifying values and constituting ways of being human in connection to those values. In other words, love has been significantly featured in the history and literature of societies of Muslims not merely as an emotion, but as a path toward knowledge. The concept of love appears mostly in the works of Sufi saints, particularly in poetic form. In fact, the basic theme of most popular Muslim poetry is love, with all of its joys and sorrows.29 A key figure in the drama of love is the ninth-century Sufi, Hossein Mansoor Hallaj (d. 922), whose utterance “ana-l-haqq” (I am the Truth) has been interpreted as a testimony to radical love, and his union through annihilation ( fana) in the Oneness of the Ultimate Reality.30 Ayn ul-Quzat Hamadani (d. 1132) wrote explicitly about this: “The lovers follow the religion and the community of God. They do not follow the religion and creed of Shafi‘i or Abu Ḥanifa or anyone else. They follow the Religion of Love and the Religion of God.”31 This means that the religion of God cannot

12

Chapter 1

and must not be equated with the shari’a, and the Qur’an cannot and must not be equated or reduced to the shari’a. Elaborating on this, Sana’i of Ghazni (1080–1131) was the first to de-emphasize the significance of belonging to a particular mazhab (school of law) by adhering to love as his personal creed. He writes: ‌‌Why do you ask of my creed and faith My creed is love. Love is my faith.32 ‌‌ The poet Sa’di (d. 1292) describes the experience of union with the divine in his reflection on love: ‌‌No peacemaker walked on the path of love, without losing both this world and the next.33 ‌‌ this experience, Sa’di is speaking of losing oneself, passing from the expeIn rience of duality and plurality to the experience of unity. The doctrine of love in Sufi thought can be traced back to a female saint from Basra, named Rabi’a al-Adawiyyah (d. 801), who lived in the first century Islam. Her experience with love became renowned four centuries later, when Farid u-Din ‘Attar wrote about her in Tazkirat ul Awliya (Memoirs of the Saints), one of the most splendid works on love. Her profound expression of love gained eminence with the imagery of pouring water upon hell fires and fire upon paradise so that love would rule as a determining value instead of the hope of paradise or the fear of inferno.34 In his study of the stories of ‘Attar, Helmut Ritter states that Muslims have conceived of love as more than mere emotion. He writes: “There is a spiritual power which is suited above all other to promote the soul’s concentration on another being, to suppress and eliminate all other ties and interests, . . . a power which is more effective than any other effort at overcoming restraints and hindrances, . . . that performs achievements of high aspiration where all other efforts fail. The power in question is love.”35 THE RELIGION OF LOVE The first reference to love in the discourse of madhab-i ‘Ishq in Persian poetry is found in the work of the first literary genius of modern Persian language, Rudaki (d. 941). It is well-represented in the juxtaposition of namaz (prayer) and vasvase-ye ‘asheghi (allure of love). He assures us that the Beloved gives primacy to the allure of love rather than to namaz: “Our Beloved will concede to the allure of love, not to prayers.”36 This Lover and Beloved has prescribed

Love

13

one religion for all: the religion of love (madhab-i ‘Ishq). We, humans—who have dubbed ourselves “sapiens” and have interpreted every religious text of every tradition, stipulating ourselves as the crown of creation—continue to quarrel with claims of superiority over one another based on minute aspects of identity: religion, race, ethnicity, gender, language, geography, sexuality, and so forth. The Qur’an is a reminder that at the dawn of creation, the architect of madhab-i ‘Ishq has allocated love for all, not for people of one faith, one race, one gender, and so forth. It is, therefore, neither peculiar nor unanticipated to find in all religious traditions and worldviews a perception of human beings as a work in progress. For human beings, the path of becoming fully human is “the religion of love.”37 In this context, love is “a way of going about being Muslim—a mode of being with God, of identifying, experiencing and living with the values and meaning of Divine Truth.”38 Within this discourse, love for human beauty is metaphorical love (‘ishq-i majazi) and functions as a means, or the experiential way, for arriving at real, true love: love of the Divine (‘ishq-i haqiqi). The ubiquity of the expression of love in the literature of Muslims was not limited to the elite or the Sufis, but was widespread on the tongues of ordinary Muslims, learned and unlearned alike: teachers, preachers, peasants, and beggars.39 In the poetic Muslim discourse, the universality of love finds its expression in much of the literature. Here are a few samples: ‌‌ The work of the lover is the work of the heart: Those meanings are beyond Belief [dīn] and Unbelief [kufr].40 ‌‌ This same idea is expressed earlier in a verse by mowlana Jalal a-Din Rumi (d. 1273), who devoted his entire body of work to love: ‌‌“Beyond the ideas of belief and disbelief there is a field, . . . ”41 “The lovers are of a different creed and conviction.”42 ‌‌ is the pervasiveness of this genre of Muslim literature that led its practitioIt ners to argue for an “understanding of themselves, the world around them, and the Divine, based primarily on love.”43 As mentioned, this discourse claims its roots, its inspirations, and its allusions in the Qur’an. The Muslim practitioners of the religion of love, Sa’di, Hafiz, Rumi, and others, were inspired by the Qur’an and saw their work as nothing but expressing its truth.44 Muhammad Hafiz-i Shiraz (d. 1390), who was given the title lisān-ul-ghayb, the “Tongue of the Unseen,” is the author of the Divan of Hafiz, the most recited book of poetry in the discourse of Muslims. It is itself considered a revelatory book.45 Before Hafiz, Sa’di had composed his works with the

14

Chapter 1

central theme of love. For him, to be human is to love (‘ishq adamiat ast).46 He writes in his Ghazaliat: ‌‌I rejoice in this world, with the one through whom the world rejoices I am in love with the cosmos, for the cosmos emanates from the Beloved.47 ‌‌ The most recognized reference to the religion of love, madhab-i ‘Ishq, can be found in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Tarjumān al-ashwāq (Interpreter of Desires), where he unequivocally declares: “I practice the religion of love”:48 ‌‌My heart has become receptive of every form: A pasture for gazelles, a monastery for Christian monks, A temple for idols, the Ka’ba of the circumambulating pilgrim, The tablet of Torah, the leaves of the Qur’an: I follow the religion [din] of love.49 ‌‌ Known as the Andalusian master, he has innumerable references to love in his lyrical texts as well as his discursive expositions.50 In addition to the abovementioned work and the Diwan al-ma’arif, he alludes to the personal experience of love. In his Futuhat, he writes: “By God, I feel so much love that it seems as though the skies would be rent asunder, the stars fall and the mountains move away if I burdened them with it: such is my experience of love.”51 An earlier sage, Shahabuddin Suhrawardi (d. 1191), who saw himself as the heir of the hermetic tradition, associates love with a meta-cosmic consciousness. Weaving Zoroaster’s vision of the living earth, with Neoplatonism and Mazdaism, he “finds expression in the conception of an animate universe teeming with angelic lights . . . God is the ‘Light of Lights,’ and as light kindles light, creation proliferates as a cascade of illumination poured into the dark abyss of non-being.”52 On the highest level he seeks to reach a position/ an essence to transcend I-thou duality, and into divine unity. He ascertains that we are given the power to become conscious of our own nothingness in divinity; that is, we are capable of realizing that only the Ultimate is Real. Mowlana Rumi has expressed this self-exploration, nonbeing, and becoming-in-love, in beautiful verse: ‌‌What is to be done, O Muslims? for I do not recognize myself. I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Muslim. I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea . . . I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire; I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity . . . My place is the placeless, my trace is the Traceless; Neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.53

Love

15

‌‌ Based on the works of these Muslim sages, few among many, one can argue that love is the common ground and an essential facet of being, of life, essential to our humanness and to the being of all beings. The great theologian Ghazali (d. 1111) used a metaphor that “changes how we think about love and spirit . . . the Spirit crossing over from the realm of nonexistence toward the realm of existence, love is already there, awaiting the Spirit. In other words, love is pre-existing, pre-eternal. This love, a love that mingles between humanity and divinity, is not an emotion but a doing, a being, a becoming.”54 QUR’AN: A LOVE LETTER The Qur’an is commonly imagined by Muslims as the gift of God’s speech, part of a timeless dialogical relationship, “a breaker and maker of human language, and as an onrush of effusive and unrelenting love.”55 The Sufis regard the entire Qur’an as a textbook of ‘ishq (love), a love that is not limited to humans alone. There are about 750 verses in the Qur’an that speak of observing the natural world, often as a better way to understand the Divine, even compared to the written Qur’an. This number is far greater than the verses that are prescriptive/proscriptive used as a source of law. Several chapters of the Qur’an are named after animals or natural phenomena. Occasionally, God takes an oath by some of these natural phenomena like, “the dawn.”56 In the Qur’an, nature is both metaphysically and morally anchored in the divine. Nomanul Haq describes it as “the contours of theistic naturalism”; in other words, nature reveals itself as cosmic sacrality.57 It is this sacrality that renders any damage to the ecological balance, a sin; the devastation of the natural environment is both an offense to oneself and to others (human and nonhuman). The major cause of ecological destruction, and the separation of human and nature, is the human greed and arrogance repeatedly mentioned in the Qur’an. On the position of humanity vis-à-vis nature, human superiority over the rest of creation has been the mainstream interpretation of all Abrahamic sacred texts. The Qur’an refers to humans as khalifa, successors of God on earth. Most commentators state that this position comes with a heavy responsibility; a trust (amanah) given to humanity that none other could accept, with the specification that this heightened attention to humanity must be strongly mediated by moral and metaphysical controls. In other words, neither are humans called upon to subdue and conquer the natural world nor have other creatures been created simply to serve humanity. It is not the Qur’an that calls humanity ashraf al-makhlouqat (the best of creation), it only refers to it as ahsan-u taqwim (created in the most beautiful mold).58 In fact, the Qur’an emphasizes that “the creation of heavens and earth is greater than the creation of human beings: yet, most people understand not!”; “The

16

Chapter 1

earth, God has assigned to all living creatures”; and “there is no animal in the earth, nor bird that flies with its two wings but that they are communities like yourselves.”59 The Qur’an insists that the book of nature (the cosmos) and the book of God (the Qur’an) are to be read side by side in order to reveal the inner meanings of creation.60 Consequently, the created world has come to be known as “al-Qur’an al-takwini ” (the cosmic Qur’an), while the revelation of the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad is known as “al-Qur’an al-tadwini ” (the composed Qur’an). Just as the relation between God and God’s creation is important, harmonious relations between living beings are an important measure of virtuous life on earth. The interrelationship between humanity and the natural world emphasizes that all beings, the heavens and the earth, glorify God.61 The Qur’an further states that all beings surrender to the will of God and are therefore, literally, muslim.62 “Do you not see that all things that are in the heavens and on earth, the sun, the moon, the stars; the hills, the trees, the animals; and a great number among mankind worship God?”63 These passages underline the centrality of the Qur’anic concept of tawhid (unity), not only of the transcendent God, but also of all that has been created by God and by the ideal of submission of all of creation to God. Therefore, for a Muslim, knowledge of the natural world—and consciousness of the current environmental crisis—should not be viewed as separate from the consciousness of God, the meaning of submission, or the notion of jihad (struggle) to protect the God-created balance. Humans are called to see their environment not as “other” that can be forgotten or exploited. We are to see nature as a creation of which we are but one part and which abounds in kindred creatures to whom we must acknowledge our profound interconnectedness.64 Understanding the interconnectedness of all things is the beginning of the process called love (‘ishq). In spite of the importance of the concept of love, the word ‘ishq does not appear in the Qur’an. Instead, the terms hubb and wudd, both implying love, are found in their variations about eighty-plus times. Among these uses are verses that describe those whom God loves: al-muttaqqin (the mindful), al-tawabbin (the repentant), al-mutaharrin (the pure at heart), al-muqsitin (the just), al-muhsinin (those who excel in doing good), and more.65 Then the category of those whom God does not love: al-musrifun (the extravagant), al-zalimin (the oppressors), al-mu’tadin (the transgressors), al-kafirun (the unbelievers), al-farrahin (the exultant), al-mukhtalan fakhur (the selfadmiring boasters) and more.66 The many names and attributes used to describe God, often referred to as the ninety-nine names of God, focus on God’s essence and attributes, such as merciful, forgiving, generous, compassionate, and clement. Only a few refer to wrath; most are rather associated with rahmah (compassion). Among those are al-Wadud (the loving).67 It is

Love

17

famously said that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy. In the Qur’an, there is no room for apathy. Furthermore, “God loves” (yuhibbu) and “God does not love” (la yuhibbu), but there is no reference to hate.68 The notion of love in the Qur’an begins with God’s initiation of love in the act of creation, described repeatedly and succinctly in the following two words in the original Arabic: “Be,” and “there is” (‫)کن فیکون‬. God’s initiation of love in the act of creation generates a medium for all beings to respond to and to reciprocate, as represented in the following verses: “God Loves them, and they love God”; “God made beautiful all that was created”; “This is God’s command: Love and Justice”; “God formed you, and made your forms beautiful”; it all begins with “Say: if you love God, follow me and God will love you”; and “The believers are staunch in the love of God.”70 From the divine initiated love, beings draw the ability to extend love and affection to others. Commentaries on the Qur’an often talk exclusively about human love for the divine and for other humans, but the language and the themes of the text seem to imply a far greater inclusivity. It is not only humans who love, but all beings are endowed with love. If the very act of creation is an act of love—and an initiation, emanation, and instruction to love—it cannot be a feature of humanity alone. Sufi writers such as Maybudi, for example, “typically take the promise of replacement as ready cash. . . . The description ‘a people whom He loves and who love Him’ in its broader sense, can be attributed to every creature insofar as it perceives itself as an object of Allah’s love and, simultaneously, as his lover.”71 Love, in the Qur’an became the foundation of the covenant (mithāq) with God.72 The immensity of the love of God is reflected in the initiation of love as an instinct in us. In its communal aspect, the early Muslims developed an ethic of living in spiritual solidarity, enjoined to doing good. The theme of love—as a way of knowing and of being—pervades Islamic discourse of self, society, and cosmos, not only among poets, but also among Muslim philosophers such as Farabi (872–950), Ibn Sina (d. 1037), Suhrawardi (d. 1191) and many others. LOVE: A PHILOSOPHY OF BEING Ibn Sina [Avicenna] (d. 1037), one of the greatest philosophers of all times, had an undisputed long-term effect on the foundational ideas of the Islamic civilization and beyond, in both the East and the West.73 He was also widely recognized as the prince of physicians, known for introducing the concept of quarantine to limit the spread of infectious disease, among other medical discoveries, in Canon of Medicine (1025).74 His short Treatise on Love is viewed as the most important document on love in Islamic philosophy, after that of the Brethren of Purity’s Treatise on Love (al-Risala fi mahiyat al-‘ishq)

18

Chapter 1

written in the ninth century.75 Ibn Sina begins his discussion with the idea that every being has an instinctive inclination toward its perfection (kamal [telos]): “All beings determined by a design possess a natural desire and an inborn love, and it follows of necessity that in such beings love is the cause of existence . . . no being is ever free from some connection with a perfection, and this connection with it is accompanied by an innate love and desire for that which may unite it with its perfection.”76 He exclaims that no being is devoid of love: “love is either the cause of their being, or being and love are identical in them.”77 Being (wujud) occurs in three states: perfection, defect, and the state in between the two. He maintains that all that we see in this world—trees, grass, sky—all beings including humans are faghir b-e-dhat (poor by essence) and can be granted existence or not by the Absolute. All essence, he affirms, is equal in God’s eye. There is no being other than God’s Being. Furthermore, all essences are the essence of causality; effects or ma’lul, in that they all are dependent upon a cause for their existence. In other words, we know only one thing for certain, and that is Existence.78 Ibn Sina’s predecessor, Abu Nasr Farabi had already established that all beings are ma’lul, and are congruent with the Being that has caused all beings. He believed that the essence of Truth is love. God is in love, with god’s self, and with all beings.79 Ibn Sina’s seminal thought-experiment of the “floating person” has been recognized by some as an earlier cogito moment in Islamic history.80 In his hypothetical scenario, Ibn Sina asks us to imagine an “entity,” a “person” (dhat), created instantly, fully mature at birth, who is suspended mid-air without any of the physical senses. This floating person is unaware of everything, including its own limbs, heart, or brain, as it is not able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch.81 It is aware only of one thing: its own existence, an awareness of the self (huwiyyah).82 Ibn Sina’s primary concern is not doubt, but an emphasis on “there is here, existence.”83 Ibn Sina explains that all animals, despite their diversity, are one, as are all bodies, animate or inanimate. All are the work of the Necessary Existent (God, the One whose existence does not have a cause) and are to reach their fulfillment. In his contemplations of the oneness of beings, Ibn Sina considered animals, too, to be capable of love. In contrast, Descartes thought of animals as mere mechanical objects, not living subjects. He assumed them as lacking language, being devoid of thought or emotion, and incapable of feeling pain.84 For Descartes, humans were lords and masters of nature. The purpose of knowledge was power. In order to maintain mastery, nature had to be rendered “dead,” “inert,” or without a soul, so that the rational human could exploit it. Meanwhile, a younger contemporary of Descartes, Anglican theologian and mystic Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), argued that animals indeed had souls. Cudworth “noticed and emphasized the animal in the human, and

Love

19

more importantly, the human in the animal; and he did so in an intellectual culture which angrily discouraged such blurring of human-animal boundaries.”85 Had the dominant Enlightenment trend followed his line of thought instead of viewing animals as machines, perhaps we would not be facing the destruction of the natural world to the extent that we are today.86 Many scientists speak of a sixth mass extinction being underway.87 In 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reported that approximately one million animal and plant species out of the eight million total species on earth are threatened with extinction.88 “According to the report, more than 40 percent of amphibian species, nearly 33 percent of sharks, shark relatives and reef-forming corals, and upwards of 33 percent of all marine mammals are threatened.”89 Among contemporary philosophers, Jacque Derrida is one of the very few who question the idea of animal and animality by opposing the idea of lumping varieties of species—such as monkeys, bees, and horses—together into one category. In L’animal que donc je suis (2006), he expresses that the idea is theoretically problematic and goes as far as saying that it is a form of violence.90 Following the Enlightenment, positivism of the nineteenth century brought about scientism, with its idealization of the scientific method as the only way for accessing truth and reality.91 This privileging of science (not wissenschaft, which is not limited to empirical knowledge but literature and the arts as well) took away from other forms of knowledge. Decolonial thought establishes that other modes of knowing and other epistemologies are necessary for the fullness of knowledge, and for intercultural communication. Central to contemplative traditions of the world is the idea that there are other ways of knowing than what is known by positivism. In fact, the idea of the perfectibility of the human being as a cosmic knower, comprising in itself the truth and meaning of the universe, was developed into the theory of al-Insan al-kamil by Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). According to this theory, animals and plants are fixed, each in their identity. Humans are fixed in their outward forms, but “infinitely diverse and everchanging in their inward forms.”92 The importance of self-knowledge in Islamic philosophical discourse has its foundation in the famed hadith. An axiom of the Sufi discourse, “man ‘arafa nafsa-hu fa-qad ‘arafa rabba-hu” (whoever knows one’s self, knows one’s God), is based on the Qur’anic idea of fitratan hanifa (all beings born pure-natured). This exploration of self and meaning has not been confined to the closed social circles of Sufis and philosophers, but rather, for centuries it has had a widespread expression in the experience of being Muslim and the grounds of the paideia throughout the societies of the Balkans to Bengal complex.93 The potential of enlightenment as an innate characteristic of all living beings is arguably central to Islamic thought. Rather than positivist reason,

20

Chapter 1

love is a fundamental feature of this enlightenment. Islamic thought posits that God has planted the general principle of love in everything. Ibn Sina writes: “the never-ceasing existence of this love in all beings determined by a design is, therefore, a necessity.” He goes on to conclude that “the existence of every being determined by a design is invariably accompanied by inborn love . . . that no being is devoid of love.”94 In other words, Wujud (Being) is love. It then follows that God’s love in the words kun (the command, be) created the cosmos. Kawn is both being and becoming, and its Aristotelian opposite is fasad (corruption, rotting, decomposing).95 In other words, it is by God’s infinite love that all things have come to be. Hence, God is the Lover and the Beloved. According to Ibn Sina “no being / is ever free from some connection with a perfection, and this connection with it is accompanied by an innate love and desire for that which may unite it with its perfection.”96 Another repeated phrase in the Qur’an states: “wa min-al-ma’ kollo shai’in hay” (from water, all things come to life), and that God’s throne is upon water.97 As an important symbol in mystical writing and in Rumi and Sepehri’s work, water is not devoid of love. SEPEHRI: “ALWAYS, THE LOVER IS ALONE”98 Rooted in Persian and Muslim contemplative traditions and enriched by Eastern contemplative thought, Vedic, Buddhist, Shinto, and more, Sepehri’s work makes in-depth and reflective references to love. He is especially, but not exclusively, influenced by Rumi, whose verses compose the magnum opus on love. Even as the concept of love is central to all of Sepehri’s ruminations, it makes explicit appearances in three of his books: The Sound of Water’s Footfall (1965), Traveler (1966), and The Expanse of Green (1967).99 Not surprisingly, these works are most interpreted in academic discourse and by public interest, which has led to the proverbialization of much of his verse. In the works of Muslim mystics, love generally appears as the second of the seven stages of the mystic’s journey: longing, love, gnosis, repentance, abstraction and unity (tajrid and tawhid ), bewilderment, poverty and annihilation. In much of Sepehri’s references, love is a movement, a destination, or in some way connected with action. He sees, for example, “a ladder from which love climbed to the roof top of celestial heavens.” He hears “the pure sound of the ambiguity of the shedding of love, . . . and the sound of the rain on the misty eyelid of love.” He sees life as having “a leap, to the span of love.”100 In his book, Traveler, Sepehri connects beauty and love in the following verses:

Love

21

‌‌Beautiful, means, loving expression of forms, And love, and only love, Will warm you up to the intimacy of an apple, And love, and only love, Took me to the expanse of the sorrow of lives, Delivered me to the possibility of becoming a bird.101 ‌‌ Rumi’s verses, birds that do not have wings do not fall in love. Sepehri In draws from Rumi’s symbolism of the bird to express the height of love before he defines the lover as dochar (involved), which implies the condition of having contracted something, being highly involved in something, a connotation that also stems from Rumi. In contracting love, Rumi was transformed from a renowned theologian, detached from his life of teaching, into a poet who composed over one hundred thousand verses on love and divine mystery.102 Rumi saw the human heart as the “astrolabe of love.” In addition, he saw all parts of the world as being in love, and love as the reason for all movements: those of the sky, the sun, the earth, the mountains, and the sea. ‌‌If this sky was not in love Its sphere (bosom) would not be so sheer (pure) And if this sun was not in love, Such light would not appear in its face.103 ‌‌ Love as the moving spirit and as the goal of life entails all beings, not only humans, in Rumi’s verse: ‌‌If the earth and mountains were not lovers, Grass could not sprout out of their breast.104 Love is the sea with invisible waves, The water of the sea is fire, and its waves are pearls.105 ‌‌Sepehri’s definition of the lover as dochar (involved or being afflicted with) and at the same time causing the lover to be alone is analogous to the loneliness that James Baldwin speaks of. This is a loneliness that is not a nihilistic resignation, but is a constructive characteristic of the artist. Baldwin writes: The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. . . . The state of birth,

22

Chapter 1

suffering, love, and death are extreme states—extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it.106

Sepehri’s notion of love is within the same construct as Rumi’s ellat-e ‘asheq (the cause of the lover).107 Baldwin’s comes quite close to that construct. He considers love an affliction with positive yet sorrowing connotations, because once love takes over, there is no way out: ‌‌Those with intellect run away from a dead ant with caution Lovers trample heedlessly on a dragon!108 ‌‌ Rumi distinguishes the religion of law from the religion of love; remembering Hallaj, he proclaims that love gives up the pulpit for the gallows. At times, he takes on a humorous tone in his comparison between reason and love, as when he writes: “Reason is like a donkey, fallen in the mire in an effort to describe it [love].”109 At the same time, he gives hope that reason can accept the invitation of love, that they can appear and act together. Although he tells us that intellect usually retreats to a corner when love brings wine and food. He then plays out a humorous dialogue between the two: ‌‌I asked intellect, where are you? Intellect replied: Since I have turned into wine, why should I become a sour grape?110 ‌‌In another moment, he writes: “When it tasted a tiny grain . . . then it even took some opium from love’s hand, and both became Majnoon.”111 Again, in the following verse, he reiterates that love is beyond rational knowledge, transcending religious rites and laws: “Love is free from the narrowness of the prayer niche and the cross.”112 Sepehri draws on much of Rumi’s imagery, particularly elements such as water and springs, gardens, trees and their branches, the sea, fish, birds, and more. In The Sound of Water’s Footfall, his autobiography written in symbolic verse, he makes various references to love: ‌‌I climbed the stairways of religion, To the end of the alley of doubt . . . I went to see someone, at the other end of love . . . To the sound of the spike of solitude, I saw things on earth . . . I saw a cage, without a door, in it, a flickering light. A ladder, from which love was climbing up to the rooftop of the celestial sphere . . .

Love

23

I hear the clear sound of the closing and opening of the window of solitude. And the pure sound of the vague shedding of love . . . And the sound of love on the moist eyelids of love . . . Life is a delightful design, Life has wings and feathers, to the span of death It has a leap, the size of love Life is the simple and uniform geometry of inhalations.113 ‌‌ The clearest definition of love in Sepehri’s work appears in his Traveler (1966): dochar ya’ni asheq (Involved means lover), in which the lover is affected by and involved in a never-ceasing movement. As Rumi would put it, we only see the beginning of love; no one reaches its end. Sepehri writes: ‌‌Involved means, Lover. And think of how lonely Is the fish who has been afflicted by the infinite blue of the sea. What a soft sorrowing thought! And sorrow is the veiled smile in the gaze of the plant. And sorrow is a mild illusion to the negation of the unity of being. Lucky are the plants who are in love with light And the sprawling hand of light is on their shoulders. No, union is not possible There is always a separation. Even as the curve of the water is a good bolster For the jovial and brittle sleep of the nenuphar, There is always a separation. One ought to be involved Otherwise the whisper of life between two letters, will go to waste. And love, Is a journey to the lightness of the pulse of the solitude of things. And love, Is the sound of separations, The sound of separations that are lost in ambiguity No, The sound of separations that are like silver, clean And with the hearing of a mere “nothing” will become grim. Always, the lover is alone. And the hand of the lover is in the brittle hands of the seconds.114

24

Chapter 1

‌‌One of the early reviewers of Sepehri’s work, Massud Farzan describes him as a neo-Sufi, without “a priori religious, mystic, or moral theses.”115 The Hasht Ketab is filled with religious symbolism, mystical elements with a moral direction. The above excerpt is but one example where he draws from the symbolism of the fish, water, and nenuphar to speak of being. It is a subtle allusion to the two letters that annunciated life in the word kon ‫ کن‬Be! in the Qur’an or God’s command that brought about the creation. To be in love (involved) is necessary in this verse, so that the whisper of life between the two letters does not despair. In other words, to be, is to be in love. Playing with notions of union and separation, the idea that union cannot be achieved, that love is a process and the reference to hich (nothing) are all found in Rumi’s depictions of love. Speaking of the solitude of love, Sepehri writes: ‌‌Come, let me tell you about the immensity of my solitude, My solitude did not predict the expanse of your sudden presence And this is the disposition of love . . . Come and melt in my hand, the luminous mass of love.116 ‌‌One of his well-known poems, “Neshani” (“Address”), in which he is telling a friend how to get to his house, has been interpreted as a parody of ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds. In search of Truth, ‘Attar’s birds pass through seven valleys and difficult terrain, with hoopoe as their guide. Many do not make it. However, the thirty birds who make it to the mountain expect to see the king of the birds, Simorgh (literally, si thirty, morgh, bird; the Truth). Sepehri’s poem is brief: ‌‌Before reaching the tree, There is a garden alley, greener than the dream of God, In it, love, is as blue as the feathers of sincerity.117 ‌‌Sepehri has also been defined as being a new humanist, even as the idea of the transcendent, with its interplay with immanence, looms large throughout his work, where humans and all beings are viewed in their relational position with transcendence/immanence and all beings. In one of his earlier works, “Life of the Dreams,” he touches on the idea of being. In a piece titled “Wandering Inferno,” he pleads to the feverish eyes to let him be, in particular, to let him be alone with the pain of being. ‌‌I am weeping the nights broken branches, Let me be, O, wandering feverish eyes! Let me be, alone with the pain of being

Love

25

Don’t let me petal this-my-dream of being, away.118 ‌‌ the “Lost Moment,” Sepehri speaks of the darkness that illuminated In his being: ‌‌The swamp of my room had turned turbid And I heard the whispers of the blood in my veins My life was passing in a deep darkness This darkness, enlightened my being.119 ‌‌ poem manifests how the poet, as Zambrano put it, is “reluctant to live in His the light of day, which is the light of reason, of that reason that once brought order to frightful reality. He seeks the dark place, the cavern he came out of, in which to plunge himself momentarily.”120 Alberto Santamaria interprets Zambrano’s description as a “kind of counter-platonic journey in which instead of leaving the cave and coming into the light,” the poet seeks to go down to the depths of the soul in search of the lost unity.121 In another piece, “A Garden in the Sound,” Sepehri speaks of wandering in a garden, wondering whether he had come to the garden or the garden had come to fill his surroundings: ‌‌The air of the garden passed me by And its branches and leaves slithered through my being Wasn’t this garden The shadow of the spirit That had for a moment bent down on the swamp of my life? ‌‌The poem continues to speak of a sound containing the garden: ‌‌Suddenly a sound in the garden A sound like that of nothingness . . . Suddenly a color arose And a body of flesh on the grass A human with a distant similarity with the self With the garden deep in its eyes.122 ‌‌In another verse, the “Legend’s Bird” leaped out of the window: ‌‌at the edge of night and day . . . landed next to a swamp pulsated with the swamp the swamp, slowly became beautiful,

26

Chapter 1

a plant grew in it a plant, dark, and beautiful the legend’s bird opened its heart the empty of its inner self was like a plant . . . it’s being became bitter: it’s clear loneliness had become murky . . . it’s being lingering between the beginning and the end.123 ‌‌ The poem continues to tell the story of the legend’s bird, the plant and the opening of the heart of the person, ending with the tree withering between two moments and the window, lost in the rim of night and day. In another poem, “Traveler,” Sepehri writes: ‌‌And in which earth it was That we sat on the edge of nothing And we washed our hands and face in the warmth of an apple The sparks of impossibility arose from being . . . . And the accident of my being alongside the tree Alter it to a lost pure connection.124 ‌‌ Zambrano’s theory of the role of “remembering” in the work of the poet can facilitate an understanding of Sepehri’s verse. She describes “remembering” as “an unbirthing of the subject” so that “by seeing it, [he] return[s] it, if he can, to nothingness, or to rescue it from its initial darkness and give it a chance to be reborn in another way.”125 In a poem that is reminiscent of the rhythmic style of some of the pieces of Rumi in Divan-e Shams, Sepehri engages in such “remembering” when he speaks of seeing with different eyes, a different sun, in a city that is not his. He writes: ‌‌In the palm of the hands, the bowl of beauty, on the lips, the bitterness of erudition.126 ‌‌ then says to us, his readers, that our city is elsewhere and that we have He to make the journey with another set of feet; still, he urges us to make the journey, as our city is not too far: ‌‌The house, cleansed from the ego The goblet of duality, shattered The shadow of “One” on earth, on time. Your city is not this, nor that,

Love

27

Your city, until it is not lost, will not be found. ‌‌ his verses, as we have seen, Sepehri speaks of being, love, and of beauty, In in their connection with knowledge (truth) at its highest level, knowledge of self. In Persian mystical tradition, the apple is the symbol of knowledge and wisdom, as is water. Sepehri uses these symbols repeatedly in his aesthetic search for truth. He believes that only through love could one realize the true nature of being and of the world. His poetry is a constant suggestion that reality can be recognized through love and compassion. Not through acquired and accumulative knowledge, but through the cleansing of the heart and the mind of all its dust and grime do we uncover a sense of purity.127 For him, the best thing was “arriving at a gaze; misty with the experience of love.”128 JAMES BALDWIN: LOVE, THE ONLY HUMAN POSSIBILITY American novelist, poet, playwright, and social critic, James Baldwin (1924– 1987) lived most of his life in self-exile in France, Turkey, and Switzerland. He witnessed the French-Algerian War (1954–1962), was conversant with Albert Camus (d. 1960) and Frantz Fanon (d. 1961), and aware of the struggles of colonial racism beyond the United States. In the 1950s, pressed for an answer as to whether he would join the Nation of Islam, Baldwin responded that he believed in the conscious efforts of lovers—black and white—to bring an end to the racial nightmare.129 At the table of Elijah Muhammad, he worried that efforts to bring down white supremacy would yield in the destruction of beauty and of life itself.130 He saw the confines of the rhetoric of hate in the same way that he saw the limitations of the rhetoric of the strategy of nonviolence, to which he himself subscribed. At the juncture of being poor, black, and gay in America, he became a champion of the religion of love. Baldwin knew fully well that “to be black in this country, meant to be weary, very early of the notion of one’s own death.”131 He left the United States to be able to live and uphold his social responsibility as an artist, so that he could do what love possessed him to do, not what he was told to do. He saw the search for self as a necessity for all, but one that is complicated by the question of race, which he believed “operates to hide the graver questions of the self . . . that is precisely why . . . it is so tenacious in American life, and so dangerous. . . . One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends, the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.”132

28

Chapter 1

Baldwin’s work demythologized the early history of America, revealing how a legend was made out of the massacre of one group of people and the dehumanization of another. Amid pain and grief, he sought to find a way forward for black and white people by looking into the self to recover love: “If only [people] could . . . be less afraid of loving each other, less afraid of being changed by each other. Life would be different. . . . But for some reason love is the most frightful thing; something that the human being is most in need of and dreads most.”133 Achieving real change for black people in America, he affirmed, would depend on radical changes in the American political and social structure. His aim was to urge our commitment to the proposition that all human beings are created equal, and that “love is the only human possibility.”134 Baldwin wrote like a mystic philosopher, connecting love, life, and death as did Rumi and Sepehri. He affirmed: “love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without, and know we cannot live within.” As he explained, his conception of love comprises more than sentiments: “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”135 In a conversation about the nature of love with his friend, poet Maya Angelou, the two spoke of life, love, and death as inseparable concepts. Baldwin, in particular, referred to love as trusting life, which he contextualized in the connection between life and death: “the only way to live is to know that you are going to die. If you are afraid to die, you won’t be able to live.” For her part, Maya Angelou referred to life as “singing the blues.” The blues began as Spirituals and were the first place for freedom of expression for black people, while the lyrics had a religious theme, they also provided a safe place for subversive messages about, for example, the underground railroad and a network of people who would provide shelter and assistance. As such it inspired hope of freedom.136 Maya Angelou then went on to define love, as “the ability to dare to challenge despair.”137 Even as Baldwin does not make use of explicitly confessional language, he is thoroughly engaged with the Bible and with the message of Jesus. It is in his commitment to the way of the cross, that he charges the Christian church of blasphemy of “having bred men, and selling them like mule.”138 Once a young Pentecostal preacher, he left the church, not in opposition to Christ, but rather because he found the church in forgetfulness of Jesus, who was a Galilean dayworker, subject to violence and abuse, in occupied Palestine. “Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah,” writes Orlando Espin, “did not concern itself with an individual’s eternal salvation,” but rather emphacized that a “compassionate way of life outweighed all other demands and practices,” in the face of all attempts to reduce his message to doctrines and codes.139

Love

29

Baldwin understood this and denounced the established interpretation of Christianity that had become an idol to the truth. Vincent Lloyd suggests that “we should understand God in Baldwin’s theology negatively, as the name for what remains when idolatry is rejected.”140 In one of his earlier works, The Amen Corner (1954), Baldwin also explained established religion as a vehicle of escapism, reaffirming his commitment to the religion of love: “[people] escape in order to avoid confronting love, as love involves the terrors of life and the terrors of death.” He believed that for many people, faith was a hiding place “where one does not have to change, does not have to be responsible for one’s neighbor.” Baldwin’s concept of love is what Drexler-Dreis refers to as “decolonial love,” which Drexler-Dreis also locates in liberation theology and decolonial theory, both of which aim to “shatter the structure of colonial modernity.”141 Baldwin believed that race, Christianity, and power were tied together, creating a structure that should be opposed by the power of love. In a confessional tone, he declared that he takes his cue on faith and life “from Jesus Christ who told us to love each other, feed the hungry, and visit those in prison.” He continued: “If you don’t do that, you are not a believer, no matter what church you go to.”142 In The Amen Corner, the protagonist, a female pastor, recognized her use of religion as a means of avoiding the struggles of life and love after she had lost almost everything in her life. Only after losing it all did she realize that ‘‘to love the Lord is to love all His children—all of them, everyone!—and suffer with them and rejoice with them and never count the cost!’’143 To avoid falling into the type of escapism that the pastor found in the church, Baldwin invited us on a path to understand our complexity and the complexity of the world in which we live: “Like all poets . . . I am full with the question of how the human being will be put to right. You know, it is for this reason that all this black, white, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, etc., etc., etc., never carried any meaning for me. The question is how to fix ourselves. Give birth to ourselves. To make us live free of all these swaddling clothes, free of these habits.”144 Baldwin observed that “color is not a personal reality, but a political reality,” and that love is a self-examination, a measure of our understanding of our humanity and our complexity.145 The most important question that Baldwin raised was how to break away from the habits of the mind and free ourselves of hate. For him, only love fortifies us against hatred: “[Love] fortifies the soul and offers a cure for what ails our living together.”146 In this manner, love offers the only way to a moral commitment to our salvation, which he defines not as “flight from the wrath of God . . . It is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation, it is the beginning of union with all that is or has been, or will ever be. Love opens up the rusted lid of the heart. There is absolutely no salvation without love.”147 Through this description, Baldwin evokes

30

Chapter 1

Rumi, who repeatedly spoke of turning the copper of the soul into gold by turning our attention to the heart, to the recognition of the inner self, and the power of love: ‌‌My soul, and your soul, are together connected I will take on your tint, whether it’s fine, or it’s abysmal148 ‌‌ Rumi’s concept of connection seems so central to Baldwin’s exploration of religion and its relationship with community, love, and salvation. “We have to have the humility to love each other.”149 For Baldwin, arousing the humility to love each other is the responsibility of the writer, whose work is dangerous because it shakes up and moves the status quo.150 The injustice of racism, Baldwin angrily declares, takes a toll on the soul of every member of the community and is tantamount to denying the self, the truth. Finding identity through love is not a self-centered act, but connects us to others, yielding an acceptance of others through suffering.151 Baldwin believes that his call, particularly in The Fire Next Time (1963), is urgent, prophetic, and related to his individual suffering and grief.152 His views on love were based on his existential anguish and consistent across the body of his work, along with his struggle against white supremacy as idolatry, his rejection of categorization, and his appeals to identity politics. He believed that identities are invented, static yet not fixed, and that complexity is our only safety. He opposed authoritarianism and idolatry and saw religion most often functioning as a form of idolatry that “leads (and is fed by) confusion, anger, hatred, and fallacy; correct theology results in communion and salvation.”153 For him, progress meant consciousness and offered the way to the new creation that he found necessary.154 In his experience in Istanbnul, where he lived for a decade, Baldwin found a community that gave him love. It was at this ancient crossroads of Christianity and Islam, in a region where many Muslim teachers of the religion of love had composed their ideas centuries ago, that he could be himself.155 Not coincidentally, Istanbul became the place where Baldwin wrote many of his important works. It was there that he returned to his emphasis on love, binding it to salvation. While Vincent Lloyd suggests that in these writings, Baldwin identified love as “a specifically Christian name” for accepting salvation, Baldwin’s understanding and expression of love, rooted as it was in his Christian upbringing, is highly similar to love as expressed in contemplative Islamic tradition.156 This connection comes forth clearly when he wrote: “There is absolutely no salvation without love . . . Salvation does not divide. Salvation connects. . . . It is not the exclusive property of any dogma, creed, or church. It keeps the channel open between oneself and however one wishes to name that which is greater than oneself.”157

Love

31

“LOVE IS A BATTLE, LOVE IS A WAR, LOVE IS A GROWING UP” In his Memoirs of the Saints, ‘Attar narrates the story of Fudayl Ibn “Ayad (d. 803), a bandit who became an ascetic and a great mystic. He is quoted to have said: ‘I do not envy the angels, as their fear is greater than that of humans, and they do not have the anguish (dard ) of being human.’158 This affliction has been long interpreted as nothing but love in the discourse of the Sufis. Fudayl continues with a statement that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Sophocles”: “I envy the one who has never been born, and will never be born.”159 The anguish of the two figures is so grave that it has driven them across centuries and geographies to aspire to non-existence. Baldwin and Sepehri’s respective work is a ceaseless expression of this affliction; the struggle of the poet/artist becomes a metaphor for the struggle of all humans on the path of becoming human beings and calling others to that path. They both viewed religion as organic and having the ability to enlarge one’s sense of reality, not to hinder it. They both spoke of exploration of self and of meaning. Baldwin asserted that one must find “one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”160 Sepehri called us to “wash our eyes,” “to see things differently.”161 He extended the idea of connectedness beyond taking care of one’s neighbor, applying it to the relationship between all beings, water, rock, the horse, the willow, and the frog. The awareness that we are all connected—that we are a part of each other and that our being depends on relationships—makes love a universal feature of our being, understanding, and becoming. It also implies that there is a direct relationship between love and ending all forms of domination.162 The re-evoking of this radical love in the pursuit of justice is central to madhab-i Ishq (the religion of love) because love reaffirms tawhid and exposes shirk (idolatry). As Baldwin put it: “Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.” NOTES 1. Sohrab Sepehri, Seda-ye Pay-e Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall], Hasht Ketab (The Eight Books) (Tehran: Tahuri, 1376 HS/1997 AD), 267. Rights owned by Zehnaviz Publishers, used with permission (ext is in Farsi). 2. Jack Goody, “Love and Religion: Comparative Comments” in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, eds. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena and Alexander C.T. Geppert (Berghahn Books, 2010), 21. The idea of courtly love long preceded that of troubadours and was, at least in part, derived from Islamic culture in Spain. Historically, the discourse of love has

32

Chapter 1

transpired in societies with developed literary traditions. Before the discourse of love evolved in writing, the phenomenon existed in communities with oral traditions and was prevalent among various Indigenous peoples and cultures. Love that manifests as a connection with the land, water, sky and all living beings has been the shared essential feature of various Indigenous traditions in their respective diversity, essential to the survival of their tradition, culture, and language. 3. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket.” See http://jamesbaldwinproject.org/ AboutJBTopics.html, accessed on November 1, 2021. 4. Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket.” 5. Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket.” 6. The Bible, New King James Version. Lamentations 3:22, https://www.bible.com/ bible/114/GEN.1.NKJV, accessed October 14, 2021. I prefer to use a non-gendered pronoun in reference to God. In translations or quotes the original masculine or feminine pronouns has been preserved. 7. .‫( عند ذکر الصالحین تنزل الرحمه‬29:68) 8. Todd Lawson, The Qur’an, Epic, and Apocalypse (Oxford: One World, 2017), 81–82. 9. There are others, few in number, referred to as abrar (virtuous human beings) and even fewer who are called awtad (pillars), people with prophetic qualities. Within Islamic contemplative tradition, these few are the ones for whose sake mercy is bestowed upon all. 10. Rico Monge, Kerry P.C. San Chirico, and Rachel Smith, eds. Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 137–38. Also see Bahar Davary, “‘King-Slaves’ in South Africa: Shrines, Ritual, and Resistance,” in Monge, San Chirico, and Smith, Hagiography, 137–38. In many Muslim communities around the world, even the physical burial places of the saints (kramats, mazars) are viewed as sacred spaces and/or protectors of the boundaries of the cities. They remain a border territory between the spiritual and the historical. 11. Franklin Lewis, Rumi Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Oxford: One World, 2000), 1. 12. Annemarie Schimmel, Rumi’s World: The Life and Work of the Great Sufi Poet (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992), 2. 13. Morteza Momayez, Sohrab Sepehri: Sha’er o Naghash (Sohrab Sepehri: The Poet Painter) (Tehran: Ofset Publishers, 1359/1980), quoted in Mohammad Hoquqi, She’r-e Zaman-e Ma: Sohrab Sepehri [Poetry of Our Time: Sohrab Sepehri] (Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1374 HS/1995 AD), 21st edition, 301. 14. Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Divan-e Shams. ‫مکانم ال مکان باشد نشانم بی نشان باشد‬ ‫نه تن باشد نه جان باشد که من از جان جانانم‬ 15. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991). 16. Greek concept referring to a complete system of education deeply connected with duty and ethics of the Polis. It has been translated as bildung, in German as tradition of self-cultivation, later translated as culture.

Love

33

17. Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers (Routledge, 1994), 76. 18. Majid F. Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 130. 19. Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109. 20. André Miquel, L’Islam et sa Civilization: 7e-20e siècles (Paris: Colin, 1968), 396. 21. Francois Bonjean, “Quelques causes d’incompréhension entre I’Islam et l’Occident,” L’Islam et l’Occident (Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1947), 35–50. 22. Mohammed Arkoun and John Bowden, “Is Islam Threatened by Christianity?” Cross Currents: Beyond Nation and Religion: 45th Anniversary Issue 45, no. 4, (winter 1995–96), 471; Arkoun, “The Notion of Revelation: From Ahl al-Kitāb to the Societies of the Book,” Die Welt des Islams 28, no. 1/4 (1988), 77. 23. Tania Gentic, “Rethinking the Cartesian Subject in Latin America and Spain: Decolonial Theory and María Zambrano’s Philosophy,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 16, no. 4 (2015): 415–35. 24. María Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía, ed. Pedro Chacón y Mariano Rodríguez, in Libros (1930–1939), vol. 1 of Obras completas [Complete Works I, Books (1930– 1939)], ed. Jesús Moreno Sanz (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), 704. 25. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999). 26. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 174. 27. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2011). 28. Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 93. 29. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: Harper One, 2015), 1745. 30. In Memoirs of the Saints, “Attar narrates that when Hallaj was being taken to the gallows, a dervish asked him, the meaning of love. He replied: ‘what you see today, tomorrow, and the next day.’ They killed him on that day, burned him on the next day, and threw his ashes to the wind, the following day.” Farid u-din Attar, Tadkirat ul-awliya (Tehran: Manouchehri, 1370 HS/1991 AD), 515. 31. From the Tamhidat. Qtd. in Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry,” Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (I.B. Tauris, 2010), 77. 32. Sana’i Ghaznavi, Divan-e Ḥakim Sana’i Ghaznavi, ed. Badi’uzaman Foroozanfar (Tehran: Nashr Azadmehr, 1381 HS/2002 AD). Az kish o ṭariqat-am che porsi eshq ast mara tariqat o kish. 33. Sa’di, Koliyat-e Sa’di, ed. Kamal Ejtema’i Jandaqi (Tehran: Entesharat-e Sokhan), 1385 HS/2006 AD. Ghazal no. 30. ‫هیچ مصلح به کوی عشق نرفت که نه دنیا و آخرت در باخت‬

34

Chapter 1

34. Farid u-Din ‘Attar, Tazkirat ul Awliya (Tehran: Safi Ali Shah Publisher, 1370 HS/1991 AD), 72 (text in Farsi). 35. Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World, and God in the stories of Farid al-din Attar, trans. John O’kane with Bernd Radtke (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003), 358–59. 36. Abu Abdullah and Roudaki Samarqandi, Divan-e Roudaki-ye Samarqandi, ed. Saeed Nafisi, Entesharat-e Negah, 1393 HS/2014 AD, Qasideh no. 68. ‫ایزد ما وسوسه عاشقی از تو پذیرد نپذیرد نماز‬ 37. William Chittick, “The Religion of Love Revisited,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 54 (2013), 37. 38. Italics in original. Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 38. 39. “The Ghazals of Mirza ʿAbd-ul-Qadir ‘Bidil’ of Delhi (1642–1720) were sung by the peasants of the local countryside as they labored in their fields . . . the beggars of Tabriz knew hundreds of stanzas by Hafiz or Nizami, which spoke of love.” Ahmed, 87. 40. Ḥasan Sijzi Dihlavi, Divan-i Ḥasan Sijzi Dihlavi, ed, Masʿud ʿAli Maḥvi (Hyderabad: Ibrahimiyyah Press, 1934), 623. Qtd. in Ahmed, 45. 41. Rumi, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, ed. Badi’uzaman Foroozanfar, Tehran: Entesharat-e Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1336 HS/1957 AD, Roba’i no. 157. ‫ صحراییست ما را به میان آن فضا سوداییست‬، ‫از ُك ْفر و ِز اِسالم ِبرون‬ ‫ نه آنجا جاییست عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد‬، ‫نه ك ْفر و نه اِسالم‬ 42. Rumi. Divan-e Shams, Ghazal no. 175. ‫عاشقان را دین و کیش دیگرست‬ 43. Ahmed, 45. 44. Several treatises of love were composed after the Brethren of Purity and Ibn Sina’s Treatise, which will be discussed further in this chapter. Ahmad Ghazali (1061–1123 or 1126) wrote the well-known Sawanih, followed by Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi’s (1213–1289) Lama’at, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam, as well as the treatise of Suhrawardi. Another important book on love is ‘Abhar al-‘Ashiqin, by Rouzbihan Baqli (1128–1209). 45. An inscription of the words of Jami in a scholarly edition of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ prepared in Herat in 1501 refers to the Divan as the “Tongue of the Unseen.” See Ahmed, 34. 46. Sa’di, Koliyat-e Sa’di, Ghazal no. 9. ‫عشق آدمیت است‬ 47. Sa’di, Koliyat-e Sa’di, Ghazal no. 13. ‫به جهان خرم از آنم که جهان خرم از اوست عاشقم بر همه عالم که همه عالم از اوست‬ 48. Chittick, “The Religion,” 37. 49. Qtd. in Martin Lings, Sufi Poems: A Medieval Anthology (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2005), 62–63. Poem by Ibn ‘Arabi. 50. Qtd. from the Futuhat, in Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University Press, 2013). It should be noted that the religion of love was part of the cultural ambiance of the Muslims far before Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi. It is found in Sufi classics such as Khwaja ‘Abdullah Ansari’s (d. 1088) Munajat

Love

35

(Whispered Prayers), Maybudi’s (d. 1130) Qur’an commentary, and the most comprehensive account of divine love in Persian by Aḥmad Samʿānī (d. 1140). 51. Claude Addas, “The Experience and Doctrine of Love,” trans. by Cecilia Twinch on behalf of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society for the Symposium at Worcester College, Oxford, May 4–6, 2002. 52. Pir Zia Inayat Khan, “Persian and Indian Versions of the Living Earth,” in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, ed. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2013), 224–25. 53. See Reynold Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 125–26. 54. Omid Safi, trans. and ed., Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), xxx. 55. Martin Nguyen, Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 114. 56. Qur’an, 89:1. 57. Syed Nomanul-Haq, “Islam and Ecology: Toward Retrieval and Reconstruction,” in Islam and Ecology, ed. R. C. Foltz et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003), 121–54. 58. Qur’an, 95:4. 59. Qur’an, 40:57; 6:38; 55:10. 60. Qur’an, 2:164; 3:190–91. 61. Qur’an, 17:44. 62. Qur’an, 21:79. 63. Qur’an, 22:18. 64. Qur’an, 6:38; 27:16; 16:68; 79:31–33; 11:6; 55:10. 65. Qur’an, 3:76; 3:119; 2:222; 60:8; 3:134. 66. Qur’an, 6:141; 42:40; 5:87; 30:45; 28:79; 31:18. 67. Oliver Leaman, ed., The Qur’an: An Encyclopedia (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 218–19. Other repeated names, appearing 101 times, are al-Ghaffar (ever forgiving) and al-Ghafur (forgiving). There are multiple other names that bear God’s attribute of forgiveness: al-‘Afuww (ever indulgent, 8 times), al-Tawab (relenting, 11 times), al-Wahhab (generous, 3 times), al-Halim (clement, 15 times), al-Karim (generous, 27 times), ar-Rahim (most merciful, 95 times), ar-Rahman (compassionate, 57 times), as-Salam (peace, 33 times), and al-Latif (gentle, 6 times). 68. The word karraha, (dislike) repeated over forty times throughout the Qur’an, e.g., 4:19; 23:70; 43:78; 108:3. 69. The words are repeated at least 8 times throughout the Qur’an: 2:117; 6:73; 19:35; 16:40; 40:68; 36:82; 3:59; 3:47. 70. Qur’an, 5:54; 32:7; 16:90; 40:64; 3:31; 11:165. 71. “You who believe, if any of you go back on your faith, God will soon replace you with a people God loves and who love God” (Qur’an, 5: 54). See Leaman, ed., The Qur’an, 313. 72. Qur’an, 7:172. 73. Despite his important contributions to the East and West, he is little known in North America or Europe and rarely included in courses taught in philosophy

36

Chapter 1

departments. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established the biannual Avicenna prize for ethics in science in 2003. This gesture has done little, if anything, in the way of making the works and contributions of this great polymath known. His name is still latinized. His given name, Abu Ali Ibn Sina, or the title he was known by, Sheikh u-Ra’is, is not even mentioned on the site, and the award is fully funded by Iran. 74. Samet Kose, “Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina,” Bulletin of Psychopharmacology 26, no. 3 (September 2016). 75. Several treatises on love were composed after the Brethren of Purity and Ibn Sina’s Treatise. Ahmad Ghazali (1061–1123 or 1126) wrote the well-known Sawanih, followed by Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi’s (1213–1289) Lama’at, Ibn ‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam, as well as the treatise of Suhrawardi. Another important book on love is ‘Abhar al‘Ashiqin by twelfth-century master Sufi Rouzbihan Baqli Fasa’i (1128–1209). 76. Ibn Sina, “A Treatise on Love,” trans. Emil L. Fackenheim, Medieval Studies 7, no. 1 (1945): 212. 77. Ibn Sina, “A Treatise,” 214. 78. This idea is consistent through his psychological as well as his philosophical works, as expressed in Kitab al-Shifa [The Book of Healing]. 79. Abu Nasr Farabi, al-Ta’liqat, ed. by Jafar Al Yassin (Tehran: Hekmat, 1371 HS/1992 AD), 1. 80. Ahmed, 330–31. 81. Ibn Sina, “On the Soul: The Floating Man,” Excerpt from the Psychology of the Book of Healing: On the Soul (Kitab al-Shifa: Tabiyat Ilm al-Nafs) (1020 AD), trans. John McGinnis and David Reisman, accessed May 29, 2021, https://wmpeople. wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/Avicenna2. 82. Fazlur Rahman, Selected Letter of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (Pakistan: Iqbal Academy, 1968), 18. This act of self-awareness is a constitutive element of being, according to Rahman. 83. See Michael Marmura, “Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ in Context,” The Monist 69, no. 3 (July 1986): 383. 84. René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637). Meditations on First Philosophy (1941). Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans, by Donald A Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company Inc. 1998). 85. Italics in original. Samuel Kaldas, “Descartes versus Cudworth on the Moral Worth of Animals,” Philosophy Now, 108 (June/July 2015): 28–31. 86. Laura Parker, “The World’s Plastic Pollution Crisis Explained,” National Geographic, June 7, 2019, accessed October 21, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic. com/environment/article/plastic-pollution. National Geographic reports that 8 million tons of plastic make their way into the oceans every year, and that half of all the plastic ever manufactured has been in the past 15 years (from 2.3 million tons in 1950 to 448 million tons in 2015, with the expectation of doubling this amount by 2050). There are five plastic islands in the world oceans. The one between California and Hawaii is the size of Texas. Plastic is found 11 kilometers deep down in the oceans. Microplastics are breaking down smaller and can be found in drinking water and air.

Love

37

Hundreds of species of animals have been impacted by plastic. Millions are killed every year. 87. Rob Jordan, “Stanford Researcher Declares that the Sixth Mass Extinction Is Here,” Stanford Report, June 19, 2015, accessed October 26, 2021, https://news. stanford.edu/news/2015/june/mass-extinction-ehrlich-061915.html. 88. United Nations, “UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating,’” Sustainable Development (blog), United Nations, May 6, 2019, accessed October 25, 2021, un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/. 89. Stanford Earth Staff, “Losing Species: The Science behind Extinction,” Stanford Earth Matters Magazine, December 9, 2020, accessed October 25, 2021, https://earth.stanford.edu/news/science-behind-extinction#gs.e4ez15. 90. Jacques Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 196ff. Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). A later work The Beast and the Sovereign (2017), was also published posthumously. 91. John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6. 92. Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn ‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 33. 93. Ahmed, 333–34. 94. Ibn Sina, “A Treatise,” 213–14. 95. Goodman, 122. 96. Italics in original. Ibn Sina, “A Treatise,” 212. 97. Qur’an, 21:30; 11:7. 98. Sepehri, “Mosafer” [“Traveler”] in Hasht Ketab, 308. ‫همیشه عاشق تنهاست‬ 99.‘Ishq (love) is repeated 21 times, and asheq (lover) and asheqaneh (lovingly) together 8 times. 100. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall] in Hasht Ketab, 267–99. 101. Sepehri, “Mosafer” [Traveler], Hasht Ketab, 301. 102. Rumi’s Masnavi contains over 25,000 couplets, and the Divan-e Shams as many as 40,000 verses of lyrical poetry, and over 3,000 ghazals. 103. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 2674. ‫اگراین آسمان عاشق نبودی نبودی سینه او را صفایی‬ ‫وگر خورشید هم عاشق نبودی نبودی در جمال او ضیایی‬ 104. Rumi, Divan-e Shams. ‫همه اجزای عالم عاشقانند‬ 105. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 1096. ‫عشق دریاییست و موجش ناپدید آب دریا آتش و موجش گهر‬ 106. Maria Popova, “James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society,” The Marginalian. August 20, 2014, https://www.

38

Chapter 1

themarginalian.org/2014/08/20/james-baldwin-the-creative-process/, accessed November 20, 2021. 107. Rumi, Masnavi-ye Ma’navi [The Spiritual Couplets] (Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1336/1957), book 1. ‫علت عاشق ز علتها جداست عشق اصطرالب اسرار خداست‬ 108. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 2366. ‫عاقالن از مور مرده در کشند از احتیاط عاشقان از‬ ‫الابالی اژدها را کوفته‬ 109. Rumi, Masnavi, book 1. ‫عقل در شرحش چو خر در گل بخفت‬ 110. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 2924, in Schimmel, Rumi’s World, 191. ‫گفتم ای عقلم کجایی عقل گفت چون شدم می چون شدم انگوریی‬ 111. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 1931. The word majnoon, literally means crazy. In the famous seventh century love story of Layla and majnoon, it is the lover, named Qais, who goes mad with Layla’s love. ‫امروز شدند هر دو مجنون‬ . . . ‫عقل از کف عشق خورد افیون‬ 112. Rumi, Divan-e Shams, Verse 355. ‫بحمدالله به عشق او بجستیم از این تنگی که محراب و چلیپاست‬ 113. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall], Hasht Ketab, 267–300. 114. Sepehri, Mosafer [Traveler], Hasht Ketab, 303–28. 115. Massud Farzan, “The Neo-Sufic Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri,” Books Abroad 47, no. 1 (winter 1973), 87. 116. Sepehri, “Be Bagh-e Hamsafaran” [To the Garden of Fellow-Travelers], Hasht Ketab, 394–97. 117. Sepehri, “Neshani” [“Address”], Hasht Ketab, 358–59. 118. Sepehri, “Jahannam-e Sargardan” [“Wandering Inferno”], Hasht Ketab, 83–84. 119. Sepehri, “Lahze-ye Gomshode” [“The Lost Moment”], Hasht Ketab, 104–5. 120. Maria Zambrano, Algunos lugares de la pintura, ed. by Pedro Chacón (Madrid: Eutelequia, 2012), 29. Qtd. in Alberto Santamaria, “Poetry and Realization: Towards a Knowledge of the Poet’s Place in María Zambrano,” The Cultural Legacy of María Zambrano, ed. Ros, Xon de and Daniela Omlor, vol. 24 (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017), 96. 121. Santamaria, 96. 122. Sepehri, “Bagh-i dar Seda” [“A Garden in the Sound”], Hasht Ketab, 108–9. 123. Sepehri, “Morq-e Afsaneh” [“Bird of Legend”], Hasht Ketab, 110–17. 124. Sepehri, “Mosafer” [“Traveler”], Hasht Ketab, 326–27. 125. Zambrano, Notas de un método (Madrid: Mondadori,1989), 81. Qtd. in Santamaria. 97. 126. Sepehri, “Ta,” [“Until”] Hasht Ketab, 247. 127. Farzan, “The Neo-Sufic Poetry,” 87. 128. Sepehri, “Shabe Tanhayi-e Khoub” [“Night of Good Solitude”], Hasht Ketab, 372. 129. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: The Dial Press, 1963). The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a Black-nationalist organization founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930. Elijah Muhammad declared Fard, Allah, and himself the messenger of Allah in 1934 and was the head of the NOI until his

Love

39

death in 1975. Malcolm X joined the NOI in 1953 and officially left the organization a decade later in 1963, two years before his assassination. 130. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. 131. James Baldwin, conversation with R. H. Darden, aired April 1, 1968, on KPFK, 60 min, accessed June 10, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Cs7DxbZnxhY&ab_channel=SecretTarotSecretTarotVerified. 132. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (Dial Press, 1961). 133. James Baldwin, interview with Nazar Büyüm in Istanbul in 1969. Qtd. in Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and It’s Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown, 2020), 102–3. 134. Cornel West, Keeping Faith (New York: Routledge, 1993), 72–73; James Baldwin, interview by Mavis Nicholson, aired February 12, 1987, accessed January 6, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wht4NSf7E4&ab_channel=ThamesTv. 135. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1963), 103. 136. Sylviane Diouf’s research reflects that the Blues as the musical genre, which started by African-Americans in the deep South of the US, did not originate in Mississippi Delta, but thousands of miles away in Muslim West Africa. The habit of group singing through all activities, such as work in the field, called field-holler and songs of loneliness. They contain spirituals with roots found in the call to prayer and at times with the use of musical instruments of West and North Africa. See Sylviane Diouf, “What Islam Gave the Blues,” in Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College, June 17, 2019. https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/what-islam-gave-theblues, accessed on November 19, 2021. Ethnomusicologist, Gerhard Kubik posits that the vocal style of melisma, wavy intonation, by the blues singers is a heritage of a larger region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Muslim Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries. See Gerhard Kubik, Theory of African Music, vol. 2 (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 137. “Conversations with the Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin,” November 11, 2021, YouTube video, 0:26:08, accessed January 23, 2021, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6sFgaZBs-U&ab_channel=AfroMarxist. 138. James Baldwin in a conversation with R. H. Darden, broadcasted: KPFK, April 1, 1968 (60 min.), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs7DxbZnxhY&ab_cha nnel=SecretTarotSecretTarotVerified, accessed on June 10, 2021. 139. Orlando O. Espin, Grace and Idol: On Traditioning and Subversive Hope (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), 2. 140. Vincent W. Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 47. 141. Joseph Drexler-Dreis, Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 4. 142. James Baldwin interviewed by Mavis Nicholson. First aired on 02/12/1987, six months before his passing. “Civil Rights: James Baldwin Interview: Mavis on Four,” November 1, 2014, YouTube video, 0:4:58, https://www.youtube.com​/watch​?v​=3Wht4NSf7E4​&ab​ _channel=ThamesTv.

40

Chapter 1

143. James Baldwin, The Amen Corner: A Play (New York: Vintage International, 1968). 144. James Baldwin, interview with Nazar Büyüm, in Glaude, 103. 145. Glaude, 103. 146. Glaude, 126. 147. Glaude, 179. 148. Divan-e Shams, verse 1031.  ‫جان من و جان تو بستست به همدیگر همرنگ شوم از تو گر خیر بود گر شر‬  149. Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Dial Press, 1979), 177. 150. “James Baldwin Speaks! Social Change and the Writer’s Responsibility,” September 19, 2016, YouTube video, 0:52:40, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cZQ5OA4rtag&t=948s&ab_channel=MatthewSiegfriedMatthewSiegfried. 151. James Baldwin, interview with Kay Bonetti, “James Baldwin interview 1984/ The post archive,” October 21, 2015, YouTube video, 1:00:41, accessed on June 10, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dua3dtrvq84&ab_channel=MatthewSiegfr iedMatthewSiegfried. 152. Glaude, 103. 153. Lloyd, 44–45. 154. Glaude, 96. 155. “James Baldwin: From Another Place” directed by Sedat Pakay (1973), https://www.sedatpakay.com/. This sojourn is beautifully depicted in the photography and short film of Pakay. 156. Lloyd, 47. 157. Baldwin, “To Crush a Serpent” (1987), in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York, Vintage, 2010), 195–204. 158. ‘Attar, 88. 159. ‘Attar, 88. 160. Baldwin, Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 9. 161. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall] Hasht Ketab, 267–300. 162. bell hooks, All About Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000). 163. Baldwin, Baldwin: Collected Essays, 220.

Chapter 2

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet Beyond Nature Poetry

THE POET’S REPORT I begin this chapter with quotes from the American novelist, playwright, and civil right activist, James Baldwin, and the Spanish philosopher, Maria Zambrano, as a tribute to Sohrab Sepehri, a poet/painter who lived a relatively short life, though had wished himself the lifespan of Noah so that he could help wipe away the despondency of the times. Zambrano writes this about the mission of the poet: “The mission of the poet in a period of defeat and permanent crisis is to make of poetry a new place for accessing hidden reality.”1 In a lecture on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity Baldwin said that the poets, by which he meant all artists, are “the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t, only the poets.” He then emphatically stated that “something awful is happening to a civilization when it seize to produce poets and what is even more crucial when it seizes . . . to believe in the report that only poets can make.”2 In the early 1960s, the same years that James Baldwin vacillated between New York and Istanbul, Sepehri published his most read and longest poem, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab (The Sound of Water’s Footfall, 1965). Also a sojourner, he travelled to Tokyo, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paulo, Kashmir, Lahore, and Kabul, as well as New York, Venice, Paris, London, yet the most beloved place was his hometown, Kashan. Zambrano was spending decades of exile in Italy, France, and Switzerland, only to return to her homeland, Spain, after the death of Franco. Although Baldwin, Zambrano, and Sepehri did not cross paths and likely had not read each other’s writings, juxtaposing their works helps us to interpret the role of the poet in society. Zambrano saw in poets a prophetic role 41

42

Chapter 2

and mission to reveal “truth” in times of crisis. Meanwhile, Baldwin enunciated and enacted his responsibility as an artist in self-exile, lamenting the civilization that had stopped producing poets, ceasing to listen to the truth that poets/artists revealed. Through Baldwin and Zambrano’s insights, I aim to introduce Sepehri as an artist who knew the truth about us. Like them, he was of the opinion that ideology cannot be imposed on poets, just as artists cannot be constrained to follow a particular technique in the arts. Originality and authenticity were among his distinct characteristics.3 Sepehri was the poet who spoke of “the sound of the bird,” not as an embellishment to his life, but as a necessary “part of his life.” He yearned to save the Earth and to lighten the despair of the entire world, not just of the human. EARTH POETRY IS SOUL POETRY John Keats was right when he said in 1918 that “the poetry of the earth is never dead.”4 A wealth of Earth poems are found across poetic traditions, from the romantics, including John Clare, William Blake, and Samuel Coleridge, to transcendentalists, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, and through the eco-Buddhism of Gary Snyder. They are neither limited to North America and Europe nor to the English language. The Indo-Persian prophetic traditions, despite their undeniable differences, agree that “the Earth is alive, we live in and through her, and as we are in her keeping, so is she in ours.”5 The notion that humans are responsible for the earth and all its inhabitants is attributed to Ali, the fourth caliph and the first Imam for the Shi’a. He reminds the responsibility for protection of the life of living beings even during human conflict and considers it as equally valuable.6 In Persian poetry, the theme of interconnection with the Earth has been featured from its beginnings. We see it reflected in Roudaki (d. 941)—in whose work all of nature is not only alive but very active—Rumi (d. 1273), Sa’di (d. 1292), Vahshi-ye Bafghi (d. 1583), all the way to the ecopoetics of Sepehri. Earth poets and ecopoets have been making their reports. Baldwin’s lament is that we do not read poetry and that we think that we do not need it. In effect, the value of a true artist—the artist that reveals the truth to us—is naught in a consumer culture. Mindless of the fact, writes the Iranian philosopher Davari Ardakani, that the history of the world from Mesopotamia to Greece has developed with poetry, the consumerist assumption that profit is truth, leads to the belief that poetry is of no use, pointless, and confusing because it is “profitless.”7 Still, the four-thousand-year-old epic of Gilgamesh is to this day a source of meaning. The poetics of the native peoples and their

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

43

various oral cultures was resolute with reverence for the Earth and living in harmony with it. The richness of different poetic traditions worldwide shows that poetry has to do with the beginning of humanity and with its foundation. “To expect profit from the foundation is to expect fruit from the roots of the tree.”8 Can we expect profit from the soul? Without the soul, what benefit has bread? “We shall not live by bread alone.”9 Nourishing the body alone will do us no good. We are souls, and poetry nourishes the soul.10 “Poetry and art are not simply venues of vagary or delight, rather they are the constant that warrants our living together. . . . Poetry is the beginning of togetherness, goodness, and amity.”11 By its nature, poetry reveals things to us, things that may have been forgotten, things that are yet to come. In a subtle form, not in a declaration or a manifesto, it reveals the truth; it warns, gives tidings, brings joy, and expresses sorrow.12 GREENING OF HUMANITIES Despite the recent “greening of the humanities” and the paradigm shifts in literary studies toward ecology, ecocriticism, and environmental studies, the field remains heavily Euro-American-centric. It also remains, for the most part, anthropocentric, or focused on Anthroparchy (a system that supposedly works only for the benefit of humans).13 Although humans have only been around for around three hundred thousand of the 4.6-billion-year life of the Earth, we have established ourselves as a major geological force on this planet. In addition, through our explorations of space, mainly the moon and Mars, we are rapidly moving beyond the Earth.14 Urbanization, industrialized agriculture, the excessive production and use of fossil fuels, destruction of forests, and pollution of the waters and the atmosphere are not new phenomena in human history. What is new is the speed and force by which we engage in acts of pollution and destruction. Our actions have determined the fate, life, and death of many species of animals, plants, and other aggregates. At the same time, we remain, for the most part, unaware that we are shaping our own fate. We have referred to ourselves as Homo sapiens since the eighteenth century, even as we have become a rival to what we simply and reducibly call “nature.” While “nature” will survive, despite all the harm imposed on it, we—wise humans—shall not, unless we change our ways. It might be possible to postpone the ecological crisis or to amend the damages we have caused by introducing measures such as the discovery and use of renewable energy sources or by enforcing policies that regulate big business. Yet, such measures will likely be ineffective as long as our philosophical, ethical, and theological worldviews have not changed. Efforts to bring

44

Chapter 2

awareness or structural change must entail seeing the world anew rather than suggest mere transitory solutions. For instance, despite the commercial success of former US vice president Al Gore’s documentary on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film resulted in greater political division, not in promoting awareness and understanding of how to resolve the climate crisis. Despite the advantage of status, in addition to the technology and social media advances of the twenty-first century, most agree that it did not have the near impact as the US environmental movement of the 1960s, which brought awareness of various ecological disasters, including the radioactive fallout of the hydrogen bomb, nuclear testing, catastrophic oil spills, and so forth. It also spawned the publication of environmental works in various fields, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962); S. H. Nasr’s Rockefeller Lectures at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1966, later published as Man and Nature (1966); Lynn T. White Jr.’s Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) and “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967); and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). SILENT SPRING: NOISY SUMMER Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in the summer of 1962, revealed the dangers of pesticides, proving that they were nothing short of insecticides and biocides.15 As a woman without an academic title or institutional affiliation who wrote for the public and took on the chemical industries, her science was at first denigrated; she was marginalized and accused of being a communist. In spite of this initial negative reaction, her work was still widely read and did not take long to become influential. After it was published, President Kennedy ordered an investigation on the effects of DDT. In 1963, the government advised less use of pesticides. By 1972, DDT was banned and Silent Spring had become one of the most significant books of the century. It was clear that Carson had inspired a new paradigm and become an advocate for the complexity of nature’s interrelationship and intricate balances. Clearly, Rachel Carson was not the first to have ventured into scientific research that revealed the harmful effects of chemicals. At a time when eighty million pounds of DDT were being used annually, an enormous amount of work had already been done on the effects of pesticides, in particular, research on the disproportionate death of robins that they were causing. This leads us to pose the question: What was it about Carson’s work that had the capacity to move America? What led her to become the “unlikely reformer” who challenged industrial empires, exposed the scientific establishment and its elitism, and called the government to account for its assault against science and nature? It is here that Maria Zambrano’s theories can help us interpret

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

45

the efficacy of Carson’s environmental discourse. If we borrow Zambrano’s concept of “poetic reason,” we can see that what made Carson’s book so powerful was that she suggested reform by questioning the dominant system of institutional arrangements and its unequivocal devotion to technological progress. Her “poetic reason” was embodied in her reverence, awe, and wonder in the encounter with nature; it is this that gave her work the power to alter the way some people viewed the environment and the relationship of humans with it. She believed that the “affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life.”16 Carson held that natural beauty was necessary for the development of any individual or society. She believed that “whenever we destroy beauty, whenever we substitute something manmade and artificial for a natural feature of this earth we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”17 Carson believed that government and industrial leaders were eager to create change, but also witnessed that they advanced new technologies without knowing the full implications of their decisions. She saw calmness and courage in the symbolic and actual beauty of “the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides,” and all of nature. Her view of poets is of special interest to my point in this chapter. She wrote: “Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science.” To give an example, she cites a poem by the English poet Francis Thompson, who wrote: “Thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star.” In spite of Thompson’s powerful implication that all of nature is interconnected, Carson argues that “the poet’s insight has not become part of general knowledge. Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important, simply because of his new-found power to destroy it.”18 It is with the aim to bring the poetic insight out of the periphery that I discuss the ecopoetics of Sohrab Sepehri. A TWENTIETH-CENTURY PERSIAN ECOPOET Also in the 1960s, Sohrab Sepehri’s heightened attention to the wonders of nature and our intricate relationship with all beings appeared in literary journals in Iran. His focus on nature was inspired in the 1950s, when he was employed by the Iranian Department of Agriculture with an assignment to eradicate grasshoppers. Upon his return, when his sister asked him about this job, he replied: “walking had become very difficult. They had covered the ground, and I was trying to walk in a way not to crush any of them.”19 He resigned from his post shortly after, without having wiped out a single grasshopper, and from all formal government employment in 1961.

46

Chapter 2

Like Carson, Sepehri was moved by the relationship between humans and the natural world and worried about the effects of scientific interventions on the environment. Hailed as “the sage of water, mirror, and flower,” he produced an intricate and sophisticated body of work that has been the subject of interpretation and analysis in various fields, including linguistics, literary criticism, mystical poetry, and modern art. His work has been described as humanist, avant-garde modernist, postmodern environmental ethics, neo-Sufic, ecomystical, and so forth.20 In the early 1970s, a complete collection of his previously published works appeared in a single volume, Hasht Ketab (The Eight Books). Meticulous in his work, in this volume he applied the symbolic meaning of number eight, an auspicious number in most cultures and traditions of the world: perfection. In particular, among the Dogons, the Indigenous people of Mali in Western Africa, eight is the number that represents speech.21 A sensitive soul, brought up in a household dedicated to the arts, at a young age he was good at calligraphy, drawing, and painting. Even as a child, he designed and wove a carpet. His artistic inclination can be traced to his parents: his father was a calligrapher and made and played the tar (Persian string instrument), while his mother, to whom he was quite attached, was a lover of literature, and of poetry. Once in a dream, he saw that his mother had fallen ill. This became the reason for his return, only shortly after he had left Iran for Paris with a year-long scholarship.22 Friends relate that he always had a gentle demeanor; doing no harm. Breaking a branch of a tree, unnecessarily, would offend him. When walking in the fields, if he saw an ant or other insects, he would change his path so as not to harm them inadvertently. Anytime he encountered a peasant in the field, he would stop to speak to them, and to see how they were doing, and whether there was anything he could do for them.23 He never spoke ill of anyone.24 In The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012), Hamid Dabashi describes Sepehri as “saintly, presential, gnostic, dwelling in the here and now, sunk and soaked in being.”25 According to Dabashi, Persian humanism is naturally different from the humanism of fifteenth-century Europe; through its heightened emphasis on human individuality and dignity, it assigns a privileged place for humans in the universe. Through the term adab (literary humanism), he associates the privileging of humans with a cosmopolitan worldliness. Shahab Ahmed calls this interpretation “a loud, albeit unstated echo of Lenn Goodman.”26 Goodman defined Islamic humanism as an effort to develop an educated, ethical culture as part of the human fulfillment as a species to seek “inner sustenance . . . in the clarity and learning of the mind, the rule of reason, nourished not by the sunna of the Prophet but by paideia, the adab of humanity.”27 Meanwhile, Mohannad Khorchide uses the term “humanistic Islam” rather than “Islamic humanism,” emphasizing the ethical

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

47

and spiritual aspects of Shari’ah over the juridical. He regards humans as the medium “for the implementation of God’s love and mercy, out of free will.”28 Nasr Abu Zayd’s humanistic hermeneutics suggests an interpretation that sees the Qur’an as a living phenomenon, a discourse in itself.29 Decades before Dabashi and Goodman’s works were published, Mohammed Arkoun wrote L’humanisme Arabe, where he describes adab as a holistic approach to education and learning, a pluralistic project that has at times been silenced by what he calls hegemonic reason or dominating orthodoxies.30 The new humanism that Arkoun envisions integrates “religions as cultures and not as dogmas for confessional groups,” a concept that he believes has “not been taken seriously either in theology or in the social scientific study.”31 He hopes that semiotics and linguistics create the possibility of reading religious texts in a new way that foregrounds issues such as consciousness, eschatology, and revelation as a springboard for mythical, or symbolic thinking. In this tradition of insaniyat/insaniyya (in Persian/Arabic) meaning (being truly human), Sepehri can be dubbed a humanist. He is colossal in his recognition of the importance of religion as a source of symbols that offer an alternative mode of thinking about religion, a way that not only overcomes fanatic divisions imposed by dogmatic, superstitious interpretations, but also negates anthropocentrism and all forms of hegemony. Sepehri’s humanism is clearly not that of Petrarch, Machiavelli, Erasmus, or even that of the existentialists like Sartre or Camus, who come from a European tradition that tends to ask whether the human is a creature on Earth or a god. In describing this humanist approach, Michael Gillespie writes: “the first of all things for man was man.”32 Baldwin problematizes this humanist approach when he writes in No Name in the Street, that for Camus, “European humanism appear[s] to expire at the European gates.”33 For Sepehri, dignity was not limited to certain groups of people; not only was it not limited to a certain race, class, or nationality, in fact, in his humanist approach dignity did not pertain to humans alone. Contrary to the ideal of being “the first of all things for man,” he implored an ethics, or etiquette, of respect toward all beings, all aggregates. Dabashi’s definition of humanism as adab—referring to etiquette, but with various other connotations including grace, culture, finesse, and more—was actually an effort to historicize the work of postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s, Orientalism, a critique of the epistemology of European humanism. Dabashi agrees that Muslim scholasticism is rooted in Muslim sacred scripture, but claims that the roots of Islamic humanism should be found elsewhere, specifically in the cosmopolitan world of the Abbasid empire, the time after a long period of Arabic literary imperialism (750–1258), which resisted the Persian language.34 In his assessment, particularly of Persian literary humanism, he put forward “a theory of subjection from within the historical matrix of Persian literary humanism to which the entire European spectrum

48

Chapter 2

of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity is entirely tangential. This is a reading of Persian literary humanism that in fact overcomes the notion of ‘modernity’ altogether.”35 His reading amounts to a critique of epistemology as a mode of knowledge production. Sepehri’s work is itself a critique of a mode of knowledge production and must not be measured by categories of Western humanism, including modern or postmodern thought. He elucidates this critique in “Conversations with the Professor,” an essay that in part defends traditional art and architecture while at the same time displays a detailed critical knowledge of art history around the world. In effect, Dabashi’s statement that Sepehri is anti-dogmatic, while true, is an understatement. He writes: “His is the poetics of being, dissolved in the ephemeral, but without any metaphysics.”36 Metaphysics as a branch of philosophy has no place in any poet’s work. Yet, metaphysics as a concern with the ultimate nature of reality is at the heart of Sepehri’s work. In that sense his work is very much concerned with metaphysics. His poetry engages with cosmology, natural philosophy, immortality, freedom of will, as well as the mind/body dichotomy. Obviously, as a cosmopolitan poet with a good sense of humor, he engages metaphysics differently than a philosopher. His sister narrates that when he was leaving for college, she had asked him for his address so that she could write him. He told her to address the letter to “The world, Sohrab Sepehri, I will get the letter.”37 Sepehri’s Persian humanist metaphysics is revealed through much of his work. One example is this proclamation in a piece called “Niayesh” (“Devotion”): ‌‌Darkness undone, Venus appeared, we came up the mountain ridge . . . down-pour of shower, affinity between us, Darkness left, our heads in devotion to the blue of the sky, We, became right for the heavens . . . Our silence merged, and we became us . . . The more we were together, the more we were forlorn, We parted from the mountain ridge Landing on dust, I became servant You ascended, and became God.38 ‌‌ the beginning, God and the human were one in this worldview. Upon sepaIn ration—which occurred at the parting from the mountain ridge—the human landed on dust and became bandeh (servant), not simply adam (human, made from the dust of the Earth). The relationship of servitude implied by bandeh manifests in the offering of the self to Truth, which is regarded as the highest service, the station of the “Beloved.” In Sufi traditions, selfless servanthood

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

49

is one of the highest states. It comes after the station of oneness because it requires an overcoming of the ego, and just before the station of “no station,” the highest station. To reach the station of no station, one must pass through all other states and stations, including Majesty and Beauty, until finally reaching the state of no attribute and no description. Sepehri’s repeated reference to hich (nothingness) evokes this stage of a sufi’s journey, and those who reach it are the Divine Ones; they have become one with the Real. In most interpretations of Sepehri’s poetry, the language of hich has been identified as Zen. There are resemblances between the state of human perfection evoked in reaching nirvana, achieving nothingness in Zen Buddhism, and reaching the station of no station in Sufi practices. As I will explore in the next chapter, Sepehri’s evocation of these traditions in his poetry shows that his verse, while deeply metaphysical, is rooted in the practice of service and remains inclusive in its understanding of Truth. Without claiming to be a Buddhist, he finds a way to Truth in Buddhist thought, as one of the many ways to Truth. His only explicit religious self-identification appears in the “Sound of the Water’s Footfall,” which will be analyzed in the next chapter. Though the God of Sepehri at times appears transcendent, he more often describes God as immanent, as we see when he writes: ‌‌[I have] A God who is nearby, Under these violets At the foot of that towering cypress On the awareness of water On the secret code of the plant.39 ‌‌ Here, God is immanent, “nearby” and very much present in the natural surroundings of the poet. At other times, when Sepehri speaks of union/separation of human from God as bande, he refers to a transcendent God. The nuances of Sepehri’s theology/ecotheology will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3. EMERSON, THE ROMANTICS, AND PERSIAN POETRY A reaction to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; romanticism is the largest recent movement that transformed the society and philosophy of the Western world. Central ideas of the romantic movement include the reverence of nature, the equation of childhood with innocence, mysticism, romantic love, the rights of women and of animals, the reinvention of poetry, and individualism. These ideas come forth, for instance, when Blake talks about the Industrial Revolution of the devil in “Jerusalem,” or when Wordsworth

50

Chapter 2

“wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills.”40 In their poetry, the romantic emphasis on individualism and the self is clear. The American version of romanticism; transcendentalism, developed after the nineteenth-century publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature. The two movements shared certain ideas; both held that basic truths come from intuition and stressed nonconformity, authenticity, self-reliance, individuality, living a simple life of solitude, interconnectedness with nature, an emphasis on experience rather than speculation, and a focus on self-improvement before working on the improvement of others. These ideas are the basis for the following comparative analysis of Sepehri with the Romantic and Transcendentalist poets. In fact, many romantic and transcendentalist ideals are shared by Islamic thought and mysticism, Sufi practices, and are expressed unequivocally in Persian poetry, which, in effect, influenced many romantics and transcendentalists. In Emerson’s work, for example, Persian poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are the sixth most-cited writers.41 Emerson was so immersed in reading and translating the works of Sa’di and Hafiz that he nicknamed himself Sa’di and aspired to be like Hafiz when he wrote: “such is the only man I wish to see or to be.”42 He found the vibrant, poetic mysticism of the Persian poets appealing, as he realized that they celebrate the glory of God not in the formality of rituals, but in the beauty of creation, as summed up in this verse from Sa’di’s Boustan: ‌‌leaf of the green trees, in the eyes of the wise each a script, on the realization of the Divine.43 ‌‌ Similarly, in “Tables Turned,” Wordsworth writes of the natural world as a teacher and guardian; he preaches, “let nature be your teacher.”44 Like him, Sepehri turns his gaze to the pulsating of a leaf, the sound of the feathers of the bird, and the water’s footfall. He does not describe nature in the abstract or as a basis for a political or artistic theory. Rather, his verse preserves its tangibility, taking the reader on a contemplative journey to “the freckles on the wing of a butterfly,” “the reflection of the swan in the water,” “the crossing of the fly from the alley of loneliness,” and “the bright hope of a sparrow when it descends upon land, from atop a sycamore tree.”45 Sepehri’s sister remembers his sensitivity to nature even during his childhood. One very early morning, she remembers, Sohrab standing by the damask rose bushes when he claimed that he could hear the budding of the flowers.46 A similar image enters into his poetry: ‌‌In this house, I am familiar with the damp obscurity of the grass, I hear the sound of the breath of the garden,

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

51

And the sound of darkness as it falls from a leaf, And the sound of the cough of light from behind the tree, The sneezing of water from every rupture in the rock.47 ‌‌By attributing senses and human sounds like coughs and sneezes to plants and water, his verse dissolves boundaries, breaking down the imposed disconnectedness of the human mind and nature and any oppositional human/nature dichotomy along with it. With his keen awareness of the vitality of nature, Sepehri points ever so delicately to a few of the manifestations of violence against the Earth. In “To the Garden of Fellow-travelers” he writes of “the age of the ascent of steel,” and “the scuffle of the armored tanks” running over “the child’s dream,” and questions the science that “uncovered the positive scent of the gunpowder?”48 In this manner, Sepehri’s poetry embodies Evelyn Reilly’s definition of ecopoetry, which reframes “the human within the ecological . . . with a minimum of human appropriation and narcissistic mirroring.”49 All three of the overarching characteristics of ecopoetry—“humble appreciation of wildness, a skepticism toward hyperrationality and its resultant overreliance on technology”—are gracefully bestowed in his piece, “To the Garden of Fellow Travelers,” and in the larger scope of his work.50 His subtle reference to the heavy mining of the Earth reveals itself in deploring “the collision of metals,” and his longing for “the discoverer of the mine of the morning.” He speaks of the atrocities of war with similarly succinct yet colorful imageries, like the abrupt flight of the ducks at the sound of the bomb and the passing of the armored tank over the child’s dream; together, these images express his dissatisfaction with the given social and cultural structures, which is one of the ways Jonathan Skinner defines ecopoetry.51 The strong mystical overtones and symbolic elements of Sepehri’s poetry give further insight into the meaning of his verses. He invokes the pear, for instance—long a symbol of abundance, divine sustenance, and longevity—to describe the falling of nature from abundance. In contrast to the “decline of the pear,” he juxtaposes the “ascendance of steel,” one of the strongest pollutants of surface and ground waters.52 At the end of the piece, he questions the structures of economy, trade, and science, which leave nature, that includes all of us humans, as well, in the state of depravity. “ROCKS: NOT AN ORNAMENT FOR THE MOUNTAIN”53 In addition to being a poet, Sepehri was a painter, yet he believed that “all the paintings in the world do not represent the truth more vividly than a rock

52

Chapter 2

on the side of the road.”54 He also compared his soul with a rock on the side of the road, declaring that it sometimes is aligned with truth, “like the rock on the side of the road.”55 Here, his assumption is that the rock always conveys the truth, while the poet’s soul only does so sometimes. He restructures and transforms the common hierarchical framework that has long placed the human at the top and other species and aggregates at its service. In his essay, “Conversation with the Professor,” Sepehri compares the canvas of the East and the West, claiming that in the painting of the East, things are equal: “The Western (artist) measures, selects. In selection there is someone/something deprived. There is falling from the sight. The western gaze is not forgiving. It is self-possessed, and conceited. It requires a special place.”56 To support his point, he gives the example of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson,” which leads the eye to the center of the painting. Giving another example, he mention’s Tintoretto’s “Presentation of Virgin Mary at the Temple,” which also “invites the eye to the main part of the canvas, even the figures in the painting are looking at that direction.” In contrast, “Chinese art does not sacrifice the tree for the sake of the human. The Bamboo is not portrayed superior to the rock . . . nothing here is up to display itself over the other.”57 Elaborating on his critique of the educational system of his time and place, he expresses gratitude that “the teaching of art had not become western, as there was no mention of ‘lifeless nature’ or ‘achromatic.’”58 In his lengthy defense of symmetry, Sepehri again ends up expressing a mystical concept: “[The] symmetry of a Persian garden is harmonized with mystical imagination. The pool reflects the blue of the sky, and the garden itself is the symmetry of paradise. In our mosques, symmetries enfold the presence of worship. You will hear the echo of majesty and mercy. And the path through the symmetries reaches union.”59 For Sepehri, creating art without a mystical core has little to no value. His poiesis is a revelatory process through which the artist brings something into being: “Something was heard in me, like the sound of water in your dream. A stream of the rising sun, of things passing me by, and in me, collided with me. My eyes did not see things: it was the empty within me that gazed, and saw things. I became light as feather, and ever so slowly rose up within myself. A presence gradually took hold of me, a presence like a flow of light.”60 Sepehri’s blue room, a room in the south side of his childhood home, was to him a mandala: a diagram or symbol of the ideal universe. It was a representative of the macrocosm and microcosm, the dramatic scene of differentiation and union. It provided guidance to salvation, the place of the awakening of liberative self-awareness. The architect of that room had not heard anything about Vajrayana and had not been infected by rationalism; rather, they based their design on epiphany and intuition.61 The blend of elements that enter into the Blue Room provides an interesting example of how Sepehri integrates the sacred and the profane in a

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

53

modern world that, as Robert Orsi writes, has “assiduously and systematically disciplined the senses not to experience sacred presence.”62 In the emptying of a mundane room above a stable that no one thinks about, a room hidden behind the trees of his childhood, Sepehri makes the experience of the sacred present.63 ECOPOETICS: WHITHER AND WHY? Although Sepehri was not a sculptor, he was constantly molding himself anew as a painter, a human, and a poet. As we have seen, an opposition to human supremacy and celebration of the vitality of nature characterizes his verse. Read today, his poetry can facilitate an understanding of the severity of the scale of ecological devastation in our society. The current ecological crisis has become so immense that it demands interdisciplinary attention. Scientists have come up with reports on critical environmental challenges, including major loss in the biosphere, mass extinctions, human overpopulation, and so forth. Some associate the emergence of a long-predicted pandemic as likely related to biodiversity loss.64 They maintain that the magnitude of the loss has not been fully grasped. At the same time, their warnings and efforts are mainly centered around “the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.”65 Some scientists believe that we have all the expertise to deal with the matter; others acknowledge that we do not have the will to deal with it. The task of overcoming the current challenges cannot be left to the scientific community alone. It is the work of everyone in every discipline. Relying on Western science and technology, which are based on a dualism between human/nature, to solve the problem that science and technology brought about is a conundrum by itself. “Science is too important to be left to scientists alone, especially when ‘science’ has once again become the name for any form of the disciplined inquiry, as in the old German sense of Wissenschaft.”66 There was a time when Wissenschaft included poetry and other subjects that helped promote an understanding of reality, truth, beauty, and goodness. In his poetry, Sepehri questions the scientism that positivism induced. As if following in his lead, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, ecopoetics evolved into an intersectional paradigm for evaluating the unevenly distributed effects of environmental degradation. What distinguishes ecopoetry from nature writing is that it invites social change, is cognizant of the interdependence of all creatures, and calls for an awareness of the superiority/inferiority complex in relation of human/nonhuman life. It is also skeptical of hyperrationality and the over-technologized culture of modernity.67 Ecopoetics and ecocriticism address a crisis that goes beyond

54

Chapter 2

pollution, deforestation, and the disappearance of millions of species of animals and plants. They convey a sense of responsibility and engage with the ethical question of what type of relationship humans should cultivate with the Earth and other beings in light of the crisis. They are, in short, a poetic project that comprehends the ecological imperative at a level higher than personal sensitivity. Their greater task is to point to a deeper problem: the broken relationships resulting from unsustainable exploitation and the culture of consumption that has privileged economics and capital over place and home. Like Sepehri’s poetry, other ecopoets also question the supremacy of humans over other beings in order to bring harmony to these broken relationships. The term ecopoetry came to be more frequently used at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with “deep green resistance” coming to fore shortly afterward. The content of such poetry, however, existed before the name, particularly outside of the United States and outside academia.68 The works of these activists who were essentially ecopoets, were not given enough attention, even as some of them have put their lives on the line, and were met with severe violence, and even execution. In “Silence Would Be Treason,” for instance, the last poem by the Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa (d. 1995), Saro-Wiwa wishes that his people would live to celebrate the end of Shell’s gradual “ecological genocide” of the Ogoni’s.69 About him another poet wrote: ‌‌ Ogoni, your agonies have sent waves across the seas. They have opened the blinded eyes of the snoring world . . . Your agonies, Ogoni, make a Lazarus of the feet-dragging world.70 ‌‌In other areas of Africa, South East Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world, environmentalists and ecopoets have been seen as a threat. In Latin America, for instance, the Chilean antipoet Nicanor Parra Sandoval (d. 2018) satirized political systems and social structures. His Ecopoemas (1982) is an example of a biocentric ecopoetry that warns against the catastrophic ramifications of a non-harmonious relationship between human and nonhuman life forms, which ignites the real potential for ecological catastrophe. There are many more examples from various regions of the world. Within the United States, ecopoetry has been linked to black poetry and tied to racial discrimination. Tracing connections between environmental violence and racialized violence, twentieth-century black poets like Helene Johnson, Lucille Clifton, and Langston Hughes relate the exploitation of their people to the exploitation of the fertile territories of the Americas. They also make connections between environmental resilience and the ancestral resilience of the black diaspora.71 It is not an accident that a defining moment for the “environmental justice” that galvanized the nation was a protest

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

55

movement against the dumping of a highly toxic chemical, PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls), in the landfill of the predominantly low-income African American community in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. Previous minority community resistance against exposure to hazardous environmental conditions included resistance to toxic insecticides by Latino farmworkers organized by Cesar Chavez in 1960. Another protest was held against the setting up of a sewage plant in West Harlem in 1968. All of these cases, as Dina Gilio-Whitaker reports, were met with resistance and failed to stop the environmental injustice of the racialized poor.72 HOMO SAPIENS AND THE LORE OF SUPERIORITY By and large, the written traditions of the world have viewed “nature” as separate and lesser than human. This juxtaposition has had an impact on the commentarial traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some trace this way of thinking to Greek philosophy, which associated “nature” with physics, as opposed to the higher realm, metaphysics, and the technological developments of the eighteenth century. Lynn White Jr., however, connects the historical roots of our ecological crisis to distinctively Occidental technological and scientific discourses that began as early as the Middle Ages and perpetuated a “dualism of man and nature.” The marriage between science and technology, he writes, resulted from the “union of the theoretical and the empirical approaches to our natural environment” resulting from the Baconian creed that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature.73 As theologians of the time insisted that “it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper end,” he argued that this fundamental shift led to the belief that man was exploiter of nature instead of part of it.74 In the early 1970s, the term ecocide was applied for the first time “to the destruction of ecosystems, implicating the behavior of governments and corporations all over the world, particularly in Indigenous and other marginalized communities.”75 Yet, this legal statute considers ecocide a crime during wartime only, without regard for the ongoing nexus between ecocide and cultural genocide that occurs due to extreme energy development technologies such as fracking.76 Sepehri’s “Be Bagh-e Hamsafaran” (The Garden of Fellow Travelers) questions the global economy that flourishes on the production and consumption of goods and technology, depicting what has been labelled simply as “natural resources,” used in weaponry at the service of militarism as the “innocent goods” arriving “at the ports.” Sepehri realizes the pervasiveness of the sense that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost. Charles Taylor’s examination of the modern self in the past couple of decades, also argues that the simple rituals of life have been replaced by

56

Chapter 2

consumption.77 Sepehri became a minimalist in the 1940s, offsetting this culture of consumption even before it was fully established and became what Harvey Cox affirmed in the late 1990s, as the newest and the largest religion of the world. His poetry and lifestyle would counteract what Cox describes in “The Market as God” as a comprehensive theology of business with its own sacraments, saviors, saints, eschatology, and God: the Market. In effect, while Sepehri was composing his Hasht Ketab, the Religion of the Market was becoming the most formidable rival to all world religions. Guided by a first commandment that declares “there is never enough,” its pervasiveness is all the more powerful because it has rarely been recognized as a religion.78 RAZÓN POÉTICA: POETIC REASON Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano, a critic of the dominant philosophical traditions of her time, in exile, wrote of the mystic who realizes a revolution after experiencing transformation. In a state of complete alienation—what she describes as the most fertile destruction, the destruction of self—a space opens up that the mystic extends to another. That is, in the deserted vacuum where the mystic suspends their own being, they welcome the other to exist.79 Zambrano’s description of mystical transformation closely approximates Sepehri’s experience of undergoing a constant vigilance and inner transformation. In her description of the mystic poet, Zambrano’s comes close to the parable in Mowlana Rumi’s Masnavi, where he tells the tale of the two egos. Here’s a summary of Rumi’s tale: Someone knocks at a friend’s door. The friend asks, “Who is it?” “It’s me,” the person replies. The friend goes on to say, “Go away! It’s not yet time, this is not the place for the unrefined.” They go away and, after a year of separation and longing, returns and knocks again. The friend asks again, “Who is it?” This time, they respond, “It is you.” The friend replies, “Since you are I, come in, myself. There is no room in one home for two egos, two “I”s.80 The refined are those who through diligent attention to the destruction of the ego-self, create a fertile space for the other. In Rumi’s tale this other, is none but Truth (haqq). This is the basis of the life and work of Sepehri’s humanist approach; that is, his insaniyat, which entails adab toward all beings. Zambrano also distinguished between what appears to be “properly” human and Western humanism.81 She reminds us that there was no Renaissance palace that did not hold a prison beneath it. The difference with the preRenaissance era was that those illuminated by humanism were separated by a narrow canal, just as the prison of Venice was from the Palazzo Ducale (Palace of the Doge): “The splendor of the lights and even the sound of voices and laughter would arrive at the cell of the condemned; the same prison is

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

57

a palace; only its interior is a dungeon. The carriages of the French nobility passed through filthy alleyways in order to arrive at the splendid palace; they were not two cities, one of splendor and the other one of misery, but rather only one.”82 The Renaissance—most often associated with modernity and positive social change, rationality, and great art—led to the establishments of powerful European nation states, making colonies of formerly sovereign regions of the world. Compared to the Middle Ages, it also brought a regression in the status of women. Zambrano defines Renaissance humanism as “the exaltation of a certain idea of man that does not even present itself as an idea, but rather as a simple reality: man’s renunciation of himself, his limitlessness; his acceptance of [himself] as a bare psychological-biological reality; his consolidation into a thing that has some determined necessities, all justified and justifiable.”83 Zambrano’s concept of razón poética (poetic reason) appeared later in her writings, offering an alternative framework to rationality for engaging with and for interpreting reality. By poetic reason, she refers to a journey toward a poetic knowledge that points out the shortcoming of the “supremacy of reason.” It includes an aesthetic experience of reality, as well as the experience of the sacred, that questions the established primacy of rationality: “[Zambrano’s] championing of a phenomenology based on empathy and compassion sets her work outside the parameters that have defined the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy from the enlightenment onwards.”84 Challenging the boundaries between poetic and philosophical modes of thinking and writing, her concept of poetic reason sought a marriage between philosophy and poetry. Informing Zambrano’s writing and philosophy, her experience of the Spanish Civil War led to her understanding that war “was not so much the consequence of archaic violence or fratricidal instincts supposedly rooted in the psyche of a nation which had not experienced the enlightenment, but rather the outcome of a totalitarian logic incubated for a long time at the heart of modern reason, and whose most brutal contemporary expression was fascism.”85 She affirms that “fascism is not simply an accidental, incidental, or random phenomenon within the civilizing ways supposedly paved by modern rationality, but a catastrophic experience rooted in logical reason itself.”86 In contrast to this rationality, she defines poetry as the “realization of lost time.”87 She believes that “all history, . . . in the last instance is poetry, creation, total realization.”88 She goes on to write: “only if [the dream] is lived, creatively-poetically, is it realized,” because poetry is pure realization. It is the creation of a new world and the opening up of a lost reality.89 As a result, for Zambrano, poetic reason is ethical reason.

58

Chapter 2

OF ROCKS AND BUTTERFLIES Using poetry as a motivating and a guiding factor in developing a deeper understanding of the underlying core of environmentally conscious thinking can be far more effective than simply trying to create more responsible economic policies and habits within the same consumerist imperative. When shaped through the prism of the sacred, environmentally responsible behavior does not entail abandoning or devaluing scientific, economic, and sociological forms of analyses. Rather, it recognizes the importance of taking a deep and holistic look at the roots of climate change, analyzing its fault lines at various levels in collaboration with other disciplines to reach a comprehensive resolution. One of the essential characteristics of ecopoetry is that it engages with and warns against the implications of a profoundly changed relationship between human and nonhuman beings. As we have seen, Sepehri’s ecopoiesis discloses a special concern for the human superiority complex over other beings and denounces oppressive structures of power and normativity. His work lays bare the ecological concerns many of his contemporaries ignore; warns against the ramifications of the distance humans have placed between themselves and “nature,” viewed simply as a resource or idyllic refuge; and, finally, theorizes a new approach to the situation. One of the most distinctive features of Sepehri’s work is his attention to the interconnectedness of being and his disavowal of anthropocentrism. The notion that animals, insects, plants, as well as water and other aggregates, have consciousness runs deep in his poetry and his paintings. His first poetry collection, “On the Side of Grass or the Burial of Love,” was published in 1947 when he was only nineteen years old.90 His ecopoetry developed in the 60s, heightened by his long wanderings in the desert hills and valleys of his native Kashan, where he observed all life forms. He had a particular affinity with rocks, with over fifty references to them; at one point he describes them as “a haven for awaiting eternity.”91 He writes: ‌‌ The rock reveals itself behind my prayers . . . I know the sound of the feathers of the quail, the time of the arrival of the starling, and the singing of the partridge, and the time of the death of the falcon.92 ‌‌ Sepehri’s ecopoetics deal with the philosophical and theoretical question that implies responsibility, ethics, and social engagement. This question is not simply a personal sensitivity, even as he personified a sensitive and

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

59

sustainable relation with the Earth and with other beings in his personal life, including the roaches infesting his New York apartment, which he humorously describes in a letter to his sister. Whenever he entered the kitchen and turned the light on, he writes, “they all escaped . . . They know me. They tell each other, ‘so-and-so has arrived.’ One jumps from the plate, another from the salt tin . . . I am worried that they might eat all of my paintings!”93 Friends and acquaintances of Sepehri describe him as rather shy, serene, quiet, and with an astute sense of humor. Jalal Khosroshahi relates another roach story to demonstrate Sepehri’s gentle demeanor. One night, when friends were gathered in Sohrab’s house in Kashan, a sizeable roach entered the room from under the door. When someone aimed at killing the roach, Sohrab said: “Please, I beg of you, don’t bother him. He is my neighbor. He occasionally pays me a visit, he appreciates poetry and literature.”94 Sohrab then explained to his friends that the roach had fallen in love with a cricket who lived nearby and who sang beautifully. Friends suggested that instead of killing the love-stricken roach, they could throw him out, but Sohrab insisted that that would not be a good idea either, as “he might fall and break his limbs. And at this time of night, how would we find a cast for a roach? Besides, it is not right that we throw a lover out of the window, in view of his beloved.”95 Another friend related that at a lunch gathering, Sepehri was focused on saving the life of a butterfly. He had hunted birds during his youth, as it was a family tradition in the region he lived. He had come to seriously regret that. In effect, family and friends would often witness him by a pond or pool in the yard, working to rescue an ant or a butterfly.96 Another life-long friend, Dr. Filsoofi, narrates that when they were on their usual walks around Golestaneh (fields of flower and greenery in the outskirts of Kashan), if they encountered a typical “republic of ants,” Sepehri would either stop and watch the ants or change route, careful not to harm them in any way.97 These anecdotes demonstrate that Sepehri practiced what he composed in his poetry. In a piece titled “Ghorbat” (“Exile”), he wrote: ‌‌I must remember, to quickly fetch every butterfly, that falls in the water. I must remember, not to do anything, that would insult the way of the earth.98 ‌‌ Sepehri’s verses make clear that he considered water and plants as sentient. In his worldview, animals and insects are not only sentient, but also capable of love.

60

Chapter 2

CONTESTING ANTHROPARCHY: “HUMANKIND, AKIN TO THE BRANCH” In Death of Color (1951), one of Sepehri’s earliest collections, Sepehri includes a piece called “Sarab” (“Mirage”), in which he describes a vast, sunny desert where there are no trees or plants, only the sound of ravens: ‌‌From a distance, amidst the sand and ash, a dot appears, a human, walking, wearied, covered in dust, gasping with thirst, feet bare, wounded. With every step towards the horizon, a sea of water appears. Getting closer to the realization that it is a mirage.99 ‌‌ this piece, Sepehri uses the Persian term adami to describe the condition In of being human: “adami hast ke mipouyad rah” (there is a human, who has set on a journey). His poem bears a resemblance to the oft-cited poem by the thirteenth-century poet Sa’di, who likens humanity to the human body and the unity of all the limbs. Just as the pain of one part of the body would affect all others, Sa’di writes, “You who are indifferent to others’ misfortune, You are unworthy to be called human.”100 The term adami that Sepehri chooses “means both a human being and the state of being a human being, or just ‘humanity’ or even ‘humanism,’ if we were to allow ourselves a bit of leeway.”101 In other words, both Sa’di and Sepehri do not privilege the state of humanness simply to any human body, but rather to a human person who has acquired the characteristic of humanness, and compassionate empathy toward others. In his next book, The Life of Dreams (1953), Sepehri mentions human in three different places. The first is a two-page poem titled “lulu-ye shisheha” (“Monster in the Glass”) in which the phrase “hazy human” (ensan-e mah aloud ) is repeated four times: ‌‌Lost in darkness, without a key, the hazy human, from whose bed a willow has grown, gazes at him.102 ‌‌ The poet has seen “the hazy human” throughout his youth; at one point, he explains, this person frightened him, but now he has broken down, like a glass.103 In another piece in the same book, “Bagh-i dar Seda” (“Garden in the Sound”), Sepehri describes having been abandoned in a garden, where

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

61

soft light shines on him, when he begins to question whether he came to the garden or the garden came to surround him: ‌‌There was a sound, sudden, its source vague. He had come suddenly, without being fatigued. Path had not been traversed. Suddenly a color dawned. A figure fallen on the grass. A human, with a far distant resemblance to self. The garden in the depth of the figure’s eyes . . . a breeze . . . and an opening to my gaze: a firm light appeared in the garden. And the garden withering, and I being freed into the opening.104 ‌‌ The third instance of his reference to human is in a piece called “Yadboud” (“Reminiscence”): ‌‌ The long shadow of the anchor of time, Was oscillating on the unending desert It came and it went, it came and it went As I was sketching on the lit sands of the desert My fleeting dream . . . The dream where I reached my end . . . I sketched the image of my dream Something was lost I bent down on the self An abyss opened up in my being . . . And I, alongside the live image of my dream The image whose veins pulsated in eternity . . . This time, when the shadow of the anchor of time passed atop my enlivened image there was nothing left on the bright sands of the desert I shouted: give back my likeness, And my voice, dwindled, like a dribble of dust. The elongated outline of the anchor of time oscillating on the unending desert Coming and going, coming and going And a human’s gaze dashing in its pursuit.105

62

Chapter 2

OF WAR AND ART By the turn of the twentieth century, the advance of science and technology had brought about a looming sense of disquiet and anxiety. Beauty and optimism seemed to have disappeared in a fractured and unintelligible world. In particular, less than a decade before Sepehri was born, between 1917 and 1919, his homeland of Iran, occupied by the British and Russian forces, witnessed the death of two million people in spite of the fact that the country had declared its neutrality in WWI. The War’s disruption of trade and agriculture, along with the confiscation of food supplies by the occupying armies, led to famine and diseases like cholera, typhus, and the flu pandemic. It’s not surprising that the most distinctive innovations of modern art during this era depicted the world as ugly and horrible. Art became a project in quest of truth, not beauty. Fitting into this framework, Sepehri’s style, both in painting and poetry, was simple and in search of meaning. He had read Nietzsche and Kafka and viewed himself like the former in discipline and with more fear than the latter.106 Like Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Twilight of the Idols, Sepehri aimed at affirming life even when he spoke of death. It is in affirming life, Nietzsche wrote, that history/art history derives its importance; history’s “real value . . . lies in inventing ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme, in raising the popular melody to a universal symbol, and showing what a world of depth, power, and beauty exists in it.”107 Sepehri, like Nietzsche, was interested in the question of how to live and how to think/see, rather than getting lost in method and research. He achieved originality early in his work. Without being an existentialist, he was concerned with ontology, not with reason, objective knowledge, or pure subjectivity. As a result, he falls outside of the labels of the modern and the postmodern. Sepehri’s epistemology was ontology and his reason aligned with Zambrano’s poetic reason. In all of his work, the word ‘ilm (science) only appears once. In “To the Garden of Fellow Travelers,” published in his most prominent book, Hajm-e Sabz (The Expanse of Green), he asks: “Which science uncovered the positive rhythm of the scent of the gun-powder.” In the “Sound of the Water’s Footfall” (1965), a fragmented autobiography in a symbolic tone, he speaks not of ‘ilm (science) but of danesh (knowledge). Through fragments, he takes the reader into his childhood, a time when he “drank water without philosophy, picked berries without knowledge.”108 Later, he speaks of moving away from childhood, “getting out of the city of nimble illusions.”109 On leaving home and setting to see the world, he writes:

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

63

‌‌I went to the banquet of the world, to the plain of sorrow, to the garden of gnosis, I went to the illuminated veranda of knowledge.110 ‌‌Later in the same piece, after relating all that he saw on Earth, defining life, and speculating about death, he declares: ‌‌ That perhaps it is not our job to discover the mystery of the red rose, that perhaps we are to drift in the mystery of the red rose instead . . . to camp out behind sagacity . . . to be born with the rising sun . . . to fill up the lungs with eternity, to take down, from the back of the swallow, the load of knowledge . . . and to run between the waterlilies and the century, in search of the ballad of truth. ‌‌Nowhere does he more clearly speak of knowledge (danesh) than in the piece titled “From Waters Onward”:111 ‌‌ The time when knowledge lived by the water, when human slept in the core of the elements and woke near the rising of fear . . . opposable thumb of evolution, lingered alone in the geometry of sorrow.112 ‌‌ “The time when knowledge lived by the water” is a reference to eternal time; Sepehri associates the eternal with the clarity of water creating a unity that Zambrano describes as capturing the most tenuous, the most aerial. She writes: “The poet in his poem creates a unity with the word, those words that try to capture what is most tenuous, what is most aerial, what is most different of each thing, of each instant. The poem is now the unity that is no longer concealed, but present; the realized unity.”113 Sepehri achieves this unity in much of his poetry, particularly in “The Sound of Water’s Footfall,” where he names about two hundred animals, birds, insects, plants, and natural elements, without the reader feeling it heavy. He then makes the following observation: ‌‌I have never seen two pine trees, as enemies I have never seen a willow selling its shade to the earth

64

Chapter 2

The elm gives its branch to the raven for free.114 ‌‌ acute observation of nature turns into an environmental ethics, leading to His a presumed but unspoken prescription to let the trees be our teacher, and for humans to adopt their generosity and giving mode. KNOWLEDGE AT THE EDGE OF WATER Wordsworth had also declared: “Let Nature be your teacher,” in the “Tables Turned.”115 Scott Hess argues that the “universal Wordsworthian vision of nature” is “largely cultural and aesthetic” and is “specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite—factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.”116 If Wordsworth felt “the centipede, the cayman, carp, eagle, and fox” in him, Sepehri saw them as having their own worth and value independent of the human. He did not view nature as Wordsworth did, that is, “through an invisible frame that turns it into a resource for the construction of his autonomous self.”117 Rather, Sepehri’s verse becomes a place for reflecting the trees and the animals, insects, and plants. Instead of painting the human being as the central point of the poem or superior to others, he finds the roots of our consciousness in nature, connected to a quail, clover, starling, snake, and vulture. At the end of “The Sound of Water’s Footfall” he invites us to reevaluate and to revise our perception of ourselves: ‌‌I do not know why they say that the horse is a noble animal; that dove is beautiful and why no one keeps a vulture in a cage. How is a clover lesser than a red tulip? Let us cleanse our eyes Let us see differently.118 ‌‌ Through his particular call for us to “cleanse our eyes,” Sepehri invites his readers to reconsider their preconceived notions and attain a more intimate connection with nature, a connection that allows us to see nature as what it is, alive, and a source of life, both material and spiritual. This call seems urgent and is a major theme in shattering the human/nature divide. Once we “cleanse our eyes,” the poem conveys a way to reach a heightened level of consciousness; it is not enough to simply observe and enjoy nature, or even to learn from it. Rather, we must respect and revere it as possessing not equal, but perhaps even more value, beauty, and consciousness than human

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

65

beings. In the following piece, he points to a former time when humanity was in such a state that it has since lost: ‌‌When knowledge lived by the edge of water Humankind was enjoying the azure philosophies In the delicate laziness of a meadow Thinking in the direction of the bird. Pulsating, tuned to the pulse of the tree. Vanquished to the condition of the poppy. The grand meaning of the river made waves in the depth of human speech. Back then, humankind slept in the heart of the elements And woke with the rise of fear. Yet, the unfamiliar melody of growth, sometimes echoed in the brittle joint of pleasure. The knee of ascend would be smeared with dust. Then, the finger of evolution lingered alone in the meticulous geometry of sorrow.119 ‌‌ Sepehri speaks of the connectedness of human with the tree and with the river and lived in tune with it. The melody of growth, and the finger of evolution may be a reference to scientific findings and the exceeding speed with which they develop, leading to the geometry of sorrow. In a more direct and intense depiction in “Tables Turned,” Wordsworth launches into a tirade against science and intellect: ‌‌Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.120 ‌‌ Nonetheless, in these lines, Wordsworth also sets the heart against the head, emotion against intellect, particularly in his mention of the art, he differs from Sepehri. Central to Sepehri’s work is the proposition that a harmonious relationship with nature, and with all beings, is a requisite for developing a harmonious relationship with the world derived not through science, but through intuition and introspection. In his worldview, water and trees have a special place,

66

Chapter 2

plants are sentient, animals and insects are not only discerning but capable of love, and gender is fluid. These notions, solidly rooted in the Persian canon of the “religion of love,” echo the mystical tradition of Rumi, ‘Attar, Baba Taher-e Oryan, and other colossi of Islamic mystical tradition, and beckon a worldview that illuminates a path for navigating the modern and postmodern world. Sepehri refuses tribal human attachments in favor of the global and the universal. Like his Sufi predecessors, he declares that life is one—one global unity movement—and that consciousness is shared not only by humans but also by animals, plants, and minerals. Through his philosophy of existence, all of nature, including humans, are interconnected. In effect, he locates the roots of our consciousness in nature, manifest in a frog, peony, starling, and vulture. In order to reach a heightened level of consciousness, he suggests, we not only must observe the world of nature, but we must respect it as possessing consciousness. While his regard for nature was rooted in the here and now, he also saw beyond the present, toward eternal forms. His respect for the mystery of the universe led him to advocate for a loving gaze as opposed to an arrogant one. The late contemporary literary scholar Shahrokh Meskoob (d. 2005) likened Sepehri to a “wide-open-eyed screech-owl with far-sighted vision, settled on a tree, with roots deep in the ground, water running by its foot . . . angst-ridden.”121 A kind, shy, and gentle advocate for a humanity and humanism that is dependent upon the way it treats other beings, animals, insects, and plants, his lyrical advocacy comes in the form of self-reflection. Sometimes it manifests as a subtle warning or in proscriptions, but Sepehri resists moralizing statements. His ecopoetics is a call for us to see things anew. Filled with mystical imagery of various religious traditions, it engages in what Scott Knickerbocker refers to as the next step in ecocriticism, namely, exploring the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways.122 The next chapter will elaborate on what Sepehri means by seeing things anew through his ecotheology, for as he put it “the poets are the inheritors of water, wisdom, and illumination.”123 NOTES 1. María Zambrano, “Filosofía y poesía” (1939). Qtd. in Santamaria, “Poetry,” 93. 2. James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (lecture, Community Church, New York, NY, 1963). 3. Sepehri’s “Conversations with the Professor” is a path to decolonizing art by locating an art history from the margins that should be taken seriously. 4. See John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009).

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

67

5. Pir Zia Inayat Khan, Spiritual Ecology: Cry of the Earth, 232. 6. Hamed Zar’e, ed., A Conversations with S. Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad (Tehran: Qoqnous, 1399 HS/2020 AD), 131. 7. Reza Davari Ardakani, She’r o Hamzabani [Poetry and Affinity] (Tehran: Rasta, 1392 HS/2013 AD), 21 (text in Farsi). 8. Davari Ardakani, She’r, 21. 9. Words attributed to Jesus in Matthew 4:4. Versions of this statement can be found in other traditions. 10. Davari Ardakani, She’r, 21. 11. Davari Ardakani, She’r, 4. 12. Davari Ardakani, She’r, 23. 13. Erika Cudworth, Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Cudworth coined the term “anthroparchy,” defining it as a system that works for the benefit of humans. 14. The exploration of Mars started in the 1960s. The next step has been set on the idea of permanent settlement. See “Mars One’s Journey: 2011–2021,” Mars One, http://www.mars-one.com/. 15. John M. Lee, “Silent Spring Is Now a Noisy Summer: Pesticides Industry Up in Arms Over a New Book; Rachel Carson Stirs Conflict—Producers Are Crying ‘Foul’; Rachel Carson Upsets Industry,” New York Times, July 22, 1962, https://www. nytimes.com/1962/07/22/archives/silent-spring-is-now-noisy-summer-pesticidesindustry-up-in-arms.html, accessed on November 21, 2021. 16. Excerpts from Rachel Carson’s speech to the sorority of women journalists, Theta, Sigma, Phi, “Exceeding Beauty of the Earth” (Columbus, OH, April 21, 1954), https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2018/01/09/exceeding-beauty-of-the-earthapril-21-1954/, accessed on November 21, 2021. 17. Rachel Carson speech, “Exceeding Beauty of the Earth,” https://awpc. cattcenter.iastate.edu/2018/01/09/exceeding-beauty-of-the-earth-april-21-1954/. 18. See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment (Library of America, 2018), 424. I prefer non-gendered language when the reference is to all humanity, but had to keep Carson’s quotes intact. 19. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab: Morgh-e Mohajer [Sohrab: The Migrant Bird] (Tehran: Tahouri Publications, 1375 HS/1996 AD), 9th edition, 76. 20. Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 286; Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives (London, England: Saqi Books, 2013), 70; Behnam Mirzababazadeh Fomeshi and Farideh Pourgiv, “Two Green Poets: A Comparative Ecocritical Study of Sepehri and Emerson,” K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature 15, no. 2 (January 2013): 109–16; Massud Farzan, “The Neo-Sufic Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri,” Books Abroad 47, no. 1 (winter 1973): 87; Mehdi Rafi’, Masahat-e Ehsas: Sohrab Sepehri va Hunar-e ‘Irfani dar Jahan-e Mu’aser (The Scale of Sentiment: Sohrab Sepehri and Mystical Art in the Contemporary World) (Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1394 HS/2015 AD). 21. Sepehri, “Conversation with the Professor” in Otaq-e Abi [The Blue Room], 50 (text in Farsi).

68

Chapter 2

In Buddhism, the eightfold path, Dharmacakra (the wheel of dharma) is the path to end suffering. In Chinese traditions, eight is the symbol of joyful unions and is associated with good omen and perfection. In Sanskrit, ashtha (eight) is the number of wealth and abundance. In Islam, it’s the number of the gates of heaven. In Christianity it is the number of the beatitudes. In Judaism, an eight-day assembly follows the seven-day holiday of sukkot. 22. Mostanad-e Sohrab. 23. Mahmood Filsoufi, Hamkelasiam Sohrab (Tehran: Asim, 1385 HS/2007 AD) (text in Farsi). 24. Hamid Siahpoosh, ed. Bagh-e Tanha-yi: Yadname-ye Sohrab Sepehri (Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1389 HS/2011 AD), 91 (text in Farsi). 25. Dabashi, The World, 286. 26. Ahmed, 229. 27. Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 109. 28. Mouhanad Khorchide and Sarah Hartmann, Islam Is Mercy: Essential Features of a Modern Religion (NP: Verlag Herder, 2014). 29. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics (Utrecht: Humanistic University Press, 2004). 30. Mohammed Arkoun, L’humanisme Arabe au IVe/Xe siècle, Miskawayh, Philosophe et Historien (1982; repr., Paris: Vrin, 1973). 31. Arkoun, “Rethinking Islam Today,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (July 2003), 38. 32. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 100. 33. Baldwin, No Name in the Street (UK: Dial Press, 1972), 32–33. 34. See Dabashi, The World, 70–97. Arabic was the lingua franca of a vast empire, in much the same way that European languages, particularly English, is in the modern era. Just as it is unlikely for an American or Englishman to learn any of the “oriental” languages, Arab poets or elites did not feel the need to learn Persian. Subsequently, he argues that Persian became the cosmopolitan language of the people revolting imperialism. 35. Dabashi, The World, 299. 36. Dabashi, The World, 286. 37. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 62. 38. Sepehri, “Niyayesh” [“Devotion”], Hasht Ketab, 192. 39. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ya Ab, 268. ‫روی قانون گیاه‬/‫روی آگاهی آب‬/‫پای آن کاج بلند‬/‫ زیر این شب بوها‬/‫و خدایی که در این نزدیکیست‬ 40. William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud, accessed November 20, 2021. 41. Oliver W. Holmes, The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Memoirs of R. W. Emerson and J. L. Motley (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1892), 295. 42. Roger Sedarat, Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 2.

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

69

43. Sa’di, Koliyat, Ghazal 296. ‫برگ درختان سبز در نظر هوشیار هر ورقش دفتری است معرفت کردگار‬ 44. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/45557/the-tables-turned, accessed November 12, 2021. 45. Sohrab Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of the Water’s Footfall], Hasht Ketab, 267. 46. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 27. 47. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 48. Sepehri, “Be Bagh-e Hamsafaran” [“To the Garden of Fellow Travelers”], Hasht Ketab, 394–397. 49. Angela Hume, “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012), 755. 50. J. Scott Bryson, Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (University of Utah Press, 2002). 51. Hume, 760. 52. Sepehri, “Be bagh-e Hamsafar-an” [“To the Garden of Fellow Travelers”]. ‫مرا باز کن مثل یک در به روی هبوط گالبی در این عصر معراج پوالد‬ 53. Sepehri, “Be Tamasha Sogand ” [“To the Sight”]. ‫سنگ آرایش کوهستان نیست‬ 54. Sepehri to friends, letters, 1341 HS/1963 AD, in Hanouz dar Safaram, ed. Paridokht Sepehri (Tehran: Farzan, 1380 HS/2001 AD). 55. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 56. Sepehri, “Conversations with the Professor,” in Otaq-e Abi, ed. by Pirooz Sayyar (Tehran: Soroush, 1392 HS/2013 AD) 56. First published in 1369 HS/1990 AD. Ten years after the death of Sohrab Sepehri (text in Farsi). The hand written pages of Sepehri are dated October, 1976. 57. Sepehri, “Conversations,” 57. 58. Sepehri, “Mo’alem-e Naqashi-ye Ma” [“Our Drawing Teacher”], in Otaq-e Abi, 41. 59. Sepehri, “Mo’alem-e Naqashi-e Ma,” 48. 60. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 21–22. 61. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 21. 62. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12. 63. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 21. 64. Gretchen Daily and Paul Ehrlich, “Global Change and Human Susceptibility to Disease,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 21 (1996): 125–44. 65. Corey J. A. Bradshaw et al., “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” Frontiers in Conservation Science, January 13, 2021, https://doi. org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419. 66. Zammito, 268. 67. J Scott Bryson, ed., Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002), 5–6.

70

Chapter 2

68. The use of the term ecopoetics came to common usage in the early twenty-first century with the appearance of the journal ecopoetics (2001), edited by Jonathan Skinner, as well as the edited anthology by Scott J. Bryson, Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002). 69. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 70. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, “Ogoni, the Eagle Birds’ Agony in the Delta Woods” Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria, ed. Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc., 1998), 101. 71. Ashia Ajani, “Eight Black Eco-Poets Who Inspire Us: Contemporary Scribes Draw Links between Environmental Resilience,” Sierra, February 25, 2020. 72. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 15. 73. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” Science 155 (1967): 1203–07. 74. White, 1203–07. 75. Gilio-Whitaker, As Long, 68. 76. See Damien Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide (London: Zed Books, 2016). 77. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 307. 78. Harvey Cox, The Market as God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 79. Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah, Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc., 1998), 101. 80. Masnavi 1:3056–63. Persian is a gender-neutral language, as I have indicated in my use of pronouns. 81. Zambrano, Person and Democracy, in Sarah Cyganiak, “The Method of María Zambrano: An Analysis and Translated Selection of Essays Centered on the Concepts of the Word, the Person, Compassion and Love,” trans. Cyganiak (dissertation, University of Michigan, 2011), 194. 82. Qtd. in Cyganiak, “The Method,” 209. 83. Zambrano, El hombre y lo divino, in Cyganiak, “The Method,” trans. Cyganiak, 258. 84. Xon de Ros and Daniela Omlor, The Cultural Legacy of Maria Zambrano (Modern Humanities Research Association, Legenda, 2017), 2. 85. De Ros and Omlor, The Cultural Legacy, 7. 86. De Ros and Omlor, 7. 87. Italics in original. Zambrano, Algunos Lugares de la Poesía (Madrid: Trotta, 2007a), 74. 88. Italics in original. Zambrano, Algunos, 74. 89. Santamaria, “Poetry,” 102–3. 90. Sepehri, On the Side of Grass or the Burial of Love (Kashan, Iran, 1947). Qtd. in Dianoush, 189.

Ecopoetics of a Persian Poet

71

91. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab. 92. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall]. 93. P. Sepehri, Sohrab: Morgh-e Mohajer (Tehran: Tahouri Publications, 1375 HS/1996 AD) (text in Farsi). 94. In Farsi, the pronoun for third-person is the same word, ou, for both feminine and masculine. It is not uncommon to refer to animals and insects with the use of the term as well. Here Sepehri uses the gender-free third-person singular in his reference to the roach. 95. Siahpoosh, 316. 96. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 75. 97. Mahmood Filsoofi, Hamkelasi-am Sohrab [Sohrab: My Classmate] (Tehran: Asim Publishers, 1385 HS/2006 AD), 51 (text in Farsi). 98. Sepehri, Hasht Ketab, 354. 99. Sepehri, “Sarab” [“Mirage”], Hasht Ketab, 25–26. 100. Sa’di, Koliyat: Golestan, book 1, “On the Manners of the Kings,” No. 10. 101. Dabashi, The World, 6. 102. Sepehri, “Lulu-ye Shisheha” [“The Monster in the Glass”], Hasht Ketab, 100–103. 103. Sepehri, “Lulu-ye Shisheha.” 104. Sepehri, “Bagh-i dar Seda” [“A Garden in the Sound”], Hasht Ketab, 107–9. 105. Sepehri, “Yadboud” [“Reminiscence”] in Hasht Ketab, 85–87. 106. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi [The Blue Room], 32–33. 107. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 39. 108. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 109. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 110. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 111. Sepehri, “Az ab-ha be ba’d” [From Waters Onward], Hasht Ketab. 423–425. 112. A more literal translation of “thumb of evolution” would be “finger of evolution.” I read this verse as a reference to the implications of the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species, which lead to the human superiority complex. 113. Maria Zambrano, and Rosa Chacel, Two Confessions, trans. and ed. by Noël Valis and Carol Maier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 694. 114. Sepehri. Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 115. William Wordsworth, “Tables Turned,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/45557/the-tables-turned. Accessed on November 18. 116. Scott Hess, William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth Century Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2012). 117. Hess, William. 118. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 119. Sepehri, Hasht Ketab, 423. A reference to the opposable thumb. 120. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/45557/the-tables-turned accessed November 12, 2021. 121. Shahrokh Meskoob, “Ghese-ye Sohrab va Nooshdaroo” in Bagh-e Tanhayi, ed. Hamid Siahpoosh (Tehran: Negah Publishers, 2010), 292 (text in Farsi). A screech

72

Chapter 2

owl is a small bird who lives in tree cavities, always near water, most often heard but not seen as it is concealed in trees in the open clearing and meadows. Morgh-e hagh is the bird of truth in Persian. 122. Scott Knickerbocker, Eco-poetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 123. Sepehri, “Posht-e Darya-ha” [“Beyond the Seas”], Hasht Ketab, 362–65.

Chapter 3

Ecotheology and Ecojustice Beyond The Green Expanse

Ou, the God of the plain, whose sound reverberates in the ethers of faraway valleys, . . . 1 Ou, the God of the plain, whose sound pours into the green cup of silence, . . . O! God of the plain of nenuphar! Where is the silver key to the gates of awakening?2 This rock, how is it related to me? That bee, how long is its flight to me?3 Tonight, The gate of a strange dream Will open in the direction of the words . . . The ceiling of an illusion will fall. Eyes, will see the sorrowful intelligence of the plants Ivy will wrap around the sight of God. The secret will boil over.4

A BIRD OF ENIGMA In The Death of Color (1951), Sepehri’s reflection on self begins with the image of the bird of enigma, Morgh-e Mo’ama, seated on the branch of a willow, alone, silent, like himself since time immemorial. Like the birds who are symbols of the soul in Sufi imagery, Sepehri’s bird turns toward the inner truth and considers all else an illusion. Similarly, Rumi’s Morgh-e bagh-e 73

74

Chapter 3

malakout (Bird of the Celestial Garden) was not from this Earth, but resided in the prison of the body: I am the bird of the celestial garden, not of this earth My body has been made my prison, for days numbered.5 Bird symbolism is prominent throughout the world, particularly in Asia. They represent wisdom, rebirth, immortality, peace and blessing, and more. As these verses by Sepehri and Rumi indicate, bird imagery is highly common in Persian poetry. To be like a bird is to have the ability of flight and to have an expansive horizon, it can also represent love, purity, and transformation, as well as protection. Among its representation in Persian myths there is the famous story of Zal who was rescued as he lay abandoned on Earth by Simurgh. Zal was literally raised in the Simurgh’s nest which was far above human domain, on the slopes of the Alborz mountain, with the guardian bird nurturing him into a youth. Zal ventured the world carrying with him a feather plucked from the breast of Simurgh as a talisman for moments of danger. Simurgh’s “gracious shade” proved a blessing to heal all.6 The bird is also a symbol of one who begins on a spiritual journey. Similar to the ones in ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Sepehri’s bird is in exile and is in search of Simurgh, a metaphor for God. Generally hailed as a modern mystic, Sepehri traversed the Earth widely and lived and died a solitary sojourner. Like every great artist/poet, there are a wide range of diverse interpretations of his work. Those most familiar with him, speak of his mystical inclinations; the influence of Rumi; particularly his Divan-e Shams, as well as the philosophy and poetry of China, India, and Japan on his thinking and works. A few, however, have painted a different picture that is not congruent with the body of his poetry. Martin Turner has commented that he was “anything but other-worldly.”7 Dabashi has designated him as “sunk and soaked in being, without any metaphysics.”8 Neither, however, elaborate on what they respectively mean by “other-worldly” or “metaphysics.” Even a cursory survey of Sepehri’s earliest works, beginning with the first four collections—The Death of Color (1951), The Life of Dreams (1953), Torrent of Sun (1961), and East of Sorrow (1961)—reveals an in-depth metaphysical approach to life and the reality of this world, to love, and to death. The way in which he has selected to place each poem and each book in the Hasht Ketab is itself an indication that he was consciously aware of his thought formation and the process of what I call his ecotheology. This chapter aims to focus on Sepehri’s theology/ecotheology and the question of whether his theology was theistic or, as some have implied, was more influenced by Eastern traditions, particularly Taoism or Zen Buddhism, or both.9 His ecotheology, which was elaborated in The Green Expanse (Hajm-e Sabz,

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

75

1967), really emerges as early as The Torrent of Sun (1961). He begins with the search for the self and goes on to consider the place of human being in this world, including its relationship with all beings and with the transcendent. A search for a transcendent God leads us to a number of pieces in four of the eight books of the Hasht Ketab: The Torrent of Sun, The Sound of Water’s Footfall, The Green Expanse, and We Nothing, We Gaze. It is in these four books that Sepehri more explicitly delineates his ecotheology, rooting it in the notion of unity so central to Islamic thought with an attention to parallel concepts within the philosophies and religions of the Far East, specifically from China, India, Japan, as well as Africa. In addition, the particular influence of a small sect and community in India; the Bishnoi has not been mentioned in any of the analyses that have been published on Sepehri’s work. Contextualizing his verse through the study of world religions—including various traditions and their theology, rituals, practice, and world of symbols—not only helps in understanding Sepehri’s poetry, but is vital for unveiling the richness of its content beyond its linguistic elements, and beyond the field of literature. As discussed in chapter 2, we will see how Sepehri’s heightened attention to natural elements and to all beings takes on a relational perspective, suggesting a new, harmonious and just relationship with all beings, human and nonhuman, while maintaining an eye on the connection with the unseen. It is through his attention to these relationships that his ecotheology can be deciphered. ECOLOGY AND RELIGION In the late twentieth century, along with the widespread awareness and acknowledgment of an immense and immanent ecological crisis that threatens human life on Earth, the study of ecology emerged in various disciplines. Within the study of religion, the term ecotheology came to prominence, along with questions on the role and the impact of the religious discourse— including myths, rituals, doctrines, and so forth—on ecology and ecological discourse. In short, ecotheology is a reevaluation of the notions of the sacred and profane in articulating the relationship between God/gods (in a theistic tradition) or the notion of transcendence (in a nontheistic one). It studies the link of these concepts with creation, particularly analyzing the relationship of the human with God/transcendence and with all beings summed up in the word “nature.” As mentioned briefly in chapter 2, Lynn White’s short but influential essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), is often identified as the starting point of ecotheological discourse in the West. Another early focus on religion, ecology, and the connection between sacral knowledge emerged in Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and

76

Chapter 3

Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1968), which was based on his 1966 Rockefeller Lectures at the University of Chicago.10 As Anna Gade notes, “Nasr depicts environmentalism, Muslim and non-Muslim, primarily in terms of the cause and effects on human’s degraded spiritual state . . . He theorizes perennial holism as the essence of ‘Islamic science,’ which, he claims, had been truncated and alienated from its very own truths under conditions of modernity.”11 In other words, Nasr interprets the knowledge of the unseen, or the Ultimate reality, in environmental understanding.12 Lynn White’s research in the history of science, came to believe that the exploitation of nature was rooted in medieval theology. He posited that fundamental medieval assumptions established “a dualism of man and nature,” which was expounded by theologians such as Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus, who insisted that “it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper end.”13 It was at that time, he claims, that humanity moved from “man as part of nature” to “man as exploiter of nature.”14 Animism was deemed a pagan practice. Since “the whole concept of the sacred grove was considered alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West,” it was regarded as idolatry.15 As a result, the assumption that spirit resided in nature had to be outrooted. White, however, rejected the axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve humanity, as well as the idea of human sovereignty over nature. Instead, he suggested the alternative Christian interpretation that came from “the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi.”16 Assisi’s Canticle of Creatures, both praised the most High and identified it in Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and Mother Earth.17 White’s essay reminds us of the radical virtues of the prophets, emphasizing that what humanity lacks is “humility, as a species.” He adds that “more science and more technology” will not save us from the ecological crisis, but rather a rethinking of our ideas, our religion.18 Along with his critique of Medieval Judeo-Christian thought, White was quite dubious of the viability of Zen Buddhism in the West, which was emerging at the time in the philosophy and politics of what he referred to as the Beatnik. The Beats, as they called themselves, were the counterculture of the conservative middle class of the 50s; they rebelled against the values of mainstream institutional religions in America and Europe that nourished the middle class norm. Their antimaterialist, antiauthoritarian, and anticapitalist ideas stressed the importance of improving one’s inner character over possessions. Their left-leaning politics opposed war and favored desegregation. Their counter-cultural message was enhanced by their rebellion against the values of the conservative middle-class of the 50s, and against mainstream institutional religions in America and Europe. Some among them, like Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) delved into Eastern traditions, Buddhism, and Taoism,

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

77

in particular. It was the Beat movement, as Carl Jackson notes, that introduced Asian religions, particularly Buddhism and Taoism, into Western society at large.19 Sepehri’s work shares the Beat’s antimaterialist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiauthoritarian slants, yet his ideas are rooted in a different variety of counterculture. Even as he was influenced by traditions of the Far East and may have been familiar with the Beat culture in the West, his foundation was rather in the traditions of Sa’di, Rumi, Hafez, and other pillars of the religion of love. It was these major figures’ understanding of Islam that questioned and undermined the total authority of the fuqaha (legal scholars), on defining Islam, thereby challenging the reduction of religion to dogmas and rituals. Sepehri, like his predecessors in the Persian poetic tradition, called for an inner awakening that could not be found in rigid religious discourse, but could be accessed by love. The awakening that he proclaimed required the eradication of greed and fear. THE GATES OF AWAKENING In some of his poems, Sepehri speaks of his childhood fears, perhaps associated with the horror stories he read or those narrated to him by adults.20 In spite of the apparent association between his description of fears and the works of writers like H. P. Lovecraft, there is no basis to claim that he had read H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890–1937) cosmic horror stories, particularly his dream cycle work, “The Silver Key” (1929) and its sequel, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932).21 Regardless of whether or not he had read Lovecraft, it is striking that he, like the protagonist of Lovecraft’s story, was in search of a “Silver Key” to the Gate of Dreams and remained uninspired by scientific learnings that took the “magic” out of life. In Lovecraft’s stories, the magical “Silver Key” transported the protagonist from manhood to boyhood, taking him from the Snake-Den, where he stayed as a small boy, to a place outside of time, imbued with the fear of the unknown. Chris Pak describes this fear: “like Promethean fear, [it] fundamentally encodes an awareness of the asymmetric relationship between the human and non-human.”22 Nature, for Lovecraft, is “the other,” a source of existential horror.23 In contrast, Sepehri is so at home with nature that he hears “the heartbeat of the garden, and the sound of darkness, as it pours off a leaf. . . . The sneeze of water from each tiny pore of rock.”24 It is in nature that Sepehri locates God, as we see in the poem quoted in the beginning of this chapter, where Sepehri asks the God of the Plain of the Far Away Valleys and the God of the Plain of Nenuphar about the whereabouts of the Silver Key to the Gates of Awakening:

78

Chapter 3

The gates of awakening were opened. At the threshold of the gates, the moment of fear tumbled. The shadow of doubt, broke at the border of the night of magic. The window of dream gulped the steam of light.25 In this poem, from The Torrent of Sun (1961), we see the first occurrence of the word God in Sepehri’s Hasht Ketab. Locating God in nature, he challenges scientific inquiry and its capacity for understanding truth in its totality. Rather, he ventures through the gate that opens to the life of dreams and wanders into the garden of his childhood.26 As we can see, being in nature, being in the self, and being with God are interrelated for Sepehri. In the essay “Otaq-e Abi” (“The Blue Room”), published in a small collected volume by the same title, Sepehri tells us about a snake found in the Blue Room of his childhood home, a room located on the southern side of the house, above the stable. Later, he would be called to the Blue Room, where he would find once and again new versions of himself. In his childhood, the mere sight of the snake had led his mother to abandon the room, moving her family to the northern side of the house. The traditional architecture of homes in Kashan and other cities of central Iran features a sustainable design with open vaulted summer rooms facing the north.27 Like in certain Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Sepehri viewed the Lokapala [guardians of the world] in the four directions. To the south, where the snake was found, was the direction of compassion. In the cosmogony of the Dogon of West Africa, domestic animals live on the southern side.28 After the snake incident, the only person who visited the Blue Room was Sohrab. For him, it had become the visual representation of the cosmos and of the human body, the macrocosm and the microcosm. A drama of separation and union, it represented a space that offered guidance to salvation. It was a place of the awakening liberation of the self.29 He wrote about it in some detail: The Blue Room remained empty. No one was thinking about it. This “mysterium magnum” was hiding behind the trees of my childhood memories. Yet, it was visible to me. A dark force would take me to the Blue Room. Sometimes in the midst of childhood games, the Blue Room would call me. I would part with friends and would go to the Blue Room to stay there and to listen. Something in me was heard, something like the sound of water in your dreams. A current of the dawn of things passed me by . . . my eyes did not see anything. The empty of my being was watching. I would see things. I would become light as a feather, and I would slowly ascend within myself. A presence would take over me, a presence like the breath of light. . . . The Blue Room was a mandala, and I easily found my way in this mandala.30

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

79

In this description, it is clear that Sepehri speaks of the Blue Room and the snake as elements of awakening within his childhood world. The Blue Room guided Sepehri in the time before he learned about the five primordial Buddhas that represent various emotions, ranging from confused to enlightened. In Tantric Buddhism, determining your Buddha family incorporates a thorough understanding of your emotional energies. For example, to decipher your Buddha family in the tradition of yogayana abhisheka, you throw a flower into a mandala three times, the first two times with a blindfold and the third time, without (a mandala is the container of essence of the heavenly sphere; it invites a healing power by transforming the mind).31 Long before learning about this ritual, every spring, Sohrab would throw a globe amaranth [gol-e makhmal] with wide-open eyes into the Blue Room. He did not claim that his essence ever became one with the Thathagata [one who has discerned Truth]. The snake and the Blue Room in all of its shapes and colors, its dome, scent, and air, became for him a canvas upon which he was able to weave together the mythology of various regions of the world. Another important symbol that guided Sepehri toward a sense of transcendence were the blue nenuphars that grew in the garden of his childhood. He makes reference to nenuphar repeatedly throughout his works (at least twenty-five times), indicating that they are another important symbol in his ecotheology. In ancient Persian traditions, particularly Zoroastrianism, nenuphar was the symbol of the holder of the splendor [farr] of Zarathustra. In Mithraism, it was the symbol of the Goddess of Water, Nahid, or Anahita. Surrounded by water, tradition holds that the world was first created on the lotus leaf. Lotus was the leaf on which the world was first created. In most Eastern cultures, nenuphar has become a symbol of spiritual awakening, purity, and wisdom. In this context, it is no wonder why Sepehri asked the God of the Plain of Nenuphar for the Silver Key to the Gates of Awakening. “Listen to the Cricket, . . . And There Is No God, and There Is a God”32 As we have seen, Sepehri’s perception of God was far from static. He did not hesitate to doubt, as doubt is a step toward certainty. He disagreed with Freud’s idea that God was a projection of the human father.33 At the same time, his process theology starts with knowing and unknowing an illusory God. Through his vacillation, he plays with the idea of Maya, the magic power in Hindu philosophy—particularly in the Advaita (non-dualist) school of Vedanta—that denotes that a god can make the illusive world appear as real. The poet tries to return to the moment of nothingness in order to create it anew. In a piece titled “A Dream in Chaos” in The Torrent of Sun, he curses life in an unprecedented tone, calling it a “blind tremble!” Then he wishes for nonbeing:

80

Chapter 3

Do away with my being, O, you that I do not know, illusory God!34 His doubt reappears more vividly in a piece called “Hala” (“Beware”) in East of Sorrow, where he writes: Hear the cricket: How sorrowful is the world, And there is no God, and there is a God, and there is . . . 35 Then, in another piece in East of Sorrow, “Padma,” he starts with doubt, reaches for certainty, and ends with not naming that which he perceives. The poem stands out in its title; “Padma” is the Sanskrit word for lotus, frequently used in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Lotus is born and nurtured from the muddy water, but rises in pure blossom. In the Hindu sacred scriptures, particularly in the Bhagavad Gita, the term padma refers to various parts of Gods divine body. Goddess Lakshmi is known as Padma because she sits in the lotus flower. In the hands of Vishnu, lotus “padma” symbolizes creation. In this poem Sepehri sees God in the forest. It was growing. In the forest, silence was a dream, Dewdrops everywhere, Gates open, the eye of vision open, the eye of vision damp, And God in every . . . was it? . . . Loneliness was alone, The invisible, was visible, “Ou,” there, there it was.36 Nonetheless, as clear as he saw it, he could still not name it. The poem plays with the essential principle of Taoist thought that Sepehri had learned long before, which is exquisitely expressed in the first verse of the Tao Te Ching: “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”37 A similar concept in Islamic mysticism that attempts to discern the nature of God famously states: “There is no name, and there is no shape.”38 A more resounding example of the pervasiveness of the concept of an unnamable God is in Islamic poetry, beginning with the early example of the Shahnameh (“The Epic of the Kings”), by hakim Abul-Qasim Ferdowsi (c. 940–1019/25). He opens the Shahnameh with a fifteen-line piece in reverence of the divine. In the first hemistich of the fourth verse of the opening, he writes: “[God is] better than any name, trace, and supposition.”39

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

81

A little over a thousand years after Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Sepehri posited his own understanding of unknowing the eternal in the concluding verses of The Sound of Water’s Footfall: It is not upon us to decipher the “mystery” of the red rose, Perhaps, we are to be afloat in the incantation of the red rose.40 It is by floating in the mystery that Sepehri reaches certainty. His certainty about the eternal evokes a famous yet controversial statement that Carl Gustav Yung made in an interview on the BBC program, “Face to Face: The Listener.” When asked about his childhood, religion, and whether he believed in God, he said, “I don’t believe,” and then paused for a moment before continuing to say, “I know.”41 His response was interpreted as controversial; he was inundated with letters asking what he meant. In a letter explaining his statement, he wrote: “I did not say in the broadcast, ‘there is a God.’ I said ‘I do not need to believe in God; I know.’ Which does not mean: I do know a certain God (Zeus, Allah, Jahwe, the Trinitarian God, etc.), but, rather, I do know that I am obviously confronted with a factor unknown in itself, which I call ‘God’ in consensus omnium [consensus of everyone] ‘quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditor’ [What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all].”42 Like Yung, Sepehri’s idea of God is unconventional. In “Chand” [Many], he reaches a level of certainty when he calls God, God. He writes: Here it is, come, open your window, O! I, and all other I’s: A hundred reflections of me in the water! The moonlight, see how shining, on the shivering of the leaf, my thought, the path of death. There are the nenuphars, to heaven, to God, there are gates . . . Here! the veranda, the silence of intelligence, the flight of spirit. In the garden of time, we were not made alone. O! rock and gaze, O! illusion and tree, were we not?43 There are similarities between this way of seeing God with the way the Catholic Mystic-theologian, Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) described: “God becomes God when creatures call God.” He continued: “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye and one sight and one knowing and one loving.”44 Sepehri’s certainty is revealed in the above verse, as he oscillates between nature and what’s beyond nature, like the Vedic hymns that do not see a separation between this world and the other.45

82

Chapter 3

When Sepehri refers to “I and all other I’s” in the above verse, he speaks of a plurality that reflects unity. At the end of this short piece, only twelve succinct verses long, he makes a quick reference to a classic Chinese philosophical tale about reality by Zhuangzi, the great Taoist thinker believed to have lived in the fourth century BC. The tale posits that Zhuangzi fell asleep one day and dreamed that he was a butterfly; when he woke up, he did not know whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Sepehri engages with his philosophical skepticism in a playful manner. He writes: What was this stain of color, this light smoke? A butterfly passed? A legend was risen? This light smoke, was not a butterfly, It was me, and you. It was not a legend. It was us, and you.46 Sepehri’s unique sense of humor, often presented in an earnest manner, at times makes it difficult to figure out whether he is jesting or serious in his verse.47 At the same time, his language and style occasionally resembles that of sacred texts, including the Torah, the Gospels, as well as the Qur’an, the Vedas, and the Gathas.48 In particular, the next three poems, toward the end of East of Sorrow, are only a few lines each and are similar in style to the shorter chapters of the Qur’an. The following poem is simply titled “Na,” a prefix used to negate, similar to in/un in the beginning of a word. But, it could also mean breath, stamina, or power, and its use in this verse implies the breath of the divine. The association of the negative connotation of na with another term, hich [nothing], appears repeatedly in his work, complicating its meaning and playing a central role in Sepehri’s theology: The wind blew, open the door, it brought the sorrow of God. Sweep the house, throw flowers, the messenger came, the messenger came, it brought tidings from na. Water emerged, water emerged, from the plain of gods, brought the black flowers. We sleep, ou arrived, the laughter of Satan on our lips.49 In this short poem, which is in essence about genesis, na is the nothing from which all beings emerge, and it also recalls Rumi’s concept of ney/nay [nay reed]. Na as the breath of the divine and as emptiness. In Sepehri’s piece, we are called to sweep the house of our mind and soul and to rejoice by

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

83

throwing flowers in anticipation of the messenger who brings tidings from na. In Rumi’s verse, found in the opening of the Masnavi, ney/nay has both an outer and an inner meaning. Specifically, it refers to a flute, one of the oldest musical instruments, but is also a symbolic representation of human being separated from its source, that is, the Divine Being. The sound of the reed is the expression of the separation and longing from its source: This sound of the ney is fire, not wind May whoever does not have this fire be naught.50 It is this fire that Sepehri is speaking about keeping alive in another poem, titled “Pa rah” (“Foot Way”). He speaks of the sorrow that is the fruit of the Garden, and of the separation from it. Sepehri writes: Neither you will last, nor the mountain. The fruit of this garden: sorrow, sorrow. Tell the sorrow to exude, you are a thirsty pitcher. The flower falls, you sniff. This ivy of rapture, give it water, satiate it. That child of fear, read it a story, put it to sleep. This tulip of intelligence, cut it from the stem. Its petals fell, let them fall. The eyes of God turned damp, let them be. And God, not higher than you. No. Lonelier, Lonelier. The higher ones, the lower ones, see them one. See not, the disclosed, but the concealed. . . . Thought: the hay placed in our manger. Solitude, made our destiny.51 In this poem he broke down not only the hierarchies between beings, but also God becomes immanent where he writes, not higher than you, but lonelier. In another poem, titled “Sheytan ham” (“Satan Also”), he goes on explaining how solitude is the way to God: Out of the house, out of the alley, our solitude found its way to God. On the road, trees green, flowers bloom, Satan worried: thought was going free. . . . Night came, and day. Somewhere, Satan worried: our solitude gone.52 In the next poem, “Shooram Ra” (“My Fervor”), Sepehri clearly states his inclusive approach to religions and sacred texts. He writes:

84

Chapter 3

The Qur’an above my head, the Gospels are my bolster, my cradle, is the Torah, my shroud, is the Avesta, I dream a Buddha in the water lily. Wherever the flowers of adoration bloomed, I reaped. I have a bouquet, your altar, far from reach: ou, up high, me, down low.53 In this last verse, God is up high, transcendent, while in The Sound of Water’s Footfall, God appears as immanent. God: “At the Foot of that Towering Cypress” The Sound of Water’s Footfall is his autobiography written in symbolic verse in the first person. Sepehri begins what became his most prominent poem by speaking of his ties to the city of Kashan, art, his mother, his friends, and his God. Here’s how he introduces himself: I am from Kashan . . . I have a piece of bread, a bit of intelligence, and a tiny bit of talent. I have a mother, better than the leaves of the tree. Friends, better than the flowing water. [I have] a God who is nearby, under these violets, at the foot of that towering cypress. On the consciousness of water, on the canon of the plant.54 Sepehri’s choice to identify with the land of Kashan, not Iran, indicates that he is not perpetuating a form of nationalism in the poem; rather than the country, he focuses on Kashan’s fields, pastures, and ancient past. Moreover, the poem titled “Shasousa” broadens his scope to show his celebration of the land is reverence given to the ancient goddess Shasousa associated with the land, at a place in the outskirts of Kashan, a remnant of its several thousandyear-old history. In this image, Sepehri’s imagery has taken its clue from the various native communities around the world. His imagery is like that of the Navajo who identify the pillars that support their roofs with deities that support the cosmos: Mountain Woman, Water Woman, and Corn Woman. Similar to what we see in the tradition of the Navajo, there is no division between animals and humans in Sepehri’s verse. Animals and birds are referred to as people. Plants have spirits. Animate and inanimate beings are nonbinary. Rocks are alive and at times sacred. In alluding to the goddess, Sepehri indicates his respect not only for the specific land of Kashan, but

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

85

emphasizes the human connection with land as important for all indigenous people everywhere. Although indigenous worldviews are diverse even within a single community, the values of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility for the Earth is a common feature. Sepehri’s ideas evoke respect for this connection. His ideas also resonate with the stories of the First Nations people of Canada, who widely hold that the First Mother, wakan, was made of the Earth and gave life to all of humankind, which is regarded as sacred. We see this idea specifically manifest in the philosophy of education of the Mississauga Nishnaabeg people of Ontario, Canada. For them, akinoomaage is the practice of learning from the land, and all education is land-based. Tremendous knowledge comes from their connection to Aki [Earth]. According to Leanne Simpson, a Mississauga Nishnaabeg, in Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language, “Aki” means Earth and “noomaage” means taking direction from, indicating the process of learning how to love and live in our lands.55 She writes: “Aki includes all aspects of creation: landforms, elements, plants, animals, spirits, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and energies and all of the emergent systems, ecologies, and networks that connect these elements. Knowledge in akinoomaage flows through the layered spirit world above the Earth, the place where spiritual beings reside and the place where our Ancestors sit.”56 In The Sound of Water’s Footfall, Sepehri’s ecotheology comes through, recognizing the indigenous understanding of the connection of all things. In much of the Hasht Ketab, almost every time God is mentioned, it is in proximity with a natural element, landform, animal, insect, tree, or plant. Here are a few examples from The Green Expanse: It was a night, brimming The river, from the foot of the pine, flowing to farther up The valley was moonlit, and mountain so bright, that God was evident.57 In another poem, “Water,” he sees the footsteps of God by the tipis/lodges of the people who live up the river and did not muddy the water: People up the hill, how pure they are! May their springs flourish, and their cows give milk by plenty! I have not seen their villages, No doubt, the footsteps of God is by their lodges . . . People up the river, understand water. They did not muddy it. Let us not muddy the water.58 This is clearly a reference to the indigenous people of the land who treated water, land, and all therein with reverence, reserving for it a sanctity that has

86

Chapter 3

been lost to the modern human. In the above poem, he locates godliness—the presence of the divine—by their lodges because of their respect for water. In another piece, “Ghorbat” (“Exile”), only twenty-four lines, he describes a moonlit village, specifying the names of at least twenty-five insects, plants, trees, fruits, animals, or natural elements: In this moonlit veranda, I can feel the scent of the bricks of exile . . . Shadows, apparent, from afar, like the loneliness of water, Like the melody of God.59 Then he reminds himself of a series of tasks he has to do, including going to Hassan’s garden to buy plums and apricots and making a sketch of the goats and of the shadows of the brooms in the water. He refers to the first— a mundane chore; and the second—the acute observation of nature that is essential to his art; as if they are in the same category of ordinary daily activities. He continues: I must remember to quickly fetch every butterfly that falls in the water. I must remember not to do anything that offends the canon of the Earth. I must remember tomorrow, by the stream, to wash my towel with choubeh.60 I must remember, I am alone. The moon is atop of loneliness.61 Sepehri’s emphasis on washing through the image of the towel, in addition to his earlier recommendation that “eyes must be washed, . . . words must be washed,” reiterates the need for humanity to clean up its act.62 Overall, his strict attention to the continuous process of cleansing of the mind and the soul, which he refers to through images of the eyes and words is heightened in this poem. In Islamic spirituality, this practice of constant guarding and purifying of oneself is called muraqaba [spiritual watchfulness] and, in its deepest sense, includes the concept of no harm. Ahimsa: “If I Cut a Grass, I Will Die!” Sepehri’s vision of our relationship with other beings goes beyond what we ordinarily consider sentient. This element in his work, as well as the use of symbols such as the lotus, has led many to identify him as Zen, or, more broadly, a Buddhist. Ahimsa, or the principle of no harm, is a bedrock concept of Buddhism. Robert Aiken describes its centrality in Zen Buddhist ethics, explaining how it extends to our relationship with the environment:

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

87

“the precept not to kill is really a fulfillment of our vow to save all beings, and the protection of the environment is an essential part of that vow.”63 The regard for the environment in ahimsa is manifest in the Thai Tripitaka, the Buddhist canon, through a story about a monk who cut off the main branch of a tree. Afterwards, the spirit of the tree complained to the Buddha that his child’s arm has been cut off, and “from then on monks were forbidden to cut down trees.”64 As mentioned earlier, cutting the branch of a tree would be a cause of anguish for Sepehri. As his faraway contemporary, W. S. Merwin, explained: “There is a feeling in which the natural world that includes us is sacred. Because we know, if there’s anything sacred, that’s it. You go out and spend two hours with the other forms of life around us, and you come back elated, feeling a great charge because this is basically what you want to be doing. Not to be cut off from it, but to be part of it.”65 The essential code of ethics for Sepehri, in his life and works was a respect for the connectedness between the self and all other life forms, and to uphold the canon of the Earth, which meant to avoid offending it. As Merwin stated: “We as a species define ourselves by our relation to the rest of life.”66 In his many travels, Sepehri not only enriched his art, but also deepened his spirituality and his relationship with the world. In The Sound of Water’s Footfall, where he names about 250 plants, animals, insects, and so forth, he speaks of packing his belongings and leaving “shahre khialat-e sabok” [the city of light imaginations] with his “delam az ghorbat-e sanjaghak por” [heart filled with nostalgic longing for the dragonfly]. He leaves the world of childhood and joins “mehmani-ye donya” [the gala of the world], where he is to experience “sorrow, gnosis, wisdom, religion, doubt, magnanimity, kindness, love, pleasure, desire, and solitude.”67 He speaks of things he saw on this Earth: children, cages, ladders, a woman, a beggar, a sweeper, a lamb, a cow, a poet, a book, a paper, a museum, a mosque, a pot, a mule, a camel, a mystic, and then four trains, an airplane, four steps, his mother, the city, love, friendship, and water. They are all intertwined and thoroughly related. Of the four trains mentioned in the above list, Sepehri describes one as “lugging jurisprudence” and simply “heavy,” while another is “tugging politics” and “empty.” He indicates that neither the train of religious legalism nor that of politics are capable of transporting us to our intended destination.68 He contrasts these two trains with another two: one “carries light” and the other “water lily seeds and the song of a canary.”69 He longs for light, seeds of water lily; symbol of rebirth, enlightenment, self-regeneration, song of canary which has long been known as a symbol of compassion, and of uplifting those around them, protecting and freeing them from both literal and figurative situations of danger, allowing them to see the light, in preparation for a number of journeys. He then writes of three journeys:

88

Chapter 3

The journey of the seed to the flower The journey of the ivy of this house to that house The journey of the moon to the pool.70 And then of five movements: Eruption, effusion, gush, glide, dispatch The eruption of the flower of regret from the soil The effusion of the young vine from the wall The gush of the due on the rim of sleep The glide of joy from the trench of death The dispatch of the incident behind the word.71 And then he summarizes all that appeared on the Earth in various distinct cultures: Order was the way in the alley of Greece. The owl sang in the Hanging Gardens. Through the Khyber Pass, wind blew a sheaf from the speck of history, towards the East. On the calm surface of the Nigeen Lake, a kayak full of flowers In Benares, an eternal light shone at every street corner.72 After all these journeys, in which he witnessed “people, cities, valleys, mountains, water, soil, plant, animal, and human, in light, and in darkness,” he presents his doctrine of harmonious existence, based on his observations in nature: I have never seen two poplars to be enemies I have never seen a willow selling its shade to the ground The elm lets its branch to the crow for free . . . Eyes must be washed Words must be washed.73 He calls for change in the way we see and speak of things, a change he details through a shattering of value hierarchy. He writes: I do not know Why it is said that the horse is a noble creature; That the dove is beautiful . . . I do not know why clover is considered inferior to the tulip.74

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

89

For this change to take place, he indicates that nature be our teacher, with trees—specifically the pine, the willow, and the elm—serving as exemplars of virtue and integrity. AN ECOTHEOLOGY IN VERSE Sepehri wrote The Expanse of Green in 1967, obviously not with the intention of delineating an ecotheology. As Gadamer puts it: “One should not ask the poet. Is it love poetry? Is it religious poetry? Is it a dialogue of the soul with itself? The poet doesn’t know.”75 The poet is simply telling us what the poet sees. What I identify as Sepehri’s ecotheology is not limited to articulating a harmonious relation with nature within a particular religious tradition. Rather, his wide vision draws from all spiritual traditions in reflecting on the condition of the world, culminating in an ecotheology with a universal appeal. He sets out to draw a guide to establishing harmonious relationships. In so doing, he gets to the core of the concept of religio, which is derived from the Latin relegere and refers to a painstaking sense of duty, concentrating fully on what one is supposed to do. That is, inherent in the notion of religion, as we see in Sepehri’s verse, is the idea of duty and obligatory practices, not doctrinal content.76 Ultimately, as Sepehri knew, religion is about establishing the harmonious relations between human/nature/divine. Ecotheology focuses on the interrelationship between religion and nature, particularly focusing on environmental concerns. It explores the interaction between ecological values, such as sustainability, and the human domination of nature. Even though Sepehri predates the formal study of ecotheology, we have seen that the heart of Sepehri’s Hasht Ketab involves establishing a harmonious relation with all beings, along with a rejection of all forms of coloniality and hegemony. For example, in the second poem of The Expanse of Green, “Light, Me, Flower, Water,” he describes himself as being seated by the small pool in the yard, watching the circling of the fish in the pool: “the purity of the bough of life. . . . salvation nearby: in the midst of flowers in the yard.” His play on words echoes the style of classical Persian poets, yet remains distinct. In Persian, life and yard are very closely related, both transliterate as hayat in the Roman alphabet, pronounced the same in Persian, rendered only slightly differently in writing: life is ‫ حیات‬while yard is hayat ‫حیاط‬. When he first mentions “life,” he does not use the word hayat [‫]حیات‬, but rather the word zist [‫]زیست‬, which keeps with the rhythm he has established and connects the purity of life, on the one hand, with the salvation that he sees hidden amid the flowers in the yard, on the other. In this short twenty-verse poem, he again combines the ordinary with the philosophical/artistic as the

90

Chapter 3

verse shifts from describing his mother picking basil to the image of salvation among the flowers, and then the philosophical concept of time: The purity of the bough of life. My mother picks basil. Bread, basil, and cheese, a clear sky, misty petunias. Salvation nearby: amidst the flowers in the yard . . . A hollow is in the wall of time From it, my image has come into view There are things I do not know.77 He moves from his acknowledgment of the things he does not know to the things he does know: that the consequence of cutting sabze [grass, or, more broadly, live vegetation] is to die: I know, if I cut green (grass) I will die.78 Sepehri’s movement from the things he doesn’t know to his knowledge that he is so closely intertwined with nature that harming even a blade of grass will result in his death is an example of his rigorous environmental ethics. However, similar to English, in the Persian lexicon, “to die” is also used frequently as an exaggeration. The two languages share the phrase, “I am dying,” in common vernacular to simply imply fatigue, hunger, thirst, or other forms of normal daily distress. One “dies of thirst” when very thirsty, or “dies for someone” to indicate intense love. In the context of the poem, it is clear that Sepehri does not mean that he would die in a literal sense; he uses the expression with the intention of showing the severity of the act of cutting a live green vegetation. As it was mentioned before, Sepehri’s affinity with nature has been compared by some to descriptions of nature made by the Romantics, and by others to Zen Buddhism or Taoism. But, the roots of his ecological ethics remain unclear. In an earlier poem titled “Shouram Ra” (“My Fervor”), he stated that he reaped the flowers of adoration wherever he found them budding. As examples of the flowers, he named the sacred texts of various religious traditions and a few distinct symbols. This leaves the question: Where did he reap his deep environmental ethics? In the poem, “Sade Rang” (“Simple Shade”), he describes a simple scene he observes from the balcony: he sees the sky; Ra’na washing clothes by the pool; falling leaves; his mother’s melancholy; he himself reading the Vedas or making a sketch of a rock, a bird, a cloud; and then a conversation between Ra’na—a woman whose identity is not made clear to the reader—and her mother. In an ironic shift of imagery, he wishes that people’s hearts were as clear as the seeds of pomegranate when

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

91

pomegranate juice leaps into his eyes, and his mother and Ra’na laugh.79 Some have used poems such as this to point to the link between Sepehri’s verse and the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, a thousand-year-old belief system that considered atman (self) and Brahman (the ultimate reality) as one. In Advaita philosophy, moksa evokes the true nature of consciousness; it is a twofold concept involving the complete cessation of suffering and the attainment of supreme bliss. Consciousness is seen as eternal, formless, and limitless, unaffected by worldly troubles. Moksa is also the direct personal recognition of one’s own divine, eternal self. Hinduism is commonly known for its practice of compassion toward animals. In certain Indian traditions, the land and rivers are also viewed as sacred; the land is seen as an embodied form of divinity, and divinity is believed to be embedded in the land. The land around the Yamuna River that runs through Delhi, for example, is associated with Krishna (major deity in Hinduism; the eight avatar of Vishnu) and the Yamuna River itself evokes the goddess of love. Meanwhile, certain branches of Buddhism extend compassion to insects as well as animals, while Jainism expresses a more specific and intentional practice of compassion that goes beyond animals and insects to include certain plants and root vegetables. Jainism has established various measures for monks and the community not to harm the smallest insects, even inadvertently. However, Sepehri’s tone in the verse, “I know, if I cut a green grass, I will die,” is even more strict than the Jain respect for life. We might further understand Sepehri’s ecotheology by considering his early interest in Japanese poetry, which introduced him to Japanese religious traditions. He translated a number of poems from Japanese into Farsi in the late 50s. In 1960, he went to Japan for several months in order to study wood carving under the tutelage of master artist Un’ichi Hiratsuka (1895–1997), a prominent figure of the twentieth-century Japanese creative print movement. It was there that he became more familiar with Zen, Taoist, and Shinto ideas and practices. He then travelled to India, stayed in Delhi, and visited the Taj Mahal before returning to Iran. In March 1964, he travelled to India again, this time to visit Bombay, Aurangabad, Jalgaon, Benares, Bodhgaya, Agra, and Delhi, where he specifically saw the Elephanta, Ajanta, and Ellora caves.80 Then from Delhi, he went to Kashmir, Lahore, Peshawar, and Kabul. His philosophy was influenced by the traditions of each place he visited. However, limiting his compassionate practice and his watchful and rigorous environmental code of ethics to those traditions would be misleading. His verse also resonates with the ways of a very small religious community in the region, the Bishnoi, which indicates that he may have also passed through Jodhpur, Rajasthan, during his long trip to India.81

92

Chapter 3

BISHNOI: A MEDIEVAL RELIGION OF THE ENVIRONMENT Studies on the Bishnoi, a medieval religious sect that arose in fifteenth-century India with strong environmental precepts, have remained peripheral to this day. Despite the vast literature that they produced between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in Rajasthani, they even remain on the fringes of the historiography of the Bhakti movement in India.82 The Bishnoi’s distinct philosophy on the preservation of nature continues to have important implications in regard to the conservation of water and all life forms in a scarce dessert community. Their model is applicable not only to the socioeconomic and political conditions of medieval Rajasthan, but also to the present. The Bishnoi remain a living culture today, quite resilient and effective in preserving the lives of trees and protecting the animals in their domain. Their movement, founded in the year 1485 by a young man named Jambhesvara (1451–1536) from a pastoral background, arose at a time when Rajasthan faced a ten-year drought and was struggling through a series of famines. Jambhesvara declared twenty-nine tenets that gave rise to the name Bishnoi or Bisnoi, which breaks down into bis [twenty] and nau [nine]. In the Bishnoi literature, Jambhoji, or Guru Jambhesvara, viewed by some of his followers as the tenth avatar of Vishnu, is likely to have been the first Indian guru who explicitly preached ecological awareness. He is situated within Bhakti philosophy, a tradition that recognized Vishu as its supreme deity. Bhakti, which means devotion in Sanskrit, was developed in India between the seventh and tenth centuries; it emphasizes love between God and the devotee, and vice-versa. This particular Hindu way of devotion, the way of love, or Bhakti-marga, is mentioned in the Bhagavadgita as superior to other religious approaches, namely, the path of knowledge [jnana] or the path of ritual and good deeds [karma]. In general, bhakti is gender-inclusive and does not hold to the idea of caste. Darsan, seeing God and being seen by God, is an important ritual in Bhakti philosophy. The influence of the Islamic idea of submission to God, as well as Sufi concepts expressed in the poetry of Kabir (1440–1518), are also visible in Bhakti writings, particularly of the Bishnoi. That is why despite the major differences between Hinduism and Islam, Jambhoji is said to have been respected by both Muslims and Hindus. In fact, an early Muslim Bishnoi saint identified as Rahmatji was a contemporary of Jambhoji.83 The twenty-nine tenets of the Bishnoi focus on love, peace, kindness, simplicity in life, honesty, compassion, forgiveness, hard work, good moral character, and purity. In addition to the twenty-nine tenets, there are one hundred and twenty sabads/shabads preached by guru Jambhoji. The following

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

93

eight tenets are concerned directly with the environment and maintaining a sustainable lifestyle: 8.  Use filtered water, milk, cleaned firewood, and cooking fuel after removing living organisms from around it. 18. Show kindness to all living beings and love them. 19. Do not cut green trees. Save the environment. 22. Provide shelter to animals so they can complete their life with dignity and don’t get slaughtered. 23. Don’t sterilize the ox, and keep male goats in the sanctuary. 27. Don’t drink wine or any type of liquor. 28. Don’t eat meat, remain a pure vegetarian. 29. Never use blue clothes or the blue color extracted from the indigo plant.84 Jambhesvara’s 120 sabdas were considered dharma: moral duty and a way of life. For him, dharma extended from mental textual constructs to everyday experiences that facilitated a vision of the world as a transparent unity.85 The instruction that the sabdas provided to protect the environment, including all of its beings, is so important to his followers that today, centuries after his passing, the Bishnoi still strictly observe them. For instance, they even avoid picking the broken branches of trees for fire; instead they use dried up cow dung. In addition, Jambhesvara’s instruction not to kill any birds was even observed during the times of famine; he promised and provided his people with their daily need for food through what he called divine intervention as a reward for their respect of the lives of birds, animals, and trees. A miracle attributed to him depicts him turning a lime tree into a coconut tree.86 “To facilitate the conservation of water, Jambhesvara also constructed water tanks. Because natural bodies of water such as lakes were so highly regarded by the community, they were believed to hold miraculous medicinal values and became places of pilgrimage. Today, the Bishnois are still highly active in protecting their community and region from hunting, poaching, and cutting down trees. Theirs is a dharma that does not separate the human from the natural world, but implies a harmonious coexistence between the two. For them, the former is only part of the latter. Following these tenets not only influenced their religious practice, it also made the Bishnoi a force in protecting animals and preventing the destruction of trees, particularly the Khejri, native to Rajasthan. Nandini Sinha Kapur sees relevance and contemporaneity in these teachings in a way that was able to draw Hindus and Muslims to the Bishnoi sampradaya, a Punjabi term meaning a syncretic religious system that blends more than one religious tradition.87

94

Chapter 3

While today the Bishnoi are considered a Hindu community, Pankaj Jain writes that “in the 1819 Census of Marwar, they were classified with Muslims.” In fact, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most communities in Rajasthan rejected the ritual systems of the Shaktas, Shaivas, and Vaishnavas, meaning they did not partake in the worship of the goddess Shakti, or of the gods Shiva, or Vishnu.88 Debates as to whether the Bishnoi originate in both Islam and Hinduism continue. One indication that their origins lie in Islam could be found in the fact that Bishnoi temples did not traditionally hold images or figurative depictions of a god; the more contemporary image of Jambhesvara in their temples is a rather new phenomenon. Among other traditions that link the Bishnoi to Islam is their burial ritual. Rather than cremation, they bury their dead. Their shrines were considered dargah or maqam; the burial place of a Muslim saint. More specifically, there are similarities between the Bishnoi and the Nizari Isma’ili branch of Shi’a, particularly in their hymns and references to Allah and Muhammad.89 Further exemplifying the extent of the Hindu-Muslim debate on Bishnoi origination, legend has it that once, two dignitary disciples of Jambhesvara argued about whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim. When asked, Jambhesvara is said to have declared that he was neither; rather, he claimed, he had raised himself above all sects and castes.90 His response is highly similar to Rumi’s well-known piece in which he identifies himself as belonging to the soul of the Beloved. Other sources support the theory that the Bishnoi adopted Muslim practices. One leading missionary cited by Yoginder Sikand and Manjari Katju explains: “having once slain a Qadi, who had interfered with their rite of widow-burning, they compounded the offence by embracing Islam.”91 However, the politically-inspired missionary work the Bishnois conducted, particularly in the 1920s, caused tension with the Muslims in the community and gradually led the Bishnoi to move toward Hinduism as an act of de-Islamization.92 Their political embrace of Hindu rituals and practices occured in spite of the repeated attention that Jambhoji himself gave to avoiding false interpretations in his sabdas.93 He spoke of false identification as the root cause of suffering both in the body and the mind. By false identification he meant avoiding specific identification as either Muslim or Hindu, losing the broad universal appeal of the Bishnoi. As Pankaj Jain writes: “The catholicity of the Bishnois philosophy can be seen in its references to the Buddha and Allah. This also indicates the broad social base of the Bishnoi movement.”94 The reform spirit of the Bishnois has been in large part the influence of medieval puritanical aspects of Vaishnavism and Bhakti ideology. It is in these philosophies that the different outward rituals of Hinduism and Islam become less significant, and their deeper shared understanding of the ultimate reality, more central.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

95

The Bishnois have survived drought and a series of famines from the fifteenth century onward in part due to their ecological practice of conservation. They were also given a royal patronage as early as 1488 AD for the socioeconomic benefits of their philosophy.95 A Bishnoi saint poet by the name of Vilhoji expresses this philosophy when he writes that not showing kindness to trees brings about damnation.96 The idea that sacrificing one’s life is a worthy price to pay to protect trees was put into practice in 1730 by Amreti Devi, her three young daughters, and 363 other Bishnoi people who followed them and were massacred as they hugged the Khejri tree in an effort to protect it from being cut down. In 1970, this event was memorialized in another episode of ecological resistance, a forest conservation effort in India known as the Chipko movement. The Chipko movement in turn inspired the Appiko movement of September 1983, where villagers in the state of Karnataka in southern India hugged trees to protect them from being cut down for timber while they chanted devotional texts such as the puranas.97 For the Bishnoi, there is no distinction between religion and environmental activism. They are deeply connected. In his study of northern India, David Haberman points to the colonial agenda that labeled certain traditions “transcendental” and “other worldly” to facilitate the imperial project. Doing so had the effect of negating the activism/environmentalism of these communities. In particular, by interpreting moksa [liberation] as an “escape from the world of nature” and assuming that the real self “has nothing to do with nature,” imperialism sought to perpetuate an epistemology that devalued the world as an illusion with little room for environmental concern.98 In spite of the effects of imperialism in India, Bishnoi environmentalism remains based in its totality on religious ethos. SOHRAB SEPEHRI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUMI Similar to others who have noted the influence of Eastern mystic poets on Sepehri, Dariush Ashuri affirms that the roots of Sepehri’s attention to nature lie deeper than European romanticism. He stresses his link to Eastern mysticism, specifically of the Far East—China and Japan—rather than Islamic traditions. He identifies Sepehri’s way as wu wei [effortless action].99 There is no doubt about the influence of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism on Sepehri’s spiritualty, and on his mind and work, yet, to assume that he was more heavily influenced by those traditions than his rootedness in Zoroastrian or Muslim roots does injury not only to understanding of Sepehri, but on a broader spectrum it harms our understanding of Islam. In light of Sepehri’s many Eastern influences, the specific question of what Islam signifies in the context of his work is important for those interested in

96

Chapter 3

the study of religion and the environment, the study of Islam, and the study of Islamic hermeneutics. A comprehensive response to this question is outside the scope of this book. Still, reflecting on his rootedness within Islam and Islamic mystical traditions is essential to understanding both who Sepehri was and in understanding his work. To help us understand Sepehri’s relationship with Islam, I refer here again to Yung’s response to the criticism he received after he was asked whether he believed in God in the interview cited earlier on Face to Face, when he responded “I know.” In his letter addressing the criticism, he wrote: “I quite understand if it should be suggested that I am no Christian. Yet I think of myself as a Christian since I am entirely based upon Christian concepts. I only try to escape their internal contradictions by introducing a more modest attitude . . . the Christian idea proves its vitality by a continuous evolution, just like Buddhism. Our time certainly demands some new thought in this respect, as we cannot continue to think in an antique or medieval way, when we enter the sphere of religious experience.”100 Like other traditions, the continuation of Islamic philosophy across the ages requires new thought and new ways of understanding old wisdom. Sepehri’s Hasht Ketab is a new expression of the wisdom of Muslim sages of the past. As such, it should be recognized as a conceptualization of Islam that incorporates pluralism and a heightened attention to the cause and effect of the degradation of nature that has been accentuated drastically in the past couple of hundred years. Although I have recognized the influence of many traditions on Sepehri’s works, in what follows I briefly make my case for labeling Hasht Ketab as a continuation of Islamic thought. Firstly, the only direct religious identifier in the entire Hasht Ketab in reference to himself appears in the beginning verses of The Sound of Water’s Footfall, where he declares: “I am a Muslim.”101 In the third and fourth stanzas of the same poem, he explains what being a Muslim means to him: I am a Muslim, My qibla is a red rose. My janamaz is the spring, and my mohr is light. The field is my sajjadeh [prayer mat]. I make ablution by the palpitation of the windows. Moon is a current in my prayer, a spectrum. Rock is evident beyond my prayer: All molecules of my prayer have been crystalized. I perform my prayers when the wind recites the azan on the minaret of the Cypress. I perform my prayers after the takbirat ul-ihram of the grass, After the qad qamat of the wave.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

97

My ka’ba is by the waters, My ka’ba is under the acacias My ka’ba, like a breeze, goes from one garden to the other, from one town to another. My hajar ul-aswad is the light of the garden.102 The above piece juxtaposes more than ten specifically Muslim religious rituals, concepts, and material objects and natural elements. I will suffice at contextualizing a couple of these concepts within Islamic mystical tradition. Qibla is the direction to the ka’ba, the cube-shaped structure in Mecca; it signals the direction toward which praying Muslims face. It is often referred to as the “house of God.” When we consider Sepehri’s verse, “My qibla is a red rose,” in the context of the Qur’an, which states that God is found in all directions, from east to west, it becomes clear that Sepehri’s reference to the red rose as his qibla is an interpretation that has precedence in the works of other mystic poets.103 He sees our task as not to discover the mystery of the red rose, but rather to be immersed in it. The verses of Baha u-din Mohammad Amili, known as Sheikh Baha’i (1547–1621), a great polymath and poet, seemed to have influenced Sepehri. He writes: Haji [the pilgrim] set out for the ka’ba And I, longing for the encounter He seeks the house, and I, the Owner Whichever door I knock on, the Owner is You Wherever I go, the Light of that house is You . . . My aim for the Ka’ba and the house of idols is You.104 Sepehri’s verses come particularly close to the following of Sheikh Baha’i’s lines: The nightingale saw the face of the flower, in the field The butterfly set out for the flame and saw the secrets so clear The mystic saw Your face in the old and in the young This means that the face of the beloved can everywhere be found . . . It depends on who feels the scent of the budding flower of this garden Each recites your praise, in their own way [language].105 Sepehri’s poetry not only expresses familiarity with Sheikh Baha’i, but also a great affinity for his idea about God, idols, and the goal of the pilgrim in this world. If read in the context of philosopher Suhrawardi’s theory of illumination, we can see that neither poet makes a distinction between the essence of any being. All being, as Suhrawardi’s philosophy states, is an

98

Chapter 3

emanation of Divine Light. The only difference is in their degree of illumination. In other words, God is in all things to a lesser or greater degree. This is summarized by Ibn ʿArabi, who said: “Whenever I said, ‘Creation,’ its Creator said, ‘There is nothing there except Me.’”106 The notion of qibla has been the locus of much interpretation in Sufi literature and poetry, particularly in the context of defining and identifying idolatry. Many a sage or Sufi saint have expressed their rejection of idolatry, not by denouncing gods of stone or wood but rather by rejecting arrogance, greed, egotism, injustice, oppression, structures of power, and pretenses of piety. Rumi mentions qibla now and again throughout the Masnavi without referring to the actual Ka’ba, that is referring to the direction but not the house itself. Often the house itself, and the way it is perceived is interpreted as a form of idolatry, particularly when the house becomes more important than the Owner of the house. At one point, Rumi speaks of the burning of the house of the lover, which is the burning of the lover, the lover burning their own house, their own self/ego. We see the link he makes between burning and love in the following: From now on this anguish will be my qibla I am a candle, and am alive by its burning.107 In another verse, he speaks of the qibla of the heart: They made a qibla of their heart and started to pray.108 In yet another verse, he distinguishes between those who understand inner meanings and those who suffice at appearances: qibla of those who understand inner meanings is patience and serenity qibla of those who worship only appearances is made out of stone.109 There are a wealth of other examples in which Rumi’s verse states that the real qibla is not made out of stone or located in a single city or country. Rather, he emphasizes, it can be found only through a perceptive heart: How do you look for qibla in the dark night Qibla is not there but the prayer is accepted.110 On the idea of the protected Qur’an, he writes in the fifth book of Masnavi: The qibla of the soul has been made hidden This has caused everyone to yield to different directions.111

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

99

It is in the tradition of Rumi, Sheikh Baha’i and other great Muslim sages that Sepehri calls the red rose his qibla. And it is in this same tradition that a trip to Mecca to perform the hajj can be categorized as idol worship, while the true Ka’ba can be found under the acacias. In addition, there is an abundance of Sufi literature—in Persian poetry and other Muslim narrative—expressing the importance of respect for the life of animals, insects, and plants. Here are a few examples: in his Boustan, Sa’di narrates that Abu Bakr Shibli (861–946), a renowned mystic, was travelling when he bought some grain. When he arrived at his destination, he noticed a few ants in his bundle. This caused him so much distress that he could not sleep all night, as Sa’di expresses through Shibli’s voice in the following verse: It is far from compassion, to scatter this poor ant from its home. Sa’di then adds his own voice to Shibli’s to conclude: Do not harm the ant that carries a kernel It has a soul, and enjoys sweet life Dark-souled and hard-hearted is the one who wishes the ant to be heartsick.112 In Tazkirat ul-Awliya (Memoirs of the Saints), ‘Attar narrates a similar story about Sufi saint, Bayazid Bastami (804–874), who made a pilgrimage to Mecca and bought some seeds in Hamedan on his return journey. When Bayazid arrived home in Bastam, a few hundred miles away, he discovered that along with his seeds he had carried a few ants away from their home and community. Fearing the suffering of the dislodged creatures, he travelled all the way back to Hamedan to return the ants to where they belonged.113 These stories reflect radical Muslim adab, which connotes deep respect for the harmony and peace of all beings. The concept is not specific to the ants, but the stories use ants to exemplify that even the smallest of creatures merit respect and is given particular attention in the Qur’an. It also specifies that the prophet Solomon, who is said to have compassionate relationship with animals, knew the language of the birds and the ants. Prophet Muhammad’s compassion toward animals reflected in the tradition includes a number of stories. One story relates that once, when he was seated and engaged in conversation with his companions, a cat sat and fell asleep on a piece of his garment. When the time arrived for him to leave, he remained seated until the cat rose.

100

Chapter 3

Along with these stories, there are examples of the importance of trees, water, mountains, and other natural elements in the Qur’an and in other important books of Islamic literature. The Qur’an particularly mentions the lives of blessed trees. One particular hadith [saying of or narrations about the Prophet] quoted in the Sahih of Bukhari narrates one example about the relationship between the Prophet and the trunk of a date palm tree that he leaned on as he preached. Once a pulpit was constructed in the mosque, he no longer leaned on the trunk of the tree. Out of love for the Prophet, the tree grieved his absence, weeping, sobbing, and shaking, and the Prophet, in turn, is said to have comforted the tree. Some versions of the story speak of the tree being transported to a location where it could still hear the Prophet. Rumi speaks of the crying tree, repeatedly referring to it as the “weeping trunk” [oston-e hannaneh] in the Masnavi. Here are a few of his references to the story: The weeping trunk, like those with aptitude sighed from the separation from the Prophet.114 In the same book in Masnavi, he writes: The language of water, the language of Earth, and the language of flower Is understood by people of the heart The philosopher who negates the weeping trunk Is foreign to the senses of the saints.115 In book three of Masnavi, he goes on to compare Qarun, a wealthy man mentioned in both the Qur’an and the Bible, with the weeping tree. Although Qarun oppressed his people, he believed that he had earned his wealth through merit. Despite warnings, he did not change his ways, but remained arrogant and despotic until the Earth finally devoured him and his house. Rumi’s comparison here emphasizes that Qarun, with all his wealth and arrogance, was consumed by the Earth without salvation, while the weeping trunk of the tree set foot on the path of salvation by expressing love for the Prophet. In the following piece he connects the idea of sentient tree, and the sentient rock that spoke to the Prophet, to the sentient mountain that spoke to John on the mount of transfiguration:116 The Earth, like a serpent devours Qarun The weeping trunk is on the path to salvation The rock greets Ahmed [another name for Mohammad] The mountain gives message to John.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

101

Rumi then gives voice to non-sentient beings, indicating the idea that even the inanimate are considered sentient within the Muslim tradition. They declare: We are hearing, seeing, and joyful Only, with those who are not our confidant, we are hushed.117 The inanimate objects who speak in the above verse affirm that they too can feel: they can see and hear, express joy and sorrow. Only humans who lack perception do not sense their sentience. As Anna Gade writes: “The story of the crying tree also vividly expresses the Qur’anic idea that even the non-sentient world is populated with creatures. A tree, too, has feelings. Not only is all creation ‘Muslim’ in its natural state, but humans participate relationally with these other creatures, whether or not their status is recognized.”118 This idea of relational empathy, which corresponds with the practice of nurturing care, has been highly emphasized in Islamic piety and elaborated in the intellectual foundation of Muslim thought in the work of Muslim sages as early as Ibn Sina, whose Kitab al-Shifa’ has been summarized in the widely circulated Kitab al Nijat (Book of Salvation).119 It is in this sense that salvation is connected to the realization of the value of all beings and the fostering of a harmonious interrelation between all. In the very deeply-rooted context of Sepehri’s ecotheology, it is clear that the issue is neither “What good would it be to possess the world, if you forfeit your soul?” nor “What use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world?”120 Rather, Sepehri suggests that it is not possible to save one’s soul while forfeiting the world, as we and the world are interconnected. A relational universal ecotheology of Sepehri is thoroughly insightful not simply because sustainable conduct is a moral imperative. Neither is it necessary only because of the widespread secular awareness of the violence human actions have done to the “others” with whom humans share the earth. Rather, Sepehri’s poetic advocacy for the environment is necessary because, in a creation whose members are fundamentally interrelated, to forfeit God’s creation would truly be to forfeit our souls. NOTES 1. Persian is a language with non-gendered pronouns. The word ou refers to both a woman and a man. I have kept the original ou in Sepehri’s verse, in reference to God, as opposed to translating it as she or he. 2. Sepehri, “Gol-e A’ineh” [“The Mirror Flower”], Hasht Ketab, 146–47. ‫او؛ خدای دشت می پیچد صدایش در بخار دره های دور‬ ‫او؛ خدای دشت می ریزد صدایش را به جام سبز خاموشی‬

102

Chapter 3

‫‌‌ای خدای دشت نیلوفر! کو کلید نقره درهای بیداری؟‬ 3. Sepehri, “Shakpooi,” Hasht Ketab, 226. 4. Sepehri, “Ta Enteha Hozour” [“Presence, Till the End”], Hasht Ketab, 456. ‫چشم هوش محزون نباتی را خواهد دید‬ ‫پیچکی دور تماشای خدا خواهد پیچید‬ ‫راز سر خواهد رفت‬ 5. Rumi, Masnavi. 6. Ferdowsi, Shahnameh (Tehran: Nashr-e Roozegar, 1379 HS/2000 AD). Simurgh is an ancient mythical bird in Persian literature who, like the phoenix of Greek mythology, has witnessed the destruction of the world three times over. It possesses the knowledge of all the ages and is capable of purifying land and waters and bestowing fertility. 7. Martin Turner, “Sohrab’s Way,” Parsagon: The Persian Literature Review, October 2017. 8. Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 286. 9. Dariush Ashuri, Roudaki Magazine (Tehran: Ministry of Culture and Art, Nowruz, 1351 HS/1972 AD), text in Farsi; Sirous Shamisa, Negahi be Sepehri [A Glance at Sepehri], 10th ed. (Tehran: Seda-ye Mo’aser, 1393 HS/2014 AD), text in Farsi. Shamisa drew analogies between Sepehri and Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). 10. Among works related to the idea of the human/nature/divine relation, see also: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam and the Plight of Modern Man (London: Longmans, 1976); Nasr, Sadr al-Din Shirazi and his Transcendent Theosophy (Tehran and London: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1978); Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (New York: Crossroad, 1981 and Kuala Lumper: Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1987). 11. Anna M. Gade, Muslim Environmentalism: Religious and Social Foundations (New York: Colombia University Press, 2019), 211. 12. Gade, 211. 13. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, n.s., 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–7. 14. White, 1203–7. 15. White, 1203–7. 16. White, 1203–7. 17. Pope Francis’s second encyclical “Laudato si” begins with the words of Francis of Assisi and is an important document “on care for our common home.” Through this encyclical the pope laments environmental degradation, critiques consumerism, capitalism, and irresponsible development, and calls all people of the world to take a unified global action. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, named St. Francis the patron saint of ecology in 1979. 18. White, 1203–7. 19. Carl Jackson, “The Counterculture Looks East: Beat Writers and Asian Religion,” American Studies 1.29, no. 1 (Spring 1988). 20. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab: Morgh-e Mohajer [Sohrab: The Migrant Bird], text in Farsi.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

103

21. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was an American fantasy horror writer whose stories detailed existential wonder. 22. Chris Pak, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 52. 23. Pak, 52. 24. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab, 271–99 25. Sepehri, “Gol-e A’ineh.” 26. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 27. These rooms are made to avoid the sun, while winter rooms face the south, benefiting from the winter sun. This architectural design is intended to maximize cooling in the summer and warmth in the winter and has been achieved by measuring and considering the angles of the sun and the degrees of penetration of light and heat. 28. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi [The Blue Room], 12, text in Farsi. 29. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 21. 30. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 21–22. The author uses the Latin phrase, mysterium magnum, in the original text (it signifies the primordial, undifferentiated matter from which water, earth, fire, and air have come to be). 31. Chögyam Trungpa, The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness (Shambhala Publications, 2013), 513. 32. Sepehri, “Hala” [“Beware”], Hasht Ketab, 218–19. 33. Paridokht Sepehri, ed., Hanouz dar Safaram [I Am Still Traveling] (Tehran: Farzan Publishers, 1380 HS/2001 AD). 34. Sepehri, “Khaabi Dar Hayahu” [“A Dream in Chaos”], 203. 35. Sepehri, “Hala.” 36. Sepehri, “Padma,” Hasht Ketab, 219–20. 37. Laozi, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (London & New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 1. 38. This phrase is repeatedly and commonly used in Arabic form in most Islamic mystical and theological literature to signify the unknowing of the essence of God. I was unable to decipher who used it originally. ‫ال اسم و ال رسم‬ 39. Abul-Qasim Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ed. Parviz Atabaki (Tehran: Sherkat-e Entesharat-e Elmi va Farhangi, 1386 HS/2007 AD), 3. 40. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. ‫کار ما نیست شناسایی راز گل سرخ‬ ‫کار ما شاید این است‬ ‫که در افسون گل سرخ شناور باشیم‬ 41. Carl Gustav Yung, Face to Face, aired 1959 on BBC, YouTube video, 0:08:05–0:08:19, accessed on December 9, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oBYEFX2dqpM&ab_channel=Peacefulness. 42. Yung, letter to the BBC, accessed on December 9, 2021, http://e-jungian.com/ car-gustaw-jung-in-the-bbc-interview-october-1959-believing-and-knowing/. 43. Sepehri, “Chand” [“Many”], Hasht Ketab, 221–22.

104

Chapter 3

44. John J. Murphy, “Meister Eckhart and the Via Negativa: Epistemology and Mystical Language,” New Blackfriars 77, no. 908 (1996): 458–72, http://www.jstor. org/stable/43249917. 45. M. Sereshk, “Hajm-e Sabz,” in Bagh-e Tanha-yi: Sohrab Sepehri [The Garden of Solitude: Sohrab Sepehri], ed. Hamid Siahpoosh (Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1389 HS/2010 AD), 63, text in Farsi. (M. Seresk is pen name of Mohammad Reza Shafi’iye Kadkani.) 46. Sepehri, “Chand.” 47. Sereshk, “Hajm-e Sabz,” 64. 48. Sereshk, 67. 49. Sepehri, “Na.” Hasht Ketab, 231. 50. Rumi, Masnavi, book I, verse 9. 51. Sepehri, “Pa rah,” Hasht Ketab, 233–34. 52. Sepehri, “Sheytan Ham” [Satan Also], Hasht Ketab, 235–36. 53. Sepehri, “Shooram Ra” [My Fervor], Hasht Ketab, 237–38. The Avesta is a collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia, developed from oral tradition between c 600 BC–200/300 AD. See Mehrdad Bahar, Adyan-e Asiya-yi [The Religions of the East], 7th ed. (Tehran: Nashre Cheshmeh, 1387 HS/2008 AD), 47, text in Farsi. 54. Sepehri, The Sound of Water’s Footfall. 55. Leanne Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Racial Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 160–61. 56. Simpson, As We, 180. 57. Sepehri, “Az Rouye Pelk-e Shab” [“From the Eye-lid of the Night”], Hasht Ketab, 333–34. 58. Sepehri, “Ab” [“Water”], Hasht Ketab, 347. ‫ بی‬.‫مردم باالدست چه صفایی دارند! چشمه هاشان جوشان گاوهاشان شیر افشان باد! من ندیدم دهشان‬ ‫گمان پای چپرهاشان جا پای خداست‬ 59. Sepehri, “Ghorbat” [“Exile”], Hasht Ketab, 352–54. 60. Choubeh is a plant that was used for washing, https://www.vajehyab.com/ dehkhoda/3-‫​چوبه‬. 61. Sepehri, “Ghorbat.” 62. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 63. Robert Aitken and Michael Toms, “Zen Ethics,” in Buddhism in the West: Spiritual Wisdom for the 21st Century, eds. Michael Toms, Thieh Nhat, and Dalai Lama XIV (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1998), 69–72. 64. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, “Early Buddhist Views on Nature,” in This Sacred Earth, Religion, Nature, Environment, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York & London: Routledge, 2004), 131. 65. Leslie E. Sponsel, Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 105. 66. Sponsel, 105. 67. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 68. ‫سیاستزدگی‬ 69. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

105

70. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 71. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 72. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 73. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 74. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 75. Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who are You?” and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 68. 76. Carl W. Ernst, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (Chapel Hill & London: UNC Press, 2003), 39. 77. Sepehri, “Rowshani, Man, Gol, Ab” [“Light, Me, Flower, Water”], Hasht Ketab, 335–37. 78. Sepehri, “Rowshani, Man, Gol, Ab.” 79. Sepehri, “Sade Rang” [“Simple Shade”], 342–44. 80. Series of Hindu caves, including Buddhist stupas. The caves date back to 2nd century BCE. Making special visit to these caves reflect his interest in traditions of India and beyond, and enriching his spirituality. 81. “Bishnois: A Religion for Environment,” documentary by Neelima and Pramod Mathur, YouTube video, 0:29:00, accessed November 12, 2021, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=OX8bnlXyXro. 82. Nandini Sinha Kapur, Reconstructing Identities: Tribes, Agro-Pastoralists and Environment in Western India (Seventh–Twentieth Centuries) (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008), 155. The works of J. N. Singh Yadav, compiled in Through the Ages (1992), along with Bhagwan Singh Suryavanshi’s The Abhira’s: Their History and Culture (1962), remain the only major monographs on them, drawing from history, mythology, religion, and ethnography. 83. See Pankaj Jain, Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011), 170. 84. Jain, 9. 85. Jain, 114. 86. Jain, 161–62. 87. Kapur, Reconstructing, 157. 88. Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna, “Religion and State in Eighteenth Century Rajasthan: Sawai Jai Singh and ‘Reformed’ Vaishnavism,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 74 (2013): 357. 89. Dominique-Sila Khan, Conversions and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1997); Khan and Zawahir Moir, “The Lord Will Marry the Virgin Earth: Songs of the Time to Come,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 28 (2000): 99–115. 90. Jain, Dharma, 55. 91. Yoginder Sikand and Manjari Katju, “Mass Conversions to Hinduism among Indian Muslims,” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 34 (August 20, 1994): 2217. 92. Sikand and Katju, 2218. 93. Jain, Dharma, 137–38. Jain offers the following quote of the sabdas of Jambhesvara: “One who devotes oneself from the beginning with Rahman Rahim will

106

Chapter 3

obtain the mercy of Rahman Rahim . . . if you seek God through your heart, you will become a true Muslim . . . if your heart is pure, hajj and ka’ba are near you . . . perform your duty truthfully, just like reading namaz. . . . why do you kill innocent animals . . . ‘do not quote Muhammad to support your animal-violence. His thought was quite complex and different from yours. His was the sword of knowledge that removed the sins of his people, not the iron-sword.’” 94. Jain, 157. 95. Jain, 168. 96. Jain, 160–61. It was Vilhoji who narrated that Jambhoji’s disciple Karamni had reached heaven and attained immortality for giving their lives for the cause of preserving the trees. 97. Jain, 10. The puranas are part of the body of the sacred texts of India that were put to writing in the second century AD. They include legends with symbolic language and layers of meaning. 98. David Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 33, 37; Jain, 11. Jain argues that Haberman has uncovered the residual effects of the colonial agenda in a preference for Sankara’s transcendental philosophy as a preferred icon of the Indic religion. 99. Ashuri, Roudaki Magazine. 100. Yung, letter. 101. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 102. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 103. Qur’an, 2:115. 104. Sheikh Baha’i, Divan-e Ash’ar, mukhamas. ‫من یار طلب کردم واو جلوه گه یار حاجی به ره کعبه و من طالب دیدار‬ ‫هر در که زنم صاحب آن خانه تویی تو هر جا که روم پرتو کاشانه تویی تو‬ ‫بلبل به چمن زان گل رخسار نشان دید پروانه در آتش شد و اسرار عیان دید‬ 105. Sheikh Baha’i. 106. Fazlur Rahman, Selected Letters of Shaikh Aḥmad Sirhindī (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1968), 18. 107. Rumi, Masnavi, book 6. ‫بعد ازین این سوز را قبله کنم زانک شمعم من بسوزش روشنم‬ 108. Rumi, Masnavi, book 6. ‫قبله از دل ساخت آمد در دعا لیس لالنسان اال ما سعی‬ 109. Rumi, Masnavi, book 6. ‫قبله معنی وران صبر و درنگ قبله صورت پرستان نقش سنگ‬ 110. Rumi, Masnavi, book 1. ‫چون تحری در دل شب قبله را قبله نی و آن نماز او روا‬ 111. Rumi, Masnavi, book 5. ‫قبله جان را چو پنهان کرده اند هر کسی رو جانبی آورده اند‬ 112. Sa’di, Koliyat: Boustan, section 2. ‫میازار موری که دانه کش است که جان دارد و جان شیرین خوش است‬ ‫سیاه اندرون باشد و سنگدل که خواهد که موری شود تنگدل‬ 113. Davary, “A Buddhist,” 91.

Ecotheology and Ecojustice

107

114. Rumi, Masnavi, book 1. 115. Rumi, Masnavi, book 1. 116. Matthew 17:1–9. 117. Rumi, Masnavi, book 3. 118. Gade, Muslim Environmentalism, 216–17. 119. Gade, 217. 120. Bruno Latour, “Will Non-Humans be Saved? An Argument in Eco-theology,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 463. Reference to Mathew, 16:26.

Chapter 4

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

A COUPLE OF POETS In 1968, James Baldwin published Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The book was underread and misunderstood. It remained his favorite novel, perhaps for the same reason. Though a novel of social protest, one critic claimed that in it Baldwin abdicated “his responsibility as a serious writer,” losing both his “enthusiasm, and willingness to assume the role of the racial spokesman and representative” of black people.1 Another suggested that Baldwin had found “impersonating a black writer more seductive than actually being an artist.”2 Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Black Panther Party, also refused to see the complexity of Baldwin’s view of race, claiming that Baldwin “was not to be trusted by blacks.”3 Over fifty years ago in Iran, when Sepehri’s Hajm-e Sabz; The Green Expanse (1968) was published, two of the most prominent Iranian newspapers of the time called it the best book of the year. Late literary critic Reza Baraheni (b. 1935), however, reacted differently, calling Sepehri an “aristocratic Buddha-boy” and his poem a “submission to safe pleasures.”4 Through the word “aristocratic,” he attacked Sepehri’s presumed social class, while “Buddha boy” implicated Sepehri’s escapism into an “obscure eastern tradition”: Buddhism. A contemporary of Sepehri’s, renowned poet Ahmad Shamlu (1925–2000), affirmed that Sepehri was “lost.” Referring to one of Sepehri’s proverbialized verses, he explains: “at a time when innocent people were getting beheaded along the gutter by the road, I cannot sit by and say, ‘Do not muddy the water.’”5 Another contemporary poet, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1928–1990), was indignant that Sohrab did not write “timely” poetry; he interpreted that 109

110

Chapter 4

in the verse cited above, the reference to mardom-e bala dast (people up the hill)—who Sepehri described as those who were pure and sincere and who “do not muddy the water”—Sepehri referred to powerful, and otherwise foreign nation states like the United States, Soviet Union, or Japan.6 This could not have been further from the anticolonial point Sepehri wished to convey, as I will explain later in this chapter. Rather, the ideological and intellectual leanings of these critics and their desire to oppose imperialism blind them to the layers and depth of meaning embedded in Sepehri’s verse. They charge that his poetry is divorced from politics and unconcerned with the death of political activists.7 A gracious take on this belligerent idea of “commitment” and “engagement” is to assert, as Fani has, that there is never “a single, unifying vision of how to be an engagée poet or critic.”8 It further reflects the lack of in-depth understanding of the aims and methods of political resistance, as well as a lack of ideological tolerance on the part of some literary critics. Neither Sepehri, nor Baldwin ever responded to the above criticisms of their work; both found discussing it trivial, in as much as it related to the ego. In No Name in the Street, Baldwin expressed that he was very much impressed by Eldridge Cleaver, even as he felt a constraint between them, because Eldridge thought Baldwin a “doubtful quality” and of too much good use to the establishment” as stated in Soul on Ice (1968). Baldwin admired both the book and its author. Even as he did not like what Eldridge said about him, he understood the sentiment of the author and the warning he had issued as a “watchman for the city.”9As a result, critics continued to refer to him as “just another black liberal talking about love while cities burned” and his work as merely a concern for the morality of white people.10 For his part, Sepehri seemed to distance himself from the public reception of his work. He rarely participated in interviews, made almost no media appearances, and often avoided attending the opening of his gallery exhibits. He thought that posing for photos in front of his paintings with viewers did not suit his personality of solitude and his centeredness against the ego. In the highly politicized intellectual circles of 50s and 60s Iran, his work was misconstrued as an “untimely mysticism,” which was often used as a justification to dismiss it. In spite of the similarities noted above, the context of the works of Sepehri and Baldwin are quite distinct. Central to Baldwin’s work was the racial issue of being black in America, a problem not of black people, but imposed and projected upon them. He was an artist who saw his responsibility as “somebody who helps you see reality again. . . . One does not aspire to become a writer. Writers are possessed by a vision.”11 Sepehri, meanwhile, was writing in a different context, and was concerned with the life of all beings, particularly of the marginalized and the oppressed. What links the two across the confines of geography, place, social location, race, class, and nationality is

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

111

their call for a new human and a new humanism to respond to the respective issues they addressed. They refer not to the humanism of modernity or the Renaissance, which are concerned with minimizing the effects of the Fall and Original Sin. In effect, Baldwin rejects this line of humanism as a lie in which the Western nations have been caught, leading them to compile a version of history that has no moral justification or authority.12 On the other hand, the new humanism of Baldwin and Sepehri more closely approximates that of Meister Eckhardt (1260–1327). Like Echhardt, they both emphasize the infinite potentiality of the human spirit, whose ultimate goal is not independence, but rather a dissolution of individuality in the infinity of God. Indeed, Sepehri’s verse seemed aligned with Eckhart’s humanism as viewing all beings as having value in the eyes of God.13 Engaged as both Baldwin and Sepehri were in the relationship between God and humans—and for Sepehri with all beings—they also focused on exposing idols and affirmed humanity in relation to a transcendent reality. By idols, I do not mean the idols that are made of wood or stone, nor any other form of visible idol, but rather power, money, political interests, national security, and the idol of the self, as Oscar Romero puts it.14 We see Sepehri’s humanism in a piece titled “Sure-ye Tamasha,” where he declares: ‌‌My words were clear like a patch of grass, And I told them, There is a sun at your threshold, if you open the door, it will shine on your demeanor . . . and I told them, in the palm of the earth, there is a hidden jewel, whose sparkling radiance dazzled all prophets. Be in search of that jewel, carry the moments to the pasture of prophecy.15 ‌‌ Rather than construing solely rational resolutions to human problems, Sepehri points to other ways of knowing, which he locates in “the pasture of prophecy.” He finds the transcendent nearby, “among the violets, at the foot of the tall pine,” and spoofs the idea of a God located faraway in the sky, as we see in his simple comical description of the neighborhood grocer who suggested that they pray on the roof of the building to be closer to God.16 Like Sepehri, Baldwin was neither concerned with dogmatic faith, nor engaged in ritual practices of the church. Altough, his version of spirituality was ultimately

112

Chapter 4

concerned with salvation even after he left the church after having been the prodigy of a preacher during his teens. To achieve the new humanism that they articulate, both Sepehri and Baldwin call for a revision of the hierarchical structures of the way we think. Baldwin, in particular, focused on deconstructing white supremacy, revealing the fear inherent in it. At the 1965 debate with William Buckley at the Cambridge Union, he likened himself to the prophet Jeremiah, who spoke truth to power without fear; he questioned “whether or not civilizations can be considered as such, equal, or whether one civilization has a right to overtake and subjugate and in fact to destroy another.”17 He went on to point to the more serious harm of this type of subjugation: the destruction of the sense of reality of the subjugated. As a black person, he said, “it comes as a great shock, around the age of 5, or 6, or 7 . . . to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.”18 Baldwin then emphasizes that it was he who “picked the cotton,” it was he who “carried it to the market,” and it was he who “built the railroad, under someone else’s whip, for nothing.”19 Baldwin’s denunciation of racism extends beyond his difficult childhood in Harlem to the first ship carrying enslaved people from Africa that landed at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.20 This mournful date in history was followed by a series of racist legal statutes: a ban on black self-defense and gun ownership in 1639; the anti-amalgamation law of 1664; the Christian baptism law of 1667; the racialization law that separated “servant” from “slave” in 1682; and the Jim Crow laws of 1877, which almost immediately followed the thirteenth amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation.21 In addition, the twentieth century saw the Tulsa race massacre in 1921; the assassinations of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, and many more to this day; and other tragic events that have propelled the contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement.22 In reflecting on all of this, Baldwin’s attention was on the alienation of “the self ” of black America. He moved to France, cognizant that the condition of the “Arab” in France was somewhat similar to the condition of blacks in America and of all colonized people living under a colonizer. In Paris, fully aware that he was still black, he lived among “les miserable,” as he called Algerians, continually witnessing their mistreatment, as they “were being murdered in the streets, corralled into prisons, and being dropped into the seine like flies.”23 In the 1950s, having seen the record of what he sarcastically called French generosity toward the Algerian, he saw the police one sunny afternoon beating an old, one-armed Arab peanut street vender until he was senseless while people watched, unconcerned, from cafes.24 He came to understand that even in what was known as the fabulous “city of lights,” Algerians or anyone who looked like them—Italian, Spaniard, or Jew—could be corralled into

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

113

prison. Baldwin repeatedly stated that he had not left for Paris, after all, he was invisible there, and in his many years he ever saw the inside of a French home, as an invisible black man. Rather, he had left America, in order not to betray his family/his people. yet he was deeply connected to what happened back home. While in Paris he remained connected to the racist violence in the United States. In 1956, he saw pictures of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts; one of the four black students admitted to the all-white Harry Harding High school in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was “reviled and spat upon . . . as she approached the halls of learning, with history jeering behind her.”25 Seeing her suffer impelled him to go back home, specifically to the South. Someone had to be with her, as he believed that black people need witnesses. His experiences both abroad and in the United States show that his politics was that of decolonization, rediscovering the self, telling the true narratives of colonialism and white supremacy, and removing the mask of whiteness from the fear it concealed. For him, all of these actions are vital to the process of decolonization and healing from the malady of what I have come to call “whitestruckness” in juxtaposing the idea of xenophobic centrality of the West, with normativity of whiteness. Meanwhile, in 1962 Iran, noted writer Jalal Al-e-Ahmad (1923–1969) published what became his most famous book, Gharbzadegi, translated as Weststruckness or Westoxication. The term had been coined by Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid (1912–1944) in the 1940s, who included “extreme xenophilous bias, indiscriminate predilection for Western things and a headlong rush toward mechanization” in the syndromes of this malady.26 As precursors to Edward Said’s (1935–2003) Orientalism (1978), Fardid and Al-e-Ahmad aimed at problematizing the epistemic centrality of the West. Al-e-Ahmad attested that “these days any school child not only sees the expansionists aims of mechanized industry . . . but also sees things that were happening in Cuba, the Congo, the Suez Canal and Algeria were disputes over sugar, diamonds, and oil . . . and for achieving a bridgehead to protect trade routes.”27 In 1971, Iranian philosopher Reza Davari also noted the absolutism of Western epistemology in studying other cultures without understanding the truth of those cultures. In Orientalism, Said questions the dichotomy of the “Orient” vs. the “Occident”; the former, he writes, is viewed as static and undeveloped, something that can be studied and reproduced in the service of imperialism, while the latter is developed, rational, and superior. In his beautiful verse, “Antithesis,” a eulogy for Said, Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) articulates his friend’s vision and dream, as going into tomorrow, trusting the candor of imagination and the miracle of grass, with the Indigenous people calling. Describing the plurality and complexity of identity, Darwish summed up Said’s ideas stating the question of belonging to here and to there and not

114

Chapter 4

belonging to here and to there, in a tug of war between yesterday, today, and the nostalgia of tomorrow. While in exile himself, dispossessed and without the right to go back to the country of his birth, he states that the “relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.”28 Darwish stridently describes him as “cursing the orientalist who is guiding the general to the weak point in the heart of an oriental woman. . . . What about identity I asked. He said it’s self-defense, it’s self-invention.”29 European Orientalism as an exclusively male province, continuously feminized the Orient.30 Women were to men as the Orient was to Occident, creatures of a male fantasy, trapped in the harem, or described as machines, as in Gustave Flaubert’s letter to his mistress: “The oriental woman is a machine and nothing more, she doesn’t differentiate between one man and another, smoking, going to the bath, painting the eyelids and drinking coffee.”31 The eroticized female figure of yesteryears, is in contemporary neocolonial military and political propaganda classifications, is still in need of saving, and the Western general’s presence is to ensure the salvation of oriental woman from the oriental man, and from herself, not realizing that the age of missionary work and colonial feminism is passed.32 It is in this context that identity becomes self-defense and self-invention. To describe the condition of belonging in-between the East and the West, Darwish offers an image of pollution: “Metonymy of identity was on the river’s bank. Had it not been for pollution, it could have embraced the other bank.”33 Said’s dispossessed oriental and the dispossessed black in America both face the same question of identity. Any people whose identity have been reduced to a polluted metonymy, a caricature or a monstrous image struggle to regain and reclaim who they are. As Mahmoud Darwish puts it: “Victims don’t ask the executioner ‘Am I you?’ Had my sword been bigger than my rose, would you have asked if I would have acted like you?”34 Like Darwish, Baldwin and Sepehri were opposed to domination, and did not wish to act like their oppressors. Rather, they were poets filled with the question of how the human being could make the world better. They were both eager to contemplate “how to fix ourselves? how to give birth to ourselves?”35 Their contemplations attracted an audience. At one poignant debate at Cambridge Union, Baldwin’s articulate arguments won the votes of a great majority of the young spectators. Sepehri also appealed to a younger generation, but only partly in his poetic simplicity and more “in his desire to experience an authentic self.”36 He was one of the very few artists “who transcended the disenchantment that dominated the culture of the Pahlavi era.”37 His disenchantment was not limited to the opposition to a regime and would not be remedied by participating in efforts to cause its downfall. Rather, he transcended the local as well as the global. His vision embraced the cosmos

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

115

with all of its microcosms, not just humanity. He had all beings in mind, knowing that the well-being of one depends on the well-being of all. Like Sepehri, Baldwin’s search for an authentic self was not individualistic, but aimed at finding the self of black America, white America, and black and white America. He recognized that before blacks and whites, America had been the home of hundreds of nations of Native Americans for many thousands of years, almost in their totality ceded and occupied. Through his sensitivity for all people who had been dispossessed, he stressed that denying the humanity of another diminishes one’s own humanity. Sepehri, meanwhile, took it a step further to say that denying the worth of any sentient being diminishes one’s own: ‌‌We should not wish the fly away from the fingertip of nature, we should not wish the leopard out of creation.38 ‌‌ Sepehri searches for the self who “once thought at the direction of the bird, whose pulse was harmonized with the pulse of the tree.”39 In the midst of political, social, and cultural shifts, Sepehri’s focus on the here and now— the seemingly mundane universal—managed to still acknowledge the tug between tradition and modernity. His epistemic self-doubt gave him the capacity to adjust his beliefs about the way things are and the way things should be. SEPEHRI: THE POET’S POLITICAL MILIEU The Allied occupation of Iran in September 1941, when Sepehri was thirteen years old, was a “rude shock to most Iranians.”40 Their dream of reclaimed sovereignty was shattered with the surreal experience of finding themselves faced with “the soldiers of the Red Army, the British Indian army, and soon after, American military personnel.”41 The occupation “triggered one of the most eventful episodes in Iran’s modern history and revealed persistent themes in the country’s recent past. The struggle for democracy, foreign intervention . . . disruption of the economy, political instability, tribal rebellions, secessionist movements, frequent imposition of martial law, and growing hatred towards foreign powers.”42 A dispatch from L. G. Dreyfus, minister to Iran, on March 9, 1943, examined some of the problems that he believed were or may “become points of irritations in relations with Iranians.”43 In addition, the presence of American troops in Iran was a potential source of difficulty, even as Iranians did not protest it “because of the extreme friendship between the two countries.”44 Dreyfus went on to describe an issue “brought up in the majlis (congress) about American soldiers opening fire on a number of

116

Chapter 4

innocent people, killing several.”45 He dismissed it as a rare, somewhat justifiable shooting that lead to “accidental” death. When the occupation began, Mohammad Reza Shah took reign of the country, following his father, Reza Shah, who was exiled by the British and the Soviets. The first decade of the young king’s rule from 1941 to 1951 was dominated on the global front by the nationalization of Iranian oil and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), successor to decades of earlier exploitation by Reuter and D’Arcy. As early as 1914, with Winston Churchill as its driving force, the British government had acquired the majority of APOC’s stocks. This concession allocated only 16 percent of the APOC’s net profits to the Persian government. The problem was “the definition of profits, about which expert opinions differed. For example, the profits of the APOC’s subsidiaries operating abroad were excluded and the discount granted on oil sold to the British Navy was deducted.”46 Renamed AIOC (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) in 1947, Iranian revenue (including royalties and taxes) was calculated to the amount of 7.10 million pounds, while British government taxation reached 16.82 million pounds.47 To put it differently, the AIOC’s after-tax profits exceeded 40 million pounds (161 million dollars), out of which Iran received 7 million (34 million dollars). The AIOC “ran the Iranian oil industry not unlike a colonial plantation, . . . preserving a culture of colonial privilege” with cheap Iranian labor, harsh conditions, exploitative wages, and poor living standards.48 It is in this context that the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq (d. 1967), submitted a bill to the parliament seeking to nationalize Iranian oil from this “obscene colonial control. . . . The bill was approved; the Shah was scandalized, check-mated, and disgraced; the British were up in arms; and the Americans wondered what to do.”49 Britain subsequently made efforts to maintain its control through the International Court of Justice, The Hague, while Mossadeq defended Iran’s sovereignty, leading to a power struggle between him and the Shah. Ultimately the CIA and MI6 executed a military coup in 1953 and brought down the democratically elected nationalist government. The Shah was restored to power for his second reign from 1953 until 1978. This event has been referred to as “the most traumatic event in modern Iranian history, a trauma from which the people have yet to recover.”50 At this juncture, the publication of Sepehri’s poetry was seen as “something extraordinary, that would have an enduring effect on the fate of the nation . . . visions of an invisible world, . . . infinitely more important than the political banality of an age feeding on its own insanity . . . voices of an aesthetic confidence, a poetic poise, . . . that no imperial hubris can intimidate and no colonial calamity can deter.”51 The political resistance to the Shah had given rise to the Marxist left as well as other forms of opposition, including but not limited to an Islamic

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

117

left. Sepehri, completely aware of the oppression within the country and the subjugation beyond, was not persuaded to adhere to ideological trends or global centers of power. In this manner, he stands apart from most intellectuals and literati of the time, who were in some way or another adherent to leftist ideologies; for instance, “Whitman emerged in Iran as a leftist and Marxist.”52 Not seeing the status quo as a viable option, nor the path to liberation through the left, Sepehri maintained that the necessity of change was far more urgent than any of his contemporaries envisioned. Dabashi’s ode to Sepehri describes him as “the assured conscience of a nation otherwise too busy fighting to pause and ponder, too belittled and wronged to stand up and configure its measures of truth.”53 Although Sepehri did not confine himself to or define himself by political allegiances, identity politics or group political contentions, his poetry was political. His decolonial approach can be found throughout his work, which he wrote with profound awareness of the events in the country and in the world, even when taking refuge at Golestaneh, a beautiful oasis outside the desert city of his hometown, Kashan, where he would often escape from “the cement expansion of the city.”54 His analysis of the human condition extended beyond the geopolitical to the realm of the cosmos and the intertwined human relationship with all beings. As we have seen, his poetry reflects life in its large sense of existence and, with a few exceptions, is rarely specific to events of his time. In the following section, I will explore one such poem that reflects his symbolic way of engaging with a political event of his time. It reflects the CIA coup d’etat that brought down the government of Dr. Mossadeq in 1953, the traumatic event that submerged both him and the country into a grief-stricken sorrow. “THE MESSAGE OF THE FISH”55 Like all of Sepehri’s poems, “The Message of the Fish,” is filled with symbolic and universal elements such as water, fish, an eagle, and a red carnation. The poem’s significance as the eighth piece in the book Hajm-e Sabz (The Green Expanse), can be understood through the description of the symbolism of the number eight that Sepehri gives in The Blue Room. A book about arts and symbols, Sepehri indicates that the number eight “is the scattered and lost conscience of the individual.”56 In addition to the number eight, understanding the other symbolic elements of the poem, which is essentially a conversation between Sohrab and the fish, helps us analyze it. It is seemingly a brief description of a blistering summer noon when he walks to the pool in his front yard.

118

Chapter 4

In the following verse, we see the symbolic meaning of water through the image of the pond: ‌‌I went to the pond, To see, perhaps, my lonely reflection in the water The pond had no water.57 ‌‌ The pond resembles the ponds situated in the middle of the yard of almost all traditional Iranian homes. In Iranian culture, along with others, water manifests itself in two rather opposite meanings: as a harbinger of knowledge and awareness and as a source of mystery. The poet goes to the edge of the pond in order to see the reflection of his loneliness in the water. However, water as a source of awareness, life and liveliness—connected in particular with fertility in the ancient Persian context through Anahita, the goddess of water—was nowhere to be found. There were fish, but no water. The representation of the fish recalls the Vedas—where a fish defines and depicts the Earth—and myths describing Sumerian deities as half man, half fish, one in particular in which two fish form human feet.58 In other myths of South Asia, Shiva (the Destroyer God in the Trimurti, triple deity of Hindu God head in addition to Brahma and Vishnu) once shared his wisdom with Parvati (the Hindu goddess of fertility, and the consort of Shiva), and a fish heard it and became a human sage. He in turn passed his wisdom to nine disciples, who then shared it with humanity.59 Meanwhile, in Europe, particularly Scandinavia, fish are a symbol of unwavering resilience. In China, fish symbolize unity and like-mindedness. And in Christianity, Christ is the fisherman of humanity and came to this world to offer salvation; the fish can be said to represent a people who, however resilient, have lost the path of salvation and are awaiting a savior. Tapping into these deeply rooted symbolic contexts, Sepehri’s fish also evokes a human form. At one moment, when it speaks, it refers to trees as also possessing human qualities; it says: “It is not the trees’ fault.” Like water and fish, trees carry a wealth of symbolic meanings in mythologies across the world. Some have been regarded as sacred. In ancient Persian mythology, for instance, the Hom tree contains the elixir of immortality. In Sepehri’s poem, the fish evokes the linkage between trees and immortality when it exonerates the trees from any and all blame. Its exoneration leaves the question: What is blamed? Are the trees to be blamed for not bestowing immortality? If so, to whom or to what should they have bestowed immortality? The poet goes on: ‌‌It was a sweltering summer noon. The bright son of the water, sat by the foot tub The eagle of the sun came and took him up, up in the air, forever.60

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

119

‌‌ my reading of this poem, “the bright son of the water” is a reference to Dr. In Mohammad Mosaddeq, the thirty-fifth prime minister of Iran who died just before the poem’s 1967 publication. A member of Iran’s ruling elite known for his truthfulness and resilience in his work on the nationalization of oil, Mosaddeq began working in the public service at a very young age as the treasurer of Khorasan province in the northeastern part of the country. In the aftermath of the CIA coup d’etat, he was not only overthrown, but was eventually sentenced to solitary confinement, and ultimately exiled in his village of Ahmedabad. The entire poem can be read as a eulogy of his life and death. Meanwhile, the following image of the “foot tub” goes on to recall the scene of the assassination of another prime minister who lived one hundred years earlier, Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani, Amir Kabir (d. 1852), or Amir Nizam (his military title), who played the role of a father and tutor to the sixteen-year-old nineteenth-century king, Nasiruddin Shah (d. 1896). Amir Kabir taught the young crown prince how to be a king and conduct the affairs of the state as “a modern ruler: assertive, educated, and disciplined.”61 Along with his role in advancing education, the press, a new system for taxes and distribution of income, Amir Kabir also encouraged domestic production, foreign trade, and radically modernized the Iranian army. He harnessed the influence of foreign powers in Iran, particularly of the British and the Russian, which turned him into a national hero.62 He also, however, curtailed the access and power of the undeserved members of the royal family, the Qajar, which made him a target of the same Shah who he had once mentored. As a result, he was banished; on January 10, 1852, upon the Shah’s order, he was secretly murdered at the foot tub in the bath house of the Royal Fin Garden, in Kashan. With the simple allusion to Amir Kabir, Sepehri’s verse moves back to Mosaddeq, who was denied a funeral and buried in the living room of his house, through the image of the “eagle of the sun” who took him up, up in the air, forever. In the Achaemenid era, both the eagle and the sun were symbols of royal power (the eagle has also been, since 1789, the national symbol of the United States, the symbols of the two forces that brought down the government of Dr. Mossadeq. Contextualizing the poem in the CIA coup d’état of August 19, 1953, a bloody event remembered by Iranians as the twenty-eighth of Mordad in the Persian calendar, offers an enhanced interpretation of the image of the eagle and the significance of Mosaddeq to the poem. As the 1953 coup brought down the popular government of Iran, restoring the autocratic monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the eagle snatched away the “bright son of the water” who had come to save Iran, taking him away forever. Mosaddeq was subsequently trialed and sentenced to three years in solitary confinement in a military prison, followed by exile and home-arrest. Upon hearing this sentence, he is reported to have said: “The verdict of this court has increased

120

Chapter 4

my historical glories.”63 In his long years of service, he had worked tirelessly to bring more power to the people and less to the king, not only in cutting the foreign hands from oil, but in establishing land reform laws and village councils to give peasants a bigger share of the production. During his mid years of service, he had once resigned, left the country, yet he had returned again to serve his people. Though many had longed for another return, this time from exile, it was clear that this trip had no return. The poem’s political slant is further complicated in the images of oxygen, light, and the red carnation in the following verses: ‌‌With this knowledge, the fish lamented: To hell if we did not discover a way to the oxygen of the water if the shine of our scales faded away, But that great light The reflection of that red carnation in the water The one whose heart, would break the walls of ignorance even in the wind Was our sight (eye). It was a window to the possibility of paradise.64 ‌‌ The oxygen level of the water is a sign of its quality, and oxygen deficiency a cause for distress for the fish. However, the poem indicates that the absence of that “great light,” the reflection of the red carnation, is even more difficult than suffocating from the shortness of oxygen. In addition, in some Christian legends, a carnation first appeared after Jesus’s crucifixion, growing from the tears Mary wept upon the cross.65 In the poetry of Federico García Lorca, whose writing, like Zambrano’s, was greatly influenced by the Spanish Civil War, the red carnation is also a metaphor of blood and injury and builds on the Catholic meaning of red carnation in poetry. In his “Poem of the Deep Song,” García Lorca refers to the image of Christ in agony, covered in blood and wounds, as the “carnation of Spain.”66 In other symbolic worlds the carnation has been used as an expression of love, fascination, and distinction. In this context, “the reflection of that red carnation in the water” can be read as the love of a nation in mourning; the vigilant eye of the people, the hero who had come to save Iran from the clutches of colonizers, was taken away. It is because of this tragedy that the fish speaks to the poet, sending a message through him: ‌‌If you see God in the heartbeat of the garden, Make an effort and say: “The fishes’ pond has no water.” The wind was going to meet up with the plane tree I went to meet up with God.67

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

121

‌‌ in the poem, in his life Sohrab went to deliver the message of the fish to As God. When, in April of 1980, shortly after the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution, he left this world, the Pahlavi regime was no longer in power. We, however, are still waiting, paralyzed, at the sight of the “train that carried jurisprudence, and how heavy it went” in the hope of the arrival of the “train that carried politics,” not knowing “how empty it went.”68 In 1980, Baldwin called the US rescue attempt at the height of the hostage crisis in Iran a hoax to get into another war. He labeled the so-called “energy crisis” an elegant phrase disguising the reality of what he called “losing your colonies, your slaves.”69 Baldwin knew far better than many a political analyst the “civilizing” and “democratizing” mission of the United States in Iran and in other parts of the world such as Cuba and Vietnam. In response to the question of “what do black people want?” Baldwin said: “I want to be able to raise my children in peace, and to arrive at my maturity in peace. I don’t want to be defined by you.” For his part, Malcolm X had wanted America to atone. Baldwin, however, asserted that the 60s were proof that the country was not capable of atonement; the world could not afford the greed that ruled the United States and the subsequent indifference toward human life that followed. Still, the critical comments that we saw earlier in this chapter toward both Sepehri and Baldwin’s work indicate the tendency of societies to reject the truth that poets bring forth. In spite of their social and political consciousness, their commitment to their communities was at first doubted and questioned, even as most of those comments were retracted later. Meanwhile, they both continued to fine-tune their poetic warnings about the way we see things. Sepehri taught that the world could not afford the greed and indifference toward what we simply reduce to “nature,” in addition to the indifference toward human life. Sepehri was awaiting the “discoverer of the mine of morning” as a point of attention to what the discovery of oil, gas, and other in ground “resources” had brought to the country and to the world. WATER: ECOPOETICS AS ECOPOLITICS Poetry and literature have always been a venue for expressing political views and a vehicle for political dissent and protest. The archetype of an ideal human in the colonized subaltern is often a revolutionary. That is because colonization in all its various and overlapping forms, and in addition to its economic exploitation and social and ecological disruption and destruction leave the colonized bereft of the sense of integrity, and a heightened yearning for freedom. One of the main characteristics of revolutionary poetry is the use of rhetoric. Sepehri’s poetics does not fit into what is commonly known as revolutionary poetry; rather, he integrates his verse with the works of the

122

Chapter 4

great poets—including mowlana Jalal u-Din Rumi, Sa’di, Baba Tahir Oryan, ‘Attar, as well as other poets of the West and of the Far East who also question the meaning of existence. At the same time, his poetry points to a clear rejection of hegemony and violence in all forms, illustrating the anguish of war, colonization, arrogance, male superiority and dominance, anthropocentrism, and ecological destruction, particularly of water sources. As an antidote to those conditions, he advocates harmony with nature and equilibrium with all beings. In a number of remarkable poems, Sepehri conveys his ecopolitics, revealing that he was not only avant-garde in his style of artistic expression, but also in his depth of political analysis and critical ideas. His connection to the deserts, hills, and fields on the outskirts of Kashan, where he spent much of his childhood and wandered as a young adult in search of solitude, is indubitably visible in all of his work. In spite of the local nature of his imagery, his ideas are not limited to Kashan or Iran. Rather, they offer a grand vision of the cosmos, calling for a reenvisioning of self and of the world in which we live and develop relationships. In so doing, he calls for far-reaching changes and a restructuring the way we view things. In a piece called “Sound of the Beginning” he writes: ‌‌I once spoke to the people of this region, from the widest of windows I did not hear a single word on the nature of time. No eye, was gazing lovingly upon the earth. No one was enchanted by the sight of a garden No one took a magpie in a farm seriously.70 ‌‌In industrial capitalist complex as a superior mode of production and accumulation, the Earth suffers, as no one gazes upon it lovingly, as it is viewed solely as a resource. Sepehri uses the imagery of a magpie, a bird with a high level of intelligence, who can recognize itself in the mirror. Yet, he laments that no one takes the magpie in the farm seriously, that things are out of place, and values are out of order, that the garden that was a place of enchantment, is no longer. He also points out that the nature of time is not realized. When describing his ancestry, Sepehri is fully aware that we—all humans, all beings—are connected in a present time that implicates the past. He writes: ‌‌My lineage, might go back To a plant in India, to an earthenware from Sialk, My lineage, might go back to a prostitute in the city of Bukhara.71 ‌‌ postulating that his lineage goes back to a plant in India or an earthenware By from Sialk he shatters the strict distinctions between his human-self and other

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

123

beings, animate and inanimate. By assuming the possibility of his ancestry going back to a “prostitute from Bukhara,” Sepehri connects his upper class, highly educated family status with what is often assumed as the lowest of all classes in most societies. Although his great grandfather was the famous historian/poet of Qajar era who wrote the Nasikh-al-Tawarikh, his grandmother a poet, and his mother an avid reader, he claims that he is also connected to what is viewed socially as the lowest of the low. In this manner, he points to the connectedness of all people and dismantles hierarchies of status. The I in the poets verse is usually a collective I. In that sense, the mention of his ancestry connection to a prostitute—which could be the lineage of any one of us—also links to his connectedness with his feminine side, on which he elaborates in his other pieces, as we saw in chapter 3. Continuing in the same poem, he reiterates that his roots are also always in nature. He describes himself as such: ‌‌In this house, I am close to the moist obscurity of the grass I hear the breath of the garden and the sound of darkness as it drizzles from a leaf . . . I am close to the beginning of the Earth. He takes the pulse of the flowers, is familiar with the wet destiny of water, and knows the green habit of the tree.72 ‌‌ one of his many proverbialized poems, titled simply “Water” (1967), he In takes on the role of a water protector at a time when very few people were aware that there was a water crisis: ‌‌Let’s not muddy the water: Perhaps down below, a pigeon is drinking water. Or in a faraway grove, a goldfinch washes its feathers. Or in a village a jug is getting filled. Let’s not muddy the water! This passing water, is going to the foot of a poplar, to wash away sorrow from a heart. The hand of a poor man, may be dipping a dried piece of bread in the water. A beautiful woman came to the river, Let’s not muddy the water! Beauty has been magnified. ‌‌ How fresh, this water! How clear, this river!

124

Chapter 4

The people up the hill are so pure . . . I have not seen their village No doubt, the foot of their tepees is the footsteps of God . . . People up the river, understand water They did not muddy it, we as well Let’s not muddy the water.73 ‌‌ many ways, the poem foresees the water crisis that surrounds the globe In today. Almost one-fifth of the world’s population currently live in areas of physical water scarcity, almost one quarter will face economic water shortage in the very near future, and nearly half could be facing water scarcity by 2030.74 In addition, more damage to water resources is bound to happen with the expansion of hydraulic fracturing or fracking—the process of extracting natural gas from deep shale rock formations—the construction of more dams, and other violent practices such as blast fishing. The majority of the world’s major dams, which often become the dumping place of factories, have been completed within the last eight decades without regard for their long-term and irreversible environmental impacts. For example, in 1960, the Koka Dam was erected across the Awash River, 75 kilometers east of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; scientific testing in 2003 reported that the deep green water of the Koka lake was contaminated with toxic waste, and high levels of chromium, iron, nickel, and lead were found in the watermelon grown around the lake.75 In Iran, half of the country’s provinces will become uninhabitable in the next fifteen years due to the extinguishing of water resources, particularly the drying up of important lakes.76 Lake Urmia, once the world’s second largest salt lake, has shrunk drastically, resembling the Aral Sea—between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—which started drying up in the 60s.77 Protests in 2011, with slogans like “Urmia is dying” and parliament “has ordered its execution,” brought attention to the threat that the exposed salt and its spreading to the surrounding area was cause for local agriculture and even the bordering countries.78 Reform in local agricultural practices—which used up 85 percent of the lake water—has helped slowly reverse the case, resulting in the slow return of the lake starting in 2013.79 In the United States, expansive pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline and other projects, continue to threaten water sources, particularly for Indigenous communities. In terms of contamination, a report in 2014 indicated that out of 1,322 superfund sites in the United States—sites of pollution rated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) involving hazardous contaminants, for example, from uranium or coal mines or aluminum facilities that leach PCBs and other contaminants into the ecosystem and local water sources—532 were located on Indian lands.80 Responding in part to this situation, the #NoDAPL movement in early 2016 intended to prevent

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

125

yet another major threat to water resources in Great Plains Indian Country (though not the first or only recent threat to water). Coalitions of Native and non-Native people successfully prevented the Keystone KL pipeline, which had the “potential to contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive but shallow and vulnerable underground water table that spans eight states, from South Dakota in the north to the Texas panhandle in the south, and yields approximately 30 percent of the nation’s ground water used for irrigation.”81 In the language of the Lakota, Mni wichoni, which means “water is life,” became the protest anthem against the DAPL, implying a spiritual connection to water as a living being, not simply a resource. The contention around the DAPL showed that water rights and water in the United States are complex and highly intertwined with Indian treaty rights, which are regulated through a doctrine established in 1908. In the past decade, several tribes have gained water rights through successful litigation. According to one study, GilioWhitaker reports that “13 percent of Alaska Natives and 25–40 percent of people on the Navajo Nation still rely on hauling water, . . . making them susceptible to water-borne diseases and . . . to increased vulnerability.”82 In Canada, one of the world’s most water-rich nations, many do not have adequate drinking water. Some have to drive several miles for clean water.83 It was in this manner that Sepehri viewed water in his poem by the same title. The reference to “mardom-e bala dast”—people up the hill—that we saw earlier were the original people of the land, not nation states or centers of power such as the United States, USSR, or Japan, as Akhavan had suspected. His concern for water and his plea for protecting it in poetry reflects his perception and awareness of the natural world. He reminds us to know our place in relation to it. In this succinct poem, he first expresses the importance of water not solely for human consumption by detailing that pure water is also a necessity for the pigeon who drinks it and for the goldfinch who uses it to wash its feathers. He then moves on to show the importance of water to people, depicting images of humans filling their jugs, along with trees and plants, depicted in a simple reference to water running to the foot of the poplar. As Sepehri lists the beings who depend on water, the spiritual role of water does not evade him. Ever so succinctly, he alludes to the importance of water in washing away sorrow from the heart. He then reminds the reader of the specific significance of clean water for the poor in the following verse: “Hand of a poor man might be dipping a piece of dried bread in the water.” In addition, his mention of beautiful women by the river recognizes the millions of women around the world who to this day have the burden of a long walk while carrying a heavy—at times 40 pounds—jug of water on their heads, often on difficult terrain. A study in 2016 reflects that in countries such as Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, for example, “an estimated 13.54 million women (and 3.36 million children) are responsible for water collection trips that

126

Chapter 4

take 30 minutes or longer. When the chore is a kid’s job, there’s still a major gender gap: 62 percent for girls versus 38 percent for boys.”84 In aboriginal cultures, women have a special relationship with water. Their attention to its spiritual significance means that they understand water to be “sentient with different levels of power and purpose.”85 To them, disrespecting water, or carelessness in managing our relationship with it, affects not only our physical health, but the spiritual well-being of the individual and the community.86 Sepehri’s succinct reference to such aspects in the politics and spirituality of water reflects a depth beyond many of his contemporaries in Iran and around the world. Without explicitly stating so, as is the way of the poet, he points to the iniquitousness of the colonial relationship and its effects on water. His writing is a poetic call to decoloniality. CENSORSHIP AND THE RED ROSE In a conversation with his friend, Kazem Tina Tehrani, in the last years of his life that was quoted in a study by Kamyar Abedi, Sepehri said, “There are more things to be said. It’s time. It must be said. . . . In poetry and in painting, one speaks only some of what must be said, not all of them.87 After Sepehri passed, Tina lamented his death, saying: “Such a loss. If he were still here, how much more of such enchantments there would be.”88 While Sepehri indicates that he cannot speak of all of what must be said, the ease and simplicity of his prose has led some to overlook the depth of its content, filled with metaphors and mysteries that say more than they seem to. Sepehri’s sophisticated use of metaphor allowed him to evade censorship in much of his work. The practice of censorship of the media and literature is applied differently in various parts of the world. As Baldwin once put it, “Dissent is unpatriotic everywhere . . . and there is more than one way to silence a dissenter.”89 In Iran, some level of censorship has been common since the beginning of the publication of the first newspaper, Kaghaz-e Akhbar (literally, News Paper), in the eighteenth century, and it was a reality when Sepehri wrote. Nonetheless, when Sepehri published “The Sound of Water’s Footfall” in the literary magazine Arash after the death of his father in the summer of 1964, which he dedicated to his “mother’s lonely nights,” there were no objections made to the verse: “the murder of a love-mad poet at the hands of the red rose.”90 However, around a decade later, when the collected works, Hasht Ketab, was to be published, he feared censorship, commenting that if they were to demand too many changes, he would refuse to publish it.91 In the end, the censor only suggested that he replace “gol-e sorkh” (red rose) in The Sound of Water’s Footfall with “gol-e yakh” (wintersweet).92

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

127

Sepehri’s sister, Paridokht Sepehri, relates that Sohrab—who never disparaged anyone—often smirked at the lack of sophistication of the censorship process. Although he fully understood the reason for the mandate that he change the original phrasing of the above verse, for instance, he remained astonished that his other poems, which should have been deemed suspect, were left unprobed. Why was the reference to “gol-e-sorkh” problematic? The issue can be better understood if we consider the incident that occurred a few years prior, in the winter of 1974, when young journalist and poet Khosrow Golesorkhi (1944–1974) was arrested and tried in a military court for conspiracy and subversion to overthrow the Pahlavi regime. The trial was broadcasted on Iranian National Television, and he began his defense with the recitation of poetry. At the time, I was in elementary school and watched it with my father, who was uncharacteristically glued to the TV set. As Amanat explains, “Even for those who did not sympathize with his ideology, Golesorkhi’s execution epitomized all that was wrong with the Pahlavi regime.”93 In Golesorkhi’s defense, the manifesto of a Marxist who had first learned about the ideals of social justice in Islam, he quoted Marx and contextualized the quote with a reference to “Imam Ali,” the son-in-law of the Prophet, and his son, “Imam Hossein,” both known as champions and martyrs of social justice, particularly within Shi’a Islam. He spoke about the White Revolution of 1963—which was advertised as a step toward modernization and the end of feudalism—and the subsequent land reform as an imperialistic plot promoting consumerism by creating a market for leftover goods and machinery. Asked to stick to his defense, Golesorkhi said: “I have nothing to say in defense of myself, rather, I am standing in defense of my people.”94 His fifteen minute speech in the military court, which can now be easily found on YouTube, and his bravery and courage throughout his imprisonment, trial, and execution, led to his reputation as the “Che Guevara of Iran.”95 As the thirty-year-old activist faced the firing squad, he requested not to be blindfolded. Thereafter, the very mention of his name, Golesorkhi (lit. from the red rose), was viewed as a threat to the regime. As a result, Sepehri’s verse, “the murder of a love-mad poet at the hands of the gol-e sorkh (red rose),” naturally caught the eye of the censor. Whereas in 1966, when the poem was first published, “gol-e sorkh” was just a red rose with its more common symbolic meanings, by the 1978 publication of Sepehri’s collected works, it was interpreted as expressing sympathy with political factions opposed to the regime.96 To appease the censors, Sepehri changed the verse to “the murder of a disheartened poet at the hands of the wintersweet.”97 Even as he accepted this minor change he was neither into submission, nor into mimicry. In the 70s, when his paintings were sold within the first couple of days of his gallery exhibit, he refused to produce replicas. He was not into mimicry. On

128

Chapter 4

one occasion, he accepted an order for painting murals for Tehran’s Central Bank, insisting that he determine their location. He produced four paintings, one of which depicted a cosmonaut suspended in space, holding a red apple.98 The other three were of tree trunks and belong to a series of his work that has been particularly celebrated in recent years.99 To decide where to put them, he carefully inspected the interior of the building before eventually deciding on a wall where there already stood a portrait of the Shah and the Queen, as was the norm. When the executive director expressed surprise by his choice, Sepehri simply stated: “These pictures can be hung anywhere, but my murals belong here.” His murals were installed on the very spot he had chosen.100 Another story relates that upon graduation from college, Sepehri, along with other top university graduates, were to have an audience with the Shah to receive a reward for their scholastic achievements. Knowing that Sepehri was an artist, the Shah asked him if he thought the art displayed in the palace was good. Sepehri replied simply: “No Sir,” a comment not presumed to be dissimilar to decrying the emperor’s new clothes. The Shah agreed: “I thought so myself.” These stories of Sepehri’s life and work confirm that he was neither submissive nor passive and that he valued truth above all else. TRAVELS, HAIKUS, AND PAINTINGS Sepehri was always busy carving himself, creating a better self. One of the ways in achieving this goal was travel. He travelled all over the world, by land whenever possible, even as he was known to be city-averse, as he preferred the beautiful fields of the outskirts of Kashan to living in New York, Paris, Tokyo, or Tehran. His flight from the city was a reflection of his affinity for nature and his delicate spiritual disposition. His travels were mostly related to his galleries and attending biennials, or for learning an art. For two years, between 1967 to 1969, his work was exhibited as part of the Smithsonian travelling tour. In 1970, he held a solo exhibit at the Elain Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, New York.101 It was during this time that he saw the possibility of learning and of progress in America. He wrote: “I am new here, but I know what I want, I have not come for the scent of democracy, and have not yet visited the Statue of Liberty.”102 While displaying his work, he regularly read literary and art magazines in French and English, which contributed to the knowledge of art that he shares in pieces like “Conversations with the Professor,” a critical survey of art history. Meanwhile, during a long stay in Japan to learn woodblock painting, he wrote his sister a letter in which he humorously criticized the kimono and Japanese sandals as quite uncomfortable. He was there to learn the art, and to learn about their culture, not to imitate or adopt a culture in-toto at the expense of forgetting his own, as some

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

129

have suggested. In all his journeys, especially the relatively long ones, he became an avid observer of deeper elements of the particularities of various cultures and he sought to build bridges between them. For example, in his twenties, he translated Japanese poetry to Farsi and published his translations of haikus. As Matthew Rohrer has pointed out “there is no such thing as the poem translated from one language into the next. There can’t be. What happens, rather than a translation, is that we get something like it, but written by the new person, the translator. There is just no way around it.”103 In a broader scope, poetry itself is innovation; it remains new every time one reads it. If such were not the case, poems would be forgotten at the time of their composition. As Reza Davari Ardakani writes, the poet is not concerned with conveying knowledge and philosophy, nor are they concerned with our behavior or morality, but rather, they reveal to us the possibilities of our existence. That is the task of the poet: to reveal, to unveil, and to express the inexpressible.104 As Sepehri’s work shows, the mind of the poet is that of the heart. It has a presence that should not be confused with or made null by philosophizing. Doing so will make it hollow and void of its meaning and value. It will see the corpse of the poem home, in that it has lost its value and it is no longer art.105 To speak of poetry as a political statement would surely have the same nullifying effect, as Sepehri seemed to know. As a childhood friend of his writes in his memoir: “Never did I hear him speak of any political party or movement. In truth, he was quite weary of politics.”106 In effect, the only direct reference Sepehri made to political affairs of the time in the text were three lines in his letter to that friend, which he wrote on January 16, 1958. Even that reads like a short essay on the importance and value of friendship, not like a political statement: “the signs of life may perhaps be eliminated from the fabric of the universe.”107 He ends the letter by saying: “I, like you, am yearning for a great revolution; a revolution to end all hardship and to instantly overturn the very basis of oppression and tyranny. But only God knows when this wish will come true. In the hope of witnessing such a day.”108 However, far from the change he hoped to witness, twenty-one years later, Sepehri saw Iran submerged in a revolt faced with violence. In the winter of 1978–1979, as security forces were deployed from Tehran to bring Kashan under control, he remembered that someone knocked on his door. When he opened the door, a man with bullet wounds fell into his arms. This event shook the fragile soul of the man who was utterly uneased at the suffering of insects.109 It was not long after that he left that house, for Tehran. Shortly after that, he became afflicted by extreme pain caused by what was later diagnosed as leukemia. The treatments in Tehran and London were ineffective, and on April 21, 1980, Sepehri passed away. Until the very last moment of his life, he had the yearning to return to Kashan to paint and write. His lifeless body,

130

Chapter 4

more frail than ever, was carried there for burial with only a few friends in tow. As we have seen, Sepehri’s language was simple, but enigmatic. In his poem entitled “To the Garden of Fellow Travelers,” he denounces the violence of war when he writes: ‌‌Put me to sleep, under a tree branch, far away from the night of the collision of the metals. Wake me up when the discoverer of the mine of the morning arrives! . . . Open me like a door To the age of the descent of the pear, in this age of the ascent of steel, Tell me about the bombs that were dropped, as I was asleep. Tell me about the cheeks, wet with tears, tell me how many ducks flew into the sky, from the face of the sea. In the scuffle, when the armored tanks ran over the child’s dream, To the foot of what feeling of tranquility did the canary tie its yellow string of melody. Tell me: What innocent goods arrived at the ports? What science uncovered the positive scent of the gunpowder?110 ‌‌ Weaving symbolism and reality in poetry, his succinct verses depict a vivid picture of the violence, unrest, death, and destruction of war. As if he were painting on a canvas, his images illustrate the calamity and injustice of war, particularly the tank running over the dream of the child and the ducks fleeing the sea in fear. In The Blue Room, Sepehri explains the symbolic meaning of the color yellow in various cultures—including that of China, or of Mali, or of Buddhist, and Christian traditions—and links it to the work of T. S. Eliot, where “yellow, is in the vicinity of sin.”111 Here, however, he draws connections to the seventeenth-century Japanese hokku master, Matsuo Basho (1644–1694), who, far from Eliot, listens to the harmony between the sound and the spring of sound: “Canary, calls its chick with a yellow melody.”112 In Basho’s verse, the violence of war left no tranquility for the canary, who was separated from its chick. Sepehri’s brief allusions to innocent goods arriving at trade ports and to the science which has discovered the positive scent of gunpowder bear witness to his view that war is more than just the responsibility of those who order the attack or are directly engaged in the fighting. Linking science with gunpowder, he calls into question the path and purpose of ever-progressing science and technology, which channel an astounding proportion of financial and natural resources into defense and military research. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

131

“annual spending on defense science and technology has ‘grown substantially’ over the past four decades from $2.3 billion in FY1978 to $13.4 billion in FY2018 or by nearly 90%.”113 In his poem, Sepehri invites us to reexamine the entire system of thought and action that supports the war machine. His verse is not an attack on science, but rather a denunciation of our uncritical deference toward it. He questions the sacral quality that modern science has attained even as it has brought the world to the brink of destruction. Likewise, Sepehri does not denounce a specific war or party while defending another. Rather, he denounces the entire worldview that enables and supports aggression and tyranny, including the science that not only enables but glamorizes such aggression. The politics of resistance in the work of Sepehri is not reflected in an ideological fashion, but rather, is expressed in a systemic web of relationships that rejects hegemony, subjugation, and control. If we understand politics as a series of relations and conventions between all living beings in the cosmos, then Sepehri’s work is highly political and engaged in a discourse that is anticolonial, anti-hegemonic, gender-equal, and bio-centric. His vision of existence is not confined to social relations and conventions and not limited to any given particular location. In contrast to the idea that human beings are to be considered supreme or have dominion over the rest of the cosmos, he envisions an alternative system governing our relationship with all beings, from the star to the toad, quail, starling, and tree. His expression is simple, yet enigmatic, and it is this that makes it timeless, universal, and inspiring. It is Sepehri’s simple, timeless style that continues to inspire artists today. For instance, prominent Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami draws heavily on the aesthetics of modern Persian poetry, particularly Sepehri and Farrokhzad (1935–1967), in the poetic style of his work. As Khatereh Sheibani describes: “In the midst of dramatic transformations of his society during the revolution or the war with Iraq, Kiarostami trains his camera on simple matters such as a toothache—in Toothache—or the notion of duty and assignment—in Home-work . . . His focus of attention is, unlike many other Iranian filmmakers, genuine human feelings translated into the language of images, not seemingly external affairs such as politics. It is this focus on matters of universal human concern that makes his films a form of art, free from any location or time.”114 This is the key feature of Sepehri’s poetry, as Farrokhzad agrees when describing his friend in an interview: “He was not like any other . . . [he was] vast [and] different . . . [he] did not speak of a particular city or of particular time or a specific nation, but rather of all of humanity and of all of life; this is what made him vast.”115 In his global vision, Sepehri saw the dark times and described them for us: ‌‌It’s been a while in this corner of glum air

132

Chapter 4

every bit of glee has died there is no movement in this darkness Hands and feet, all in the tar of night.116 ‌‌ Rather than engage in the liberation of the country, politics, ideological tribalism, armed struggle, or underground political manifestos, he focused on self-cultivation and resisting and awakening through art and poetry. Like Mawlana Rumi and the other giants of Persian literature, he aimed to sever “ill words from the tongues,” “uproot walls,” and “tie the eyes with the sun.”117 Drawing on his experience as a traveler, he called all to action: ‌‌Listen, the path, beseeches your steps, from afar Your eyes are not an adornment for the darkness Shake off the dust from your eyelids, put on your shoes, and come And come to the place, where the feathers of the moon exhort your fingers.118 ‌‌ invitation to transformation, these verses urge the reader to step away An from being passive and stagnant. Calling us to awareness, Sepehri points to the actual function of the eye: to see reality, not to stay in the darkness of Plato’s cave. His inclination toward social justice appears in the following verses from a piece titled “A Message on its Way”: ‌‌Someday, I shall come, and I shall bring a message. I will pour light in the veins, And I will call out: Oh, you, with baskets full of sleepiness, I brought apples, red apples of the sun . . . I shall tell the blind man: “What a sight the garden is!” . . . A passerby will muse: “it sure is a dark night!” I will give him a galaxy. On the bridge, there is a little girl, with no legs, I shall string a constellation of stars around her neck. I shall take away all curses off the lips, I shall tear down all walls.119 ‌‌ Sepehri’s attention to the poor and the disadvantaged, to administering joy in place of sadness and hope instead of despair, is central to The Green Expanse where the above poem appears. It was also central in his daily practice of life. This inclination was not motivated by a political or ideological tendency, rather, it was inspired by his awareness of the cosmological connection between all beings. He was well aware of the consciousness of water and

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

133

plants, believed in the “memory of the pine tree” and in the “melancholic intelligence of vegetation.” He “found the path of life” through his guide, “the hoopoe” of ‘Attar’s Conference of the Birds.120 He came from “the vicinity of a tree” and was searching for “the hidden seed of a mysterious song.”121 Sepehri’s poetry became that song, with immeasurable effects. That is because poetry is not simply a reflection of the poet’s disposition or persona. It is most powerful when the poet is transformed into a mirror reflecting the truth of society and the state of social order or its disarray. It is in this manner that the poet is a witness. Poetry must be heard, even as what it conveys may be ominous and foreboding. The testimony of the poet cannot be null and void. This is the secret to the endurance of poetry, its resistance to the test of time.122 In a piece titled “Behind the Seas,” Sepehri reiterates his despair with contemporary society: ‌‌I shall build a boat I shall set sail I shall go far away from this strange land, In which no one, awakens the heroes in this grove of love.123 ‌‌ a short autobiography he wrote: “when you travel to the borders of beauty, In halfway through, you cannot contain your euphoria, you return to tell of what you have seen, and art appears. Let it be, go far. Carry the onus of witnessing to the end.”124 His voice is not of despair. Although the Hasht Ketab begins with “It is of late in this loneliness,” it ends with “Morning will come.” NOTES 1. See Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (New York: Crown, 2020), 95. Here, Eddie Glaude is quoting Albert Murray, Henry Louis Gates, Eldridge Cleaver, and unnamed critics of Baldwin. 2. Glaude, 93. Hilton Als’s critique of Baldwin. 3. Baldwin, No Name. 105. 4. Houman Sarshar, “Sohrab Sepehri,” Encyclopedia Iranica, August 15, 2009, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/sepehri-sohrab. 5. Siahpoosh, ed. Bagh-e Tanhayi [The Garden of Loneliness], 321 (text in Farsi). 6. Siahpoosh, Bagh-e Tanhayi, 326. 7. See Aria Fani, “A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli,” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 523–52. Fani cites Reza Baraheni and Parviz Mohajer’s critique of Sepehri. 8. Fani, 540.

134

Chapter 4

9. James Baldwin, No Name, 104. 10. Mario Puzo, review of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, by James Baldwin, New York Times, June 23, 1968. Another critic wrote that perhaps Baldwin “gives us propagandist fiction, a readable book with a positive social value” because he thinks that “this is not tactically the time for art, that polemical fiction can help the Negro cause more, that art is too strong, too gamy a dish for a prophet to offer now.” The critic ends his piece with this statement: “perhaps it is not time for Baldwin to forget the black revolution and start worrying about himself as an artist, who is the ultimate revolutionary.” 11. Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (lecture, Community Church, New York, NY, 1963). Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dU0g5fAA2QY&ab_channel=-stellla-. 12. Baldwin, No Name, 56–57. 13. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 57. 14. Oscar Romero, Violence of Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,1988), 56–69. 15. Sepehri, “Soure-ye Tamasha,” Hasht Ketab, 374. 16. Paridokht Sepehri, ed., Hanouz dar Safaram, 15. 17. “James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley: A Legendary Debate from 1965” at Cambridge University, titled “American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro,” YouTube Video https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ&t=619s&ab_channel=AeonVideo. 18. Baldwin Debate vs. William Buckley. 19. Baldwin Debate vs. William Buckley. 20. The transatlantic slave trade enslaved people from Africa and brought them to the colony of Virginia as indentured servants before pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock (1620) and before Puritans arrived at Salem (1629). 21. See Steve Ekwall, “The Racist Origins of US Gun Control,” accessed September 21, 2021, https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/29093/the-racistorigins-of-us-gun-control.pdf; Rachel F. Moran, “Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage,” Hofstra Law Review 32, issue 4, art. 22. Ekwall describes the race-based total gun and self-defense ban (1940, Virginia) that prohibited black people, slave and free, from carrying weapons including clubs. Moran writes that the first colonial anti-amalgamation law was enacted in Maryland and stipulated that any white man or woman who married a black or a mixed race person would be banished from the colony forever. Other colonies soon followed. The law was in place till 1967 with the case of Loving v. Virginia. The Christian Baptism Law of 1667 in Virginia prevented Christian baptism from changing the status of a black or an Indian. The 1682 racialization law established racial distinction between servants and slaves, separating poor white and poor black people. Immediately following the ratification of the thirteenth amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery in the United States, the Jim Crow Law legalized racial segregation with the ratification and enforcement of a set of state and local statutes that legalized denying African Americans the rights to vote, hold jobs, and get an education. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow faced arrest, fines, and

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

135

jail sentences or were met with violence and even death. These laws lasted for one hundred years, until 1968. 22. See Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, et al., “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed,” New York Times, May 24, 2021, accessed September 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html. A hundred years ago a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the Black Wall Street, was destroyed by a white mob. The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 burned more than 1,250 homes and killed hundreds of residents, erasing years of black success. Medgar Evers, WWII veteran and civil rights activist, was assassinated for his efforts in ending segregation at the University of Mississippi. Malcolm X was assassinated for advocating black empowerment. Dr. King, the leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, was assassinated for dreaming for the civil and economic rights of black people. 23. Baldwin, No Name, 29. 24. Baldwin, No Name, 24–25. 25. Baldwin, No Name, 36–37. 26. Massud Farzan, “The Neo-Sufic Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri,” Books Abroad 47, no. 1 (winter 1973): 85. 27. Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Gharbzadegi [Weststruckness] (California: Mazda Publishers, 1983), 14. 28. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978), 13. 29. Mahmoud Darwish, “Antithesis,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2005, https://mondediplo.com/2005/01/15said. 30. Said, 207. 31. Gustave Flaubert, “Lettre a Louise Colet,” Correspondence, 1853. See Lisa Lowe, “Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert,” in Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, 75–101 (Cornell University Press, 1991), http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g5rk.6. 32. Lila, Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567256. 33. Darwish, “Antithesis.” 34. Darwish, “Antithesis.” 35. Blint, Rich, and Nazar Buyum, “‘I’m Trying to Be as Honest as I Can,’ An Interview with James Baldwin,” James Baldwin Review, 1, 2015, 112–29. 36. Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017), 679. 37. Amanat, Iran, 678. 38. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pay-ye Ab. 39. Sepehri, “Az Abha be ba’d,” [“From Waters Onward”], Hasht Ketab, 424. 40. Amanat, Iran. 41. Amanat, Iran. 42. Amanat, Iran. 43. M. G. Majd, Iran Under Allied Occupation in WWII: The Bridge to Victory and a Land of Famine (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2016), 403–7.

136

Chapter 4

44. Majd, Iran. 45. Majd, Iran. 46. Parviz Mina, “Oil Agreements in Iran: 1914–1978,” Encyclopedia Iranica, July 20, 2004, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/oil-agreements-in-iran. 47. John H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, vol. 2, The Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928–1954 (Cambridge, 1982), 325. 48. Amanat, Iran, 520. 49. Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: The New Press, 2007), 125. 50. Dabashi, Iran, 127. 51. Dabashi, Iran, 126–27. 52. See Behnam M. Fomeshi, The Persian Whitman: Beyond a Literary Reception (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2019), 167. In 1940, Ehsan Tabari (1917–1989), an Iranian philosopher and poet and founding member of the Tudeh Party, translated Whitman into Persian, associating him with leftist ideology. After the US organized the 1953 coup d’etat, cultural measures to fight against the Soviet Union in Iran led to the translation of about eight hundred books between 1954–1979, among them a mystical (apolitical) translation of Whitman. 53. Dabashi, Iran, 126. 54. Sepehri, “Be Bagh-e Hamsafaran” [“To the Garden of Fellow Travelers”], 394. 55. Sepehri, “Peygham-e Mahi-ha” [“The Message of the Fish”], Hasht Ketab, 355–57. 56. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi [The Blue Room], 50. 57. Sepehri, “Peygham-e Mahi-ha,” [“The Message of the Fish”]. 58. Arefe Sarami and Bahar Mokhtarian, “Pisces and Iranian Two-Symbolic-Fish Pattern, Herati: A Structural Analysis of Iconographic Symbols and Metaphorical Expressions of Bicorporal Fish Pattern,” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2015). 59. Devdutt Pattanaik, Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols, and Rituals, from the Heart of the Subcontinent (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003), 132. 60. Sepehri, “Peygham-e Mahi-ha” [“The Message of the Fish”]. 61. Amanat, Iran, 250–51. 62. Dabashi, Iran, 50–51. 63. Welles Hangen, “Mossadegh Gets 3-Year Jail Term,” New York Times, December 22, 1952. 64. Sepehri, “Peygham-e Mahi-ha” [“The Message of the Fish”]. 65. Natalia Tyshchenko, “Symbolic Meanings of Phytonyms in the English and Ukrainian Languages,” Widening Our Horizons, April 2018, vol. 1, 83, http://ir.nmu. org.ua/handle/123456789/154245?show=ful. 66. Antonio Pamies Bertrán and Daniela Natale, “Floral Symbolism in Creative Metaphors and in Phraseology,” Grandl, Ch. & McKenna, K., et al., eds., Bis dat, qui cito dat: Gegengabe in Paremiology, Folklore, Language and Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015), 305–18. 67. Sepehri, “Peygham-e Mahi-ha” [“The Message of the Fish”]. 68. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall].

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

137

69. “SCETV ‘James Baldwin’ 1988,” January 26, 2018, YouTube video, 0:14:21, accessed September 19, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaoaEAE27lo&ab_ channel=AlkebulanNationTV. Video shows Baldwin speaking at group protesting federal budget cuts in 1980. 70. Sepehri, “Neda-ye Aghaz” [“The Voice of the Beginning”], Hasht Ketab, 391. 71. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. Sialk is an area outside of Kashan located between two hills that were the sites of the oldest settlements identified in that region, going as far back as the fifth millennium BCE. 72. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab. 73. Sepehri, Ab [Water], 345–47. 74. Report on International Decade for Action “Water for Life” 2005–2015, accessed on September 19, 2021, http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml. 75. People & Power, aired February 21, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=j3vvy8xsqeM; Assefa Tefera Dibaba, “Eco-poetics of Place: Reclaiming Finfinne, Past and Present,” in Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, ed. John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021). 76. People & Power, aired November 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VPIMoiiIU6U&ab_channel=AlJazeeraEnglish. 77. “World of Change: Shrinking Aral Sea,” NASA Earth Observatory, accessed November 20, 2021, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/AralSea. 78. Peter Schwartzstein, “The Return of a Once-Dying Lake,” BBC: Future Planet, February 25, 2021, accessed November 20, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/future/ article/20210225-lake-urmia-the-resurrection-of-irans-most-famous-salt-lake. 79. “Lake Urmia,” NASA Earth Observatory, accessed on November 20, 2021, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/84116/lake-urmia. Earth observatory images of Urmia lake show a slow improvement of the lake. 80. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 68. 81. Gilio-Whitaker, 84. 82. Gilio-Whitaker, 85. 83. “Dozens of Canada’s First Nations Lack Drinking Water: ‘Unacceptable in a Country so Rich,’” The Guardian, April 30, 2021, accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/30/ canada-first-nations-justin-trudeau-drinking-water. 84. Vicky Hallett, “Millions of Women Take a Long Walk with a 40-Pound Water Can,” NPR, July 7, 2016, accessed October 1, 2021, h t t p s : / / w w w. n p r. o rg / s e c t i o n s / g o a t s a n d s o d a / 2 0 1 6 / 0 7 / 0 7 / 4 8 4 7 9 3 7 3 6 / millions-of-women-take-a-long-walk-with-a-40-pound-water-can. 85. Gilio Whitaker, 85. 86. Kim Anderson, Barbara Clow, and Margaret Haworth-Brockman, “Carriers of Water: Aboriginal Women’s Experiences, Relationships, and Reflections,” Journal of Cleaner Production 60 (2013): 11–17.

138

Chapter 4

87. Kamyar Abedi, Do Resaleh Darbare-ye Sohrab Sepehri [Two Treatises on Sohrab Sepehri] (Tehran: Entesharat-e Baztab-e Negar, 1387 HS/2008 AD), 83 (text in Farsi). 88. Abedi, 83. 89. James Baldwin National Press Club Speech, 1986. You Tube Video. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_1ZEYgtijk&ab_channel=thepostarchive. 90. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall], Arash 2, issue 3, 1344 HS/1965 AD. 91. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 99. Gol-e Sorkh is literally red flower. I have translated it here as red rose. 92. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 99. 93. Amanat, Iran, 661, 662. Golesorkhi was a member of an urban guerilla struggle called Fada’iyan-e Khalq. Between 1970–1978 they lost 198 of their members, 169 men and 29 women. 94. “The Trial of Khosrow Golesorkhi (1974),” May 13, 2020, YouTube video, 0:15:07, accessed on September 18, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=utMxG0A1ERY&ab_channel=Zarghami-ez. 95. Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran (New York: Anchor Books, 2009). 96. Amanat, Iran, 661, 662. Some historians and political theorists are of the opinion that Golesorkhi’s Marxist-Leninist ideology—and his execution, along with that of his comrades, was a spark igniting the 1978–1979 Revolution. 97. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 99. 98. Space exploration, and moon expedition in 1968–1969 was a new frontier in the world imagination. Sepehri’s depiction of the astronaut holding an apple might be a subtle critique of the colonizing enterprise in this next frontier. 99. One of his paintings was sold at an auction in Tehran for $860,000. “Sohrab Sepehri Tree Trunk Paintings Lead Tehran Auction,” Tehran Times, May 28, 2016. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/402928/ Sohrab-Sepehri-Tree-Trunk-paintings-lead-Tehran-Auction. 100. Paridokht Sepehri, Sohrab, 90. 101. Sarshar, “Sohrab Sepehri,” Encyclopedia Iranica. 102. Dianoush, 86. 103. Matthew Rohrer, “Translations from Hafiz,” The American Poetry Review, vol. 41, no. 6, 2012, p. 152. 104. Reza Davari Ardakani, She’r o Hamzabani [Poetry and Affinity] (Tehran: Rasta, 1392 HS/2013 AD), 35 (text in Farsi). 105. Davari Ardakani, Sha’eran dar Zamane-ye Osrat [Poets at the Time of Adversity] (Tehran: Entesharat-e Nil, 1350 HS/1971 AD) (text in Farsi). 106. Filsoufi, 61. 107. Filsoufi, 22. 108. Filsoufi, 23. 109. Filsoufi, 40. 110. Sohrab Sepehri, “Be Bagh-e Hamsafaran” [“To the Garden of Fellow-Travelers”].

Poetry, Politics, Social Justice, and Resistance

139

111. Sepehri, Otaq-e Abi, 20–21. 112. See “Matsuo Basho Poems,” My Poetic Side, accessed November 8, 2021, https://mypoeticside.com/poets/matsuo-basho-poems. Hokku and haiku are not the same. Hokku poems are 5–7–5 with an addition from another poet of 7–7. Haiku poems are 5–7–5 without addition from another poet. 113. Steven Aftergood, “A Profile of Defense Science and Tech Spending,” Secrecy News (blog), February 22, 2018, accessed January 9, 2020, https://fas.org/blogs/ secrecy/2018/02/defense-sci-tech/. 114. Khatereh Sheibani, “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 4 (December 2006): 537–38. 115. Kamyar Abedi, Tapesh-e Saye-ye Doost [The Tenor of the Friend’s Voice] (Tehran: Kamyar Abedi, 1377 HS/1998 AD), 130 (text in Farsi). 116. Sepehri, Hasht Ketab, 11. 117. Sepehri, “Va Payam-i Dar Rah” [“And a Message on Its Way”], Hasht Ketab, 338–39. 118. Sepehri, “Shab-e Tanhayi-ye Khoub” [“The Good Night of Loneliness”], Hasht Ketab, 371–72. 119. Sepehri, “Payam-i Dar Rah” [“A Message on its Way”], Hasht Ketab, 338. 120. See “Simorg,” Encyclopedia Iranica, accessed March 19, 2019, http://www. iranicaonline.org/articles/simorg. In ‘Attar’s Manteq u-Teir [Conference of the Birds], Hoopoe, the wisest of all the birds, serves as a guide to many in search of the great Simurgh. In Persian mythology Simurgh, often equated with huma or phoenix, is the king of the birds with a hundred thousand veils living in mount Ghaf. When thirty birds out of millions manage to complete the arduous journey to find their king and reach the place of Simurgh, they realize that they are one and the same as the Simorgh (literally Si thirty Murgh birds). 121. Sepehri, “Mosafer” [“Traveler”], Hasht Ketab, 301–27. 122. Davari Ardakani, “Sha’ere Shabe Siahe Ghorbate Shahre Sangestan,” Name-ye Farhang, no. 29, 1377 HS/1998 AD, 113 (text in Farsi). 123. Sepehri, “Posht-e Darya-ha” [“Behind the Seas”], Hasht Ketab, 362. 124 Paridokht Sepehri, ed., Hanouz dar Safaram [I Am Still Travelling] (Tehran: Farzan, 1380 HS/2001 AD), 85 (text in Farsi).

Conclusion

In Who Am I and Who Are You? Gadamer writes about Paul Celan’s poems. He affirms that they “reach us, and yet we miss them.” Gadamer adds that Celan “himself understood his work as a message in a bottle.” When someone found and read his message, Gadamer wrote, even though they were convinced that they were receiving some sort of communication, they were left wondering: “What sort of communication is it? What does it say?”1 Like Celan, Sepehri’s poetry is a message in a bottle. He also embodies the Latin term, poeta doctus [learned poet]; his work presupposes the knowledge expressed in the works of his predecessors, pointing to them while leaving them implicit, unspoken. His poetic strength is founded on his detailed reading and understanding of the classical literature of Iran and of the world, expressing it in a new amalgam of meaning-making: in a new verse that shares a new interpretation of both revelation and salvation. His language appears simple; at first glance, his poetry seems accessible to people of every level of learning and education. Yet, its rich symbolic network and encryptions entail layers of meanings, which make it at the same time almost illegible and obscure even for the erudite. In reading and reflecting on Sepehri’s work, I have made an attempt to clarify some areas that have remained unclear in some previous interpretations by focusing on the significance of his knowledge of world religions—including their sacred texts, cultures and practices—in his verse. In introducing Sepehri by way of juxtaposing him with James Baldwin, I have conveyed the centrality of their shared emphasis on decoloniality and their opposition to idolatry to their mission as poet/artists. In spite of their very different backgrounds, both artists built their work on love and on an authentic way of knowing the world based on a deeper, interconnected knowledge of the self. Looking at Sepehri and Baldwin in the twenty-first century cannot be done without contextualizing their art in our conflict-laden era. The spirit of protest that has characterized the last two decades—including the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park protests, the Umbrella Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Green 141

142

Conclusion

Movement, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the Me Too Movement, and more—resonates with the spirit of resistance found in both of their works. However, resistance to injustice for Sepehri and for Baldwin did not take the form of revolutionary acts or joining specific opposition movements. Rather, it manifested in their self-development and in becoming exemplars of wisdom and goodness. Examining and perfecting their souls and the integrity of their art was their way of being active and alive in the world. Through their art, both worked to decolonize ways of thinking. The layers of depth in Sepehri and Baldwin’s works and their immediacy for our time has yet to be fully understood. Reflected in their commitment to resistance, their pen was at the service of social justice. A repository of liberation, their respective voices and works do not age. Reading Baldwin through the common interpretive focus on issues of race and sexuality only scratches the surface of his commitment to social justice issues. In response to a question about Giovanni’s Room, he emphatically declared that “it is not about homosexuality at all,” but rather “about what happens to you if you can’t love anybody. . . . If you can’t love anybody, you are dangerous. You have no way of learning humility, no way of learning that other people suffer, no way of learning how to use your suffering and theirs to get from one place to another. In short you have failed your responsibility, which is to love each other.”2 Just as the theme of sexuality opens up to address larger questions on love and social injustice, the theme of race functions to question a broader structure of power: “Once you examine what the word racial means, after all, everybody is a race of one kind or another, we are not talking about racial prejudice, we are talking about structure of power, the structure of power which has the right and duty to tell other people who they are, for very dubious reasons, . . . it has nothing to do with race.”3 Both Baldwin and Sepehri observed that the political vocabulary of their age did not serve society. Instead of focusing on specific issues, they sought to broaden their scope and treat what they believed to be the core of social malaise. However, the panic-stricken attitude they witnessed during their time has continued to be exacerbated by wars being waged in the name of eradicating war and violence employed in the name of exterminating violence. In this sense, reading them today is more important than ever. Through Baldwin and Sepehri, this book aims to point to the role that poets play in rewriting history and changing the moral climate. As Baldwin wrote: “only poets . . . since they must excavate and recreate history, have ever learnt from it.”4 By poets, he did not mean those who write harmonious verse, but rather those who see the world anew and who guide and who warn us of its condition. Sepehri was such a poet, specifically an ecopoet, who exposed the idols of modernity: consumerism and militarism, in both his work and in his life. He expressed fear in relation to “the cement surface

Conclusion

143

of the century,” “the cities whose dirt is the pasture for bulldozers,” and “the age of ascent of steel.”5 It is regrettable that his time was short and that he did not get to say more. Sepehri manifested the values he evoked in his art through his life. He never spoke ill of anyone, was simple, and exemplified goodness; he lacked pretense and conceit. He called for us to also “be simple” in our everyday actions: ‌‌Let us be simple, Whether at a counter of a bank, Or under a tree.6 ‌‌As his writing shows, Sepehri did not limit himself to the local/national boundaries of one religion, culture, or geographic milieu. Throughout his work, he reflected a cohesive and consistent philosophy, rooted in tradition, yet offering a new universal hermeneutic of the human condition through the means of critique, commitment, and engagement and with the goal of liberation. To borrow the words of Maria Zambrano, Sohrab Sepehri was “the ratio-poetic, . . . the ‘new’ philosopher who is able to overcome the ‘violence’ of classical metaphysics and the voluntarist ‘spirit’ of modern metaphysics.”7 He was acquainted with “the stark passing of moments.” He knew “the perplexed ticking of time, in the twilight of life,” and he understood closed doors, “the keys to which had disappeared in the distant darkness.”8 He saw the path in a struggle that freed him from his nightmarish fear of life. He took his youthful soul on many a journey around the Earth while pondering deep into his being. “Wherever the flowers of reverence grew,” he picked them.9 Like the water lily, he grew out of muddied waters, clean and pure, “vast, lonesome, modest, and firm.”10 The decolonialist slant of Sepehri’s poetry is a call to expand our understanding of knowledge and ways of knowing to include the viewpoints of those on the periphery. I end this book with a piece from his poem titled “Behind the Seas,” which offers a description of his utopia. To arrive there requires building a boat, setting sail, and leaving the strange land in which no one awakens the saviors in the grove of love: ‌‌Behind the seas there is a town Where the windows are open to epiphany. The rooftops are the place of the doves who are watching the fountain of human intelligence. In the hands of every ten-year old child in the town, there is a bough of wisdom. . . . The soil hears the melody of your emotion,

144

Conclusion

And the wind brings the sound of the mythical birds. Behind the seas there is a town In which the grandeur of the sun is as great as the eyes of the rising-early. The poets are the inheritors of water, of wisdom, and of light. Behind the seas there is a town. One must build a boat.11 NOTES 1. Hans Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: Who Am I and Who Are You? And Other Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 63. 2. Baldwin, “Civil Rights,” interview by Mavis Nicholson, February 12, 1987, YouTube video, 0:16:52–0:17:21, accessed November 26, 2021, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=3Wht4NSf7E4&t=609s. 3. Baldwin, “Civil Rights,” 0:12:17–0:12:48. 4. Baldwin, No Name, 24–25. 5. Sepehri, “Be Baq-e Hamsafaran” [“To the Garden of Fellow Travelers”]. 6. Sepehri, Seda-ye Pa-ye Ab [The Sound of Water’s Footfall]. 7. Qtd. in Alberto Santamaria, “Poetry and Realization,” 94. 8. Sepehri, “Tanin” [“Reverberation”], Hasht Ketab, 125. 9. Sepehri, “Shouram Ra” [“My Fervor”]. 10. Sepehri, “Mosafer” [“Traveler”]. 11. Sepehri, “Posht-e Darya-ha” [“Behind the Seas”].

Appendix October 6

1928

Timeline of Sepehri’s work Birth

1951

Publication of his first collection of poems, Death of Color.

1953

Participated in a number of galleries in Tehran. Publication of his second collection of poems, Life of Dreams.

September 1955

Publication of his translation of a number of Japanese poems into Farsi (in the magazine, Sokhan)

July

1957

Travel to Europe (Paris and London) through land.

March

1958

Participated in first Biennial in Tehran. Two-month long trip from Paris to Rome. Participated in Venice Biennial.

March

1960

Participated in second Tehran Biennial.

July

1960

Trip to Tokyo, Japan.

1961

Trip to India on his route back from Japan.

April

1961

Solo exhibition at Talar-e Abbasi, Tehran. Publication of another collection of poems, Torrent of Sun. Publication of another collection of poems, East of Sorrow.

May

1962

Solo exhibition at Talar-e Farhang, Tehran.

December 1962 1963

Second Solo exhibition at Talar-e Farhang, Tehran. Participated in a group exhibition at Gilgamesh Gallery, Tehran.

145

146

June

Appendix

1963

Solo exhibition at Golestan Film Studio, Tehran. Participated in Biennial in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Participated in a group exhibition of contemporary Iranian art at Port of LeHavre museum, France. Participated in a group exhibition at Niala Gallery, Tehran. Solo exhibition at Saba Gallery, Tehran.

1964

Trip to India (Bombay, Benares, Delhi, Agra).

1965

Participated in a group exhibition at Bourges Gallery, Tehran. Solo exhibition at the Bourges Gallery, Tehran.

1965

Publication of “The Sound of Water’s Footfall” in Arash. Trip to Europe (Munich and London).

1966

Trip to Europe (France, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Austria). Publication of “Traveler” in Arash Quarterly.

January

1968

Solo exhibition at Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran. Publication of Expanse of Green by Rozan Publishers. Sohrab Sepehri poetry event at Rozan Gallery. Participated in a group exhibition at Mes Gallery, Tehran.

May

1968

Participated in Contemporary Iranian Art exhibit at Goethe Institute, Tehran.

October

Appendix

August

147

1968

Participated in a group exhibit, Shiraz University, Shiraz.

1969

Participated in International Art Festival in France.

1970

Trip to the United States. Seven-month stay in Long Island, NY. Participated in a group exhibit in Bridgehampton, NY.

1971

Another trip to the United States. Solo exhibit at Benson Gallery, New York. Solo exhibit at Lito Gallery, Tehran.

1972

Solo exhibit at Sirus Gallery, Paris, France. Same solo exhibit moved to Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran.

1973

Another solo exhibit at Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran. Trip to Paris.

1974

Trip to Greece and Egypt.

December 1974

Participated in the first international art exhibit in Tehran.

1975

Solo exhibit at Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran.

May

1976

Participated in contemporary Iranian art exhibit, Switzerland.

May

1977

Publication of Hasht Ketab, with the addition of “We Nothing, We Gaze,” Tahouri Publishers, Tehran.

1978

Solo exhibit at Seyhoun Gallery, Tehran.

1979

Hasht Ketab reprinted.

May

148

Appendix

December 1979

Trip to London to seek treatment for leukemia.

February

1980

Return to Iran.

April

1980

Death at Pars Hospital in Tehran. Buried the next day in Kashan.

Bibliography

Abedi, Kamyar. Tapesh-e Saye-ye Doost [The Tenor of the Friend’s Voice]. Tehran: Kamyar Abedi, 1377 HS/1998 AD. Abedi, Kamyar. Two Treatises on Sohrab Sepehri. Tehran: Baztab Negar Publications, 1387 HS/2008 AD. Abu Zayd, Nasr. Rethinking the Qur’an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. Utrecht: Humanistic University Press, 2004. Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567256. Addas, Claude. “The Experience and Doctrine of Love.” Translated by Cecilia Twinch on behalf of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society for the Symposium at Worcester College, Oxford, May 4–6, 2002. Aftergood, Steven. “A Profile of Defense Science and Tech Spending.” Secrecy News (blog), February 22, 2018. Accessed January 9, 2020. https://fas.org/blogs/ secrecy/2018/02/defense-sci-tech/. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: CA, Stanford University Press, 1998. Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Aitken, Robert, and Michael Toms, “Zen Ethics.” In Buddhism in the West: Spiritual Wisdom for the 21st Century. Edited by Michael Toms, Thieh Nhat, and Dalai Lama XIV. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 1998. Ajani, Ashia. “Eight Black Eco-Poets Who Inspire Us: Contemporary Scribes Draw Links between Environmental Resilience.” Sierra (February 25, 2020). Al-e-Ahmad, Jalal. Gharbzadegi [Weststruckness]. California: Mazda Publishers, 1983. Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. Anderson, Kim, Barbara Clow, and Margaret Haworth-Brockman. “Carriers of Water: Aboriginal Women’s Experiences, Relationships, and Reflections.” Journal of Cleaner Production 60 (2013).

149

150

Bibliography

Arkoun, Mohammed. L’humanisme Arabe au IVe/Xe siècle, Miskawayh, Philosophe et Historien. Paris: Vrin, 1973. Arkoun, Mohammed. “The Notion of Revelation: From Ahl al-Kitāb to the Societies of the Book.” Die Welt des Islams 28, no. 1/4 (1988). Arkoun, Mohammed. Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers. London: Routledge, 1994. Arkoun, Mohammed. “Rethinking Islam Today.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 588 (July 2003). Arkoun, Mohammed, and John Bowden. “Is Islam Threatened by Christianity?” Cross Currents: Beyond Nation and Religion 45, no. 4, (winter 1995–96): 471. Attar, Farid u-Din. Tazkirat ul Awliya. Tehran: Safi Ali Shah Publisher, 1370 HS/1991 AD. Bahuguna, Rameshwar Prasad. “Religion and State in Eighteenth Century Rajasthan: Sawai Jai Singh and ‘Reformed’ Vaishnavism.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 74 (2013): 357. Baldwin, James. The Amen Corner: A Play. New York: Vintage International, 1968. Baldwin, James. “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” Lecture, Community Church, New York, 1963. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dU0g5fAA2QY&ab_channel=-stellla-. Baldwin, James. The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity. New York: Community Church, 1963. Baldwin, James. Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. Baldwin, James. “Conversation with R. H. Darden.” Aired April 1, 1968, on KPFK, 60 min. Accessed June 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Cs7DxbZnxhY&ab_channel=SecretTarotSecretTarotVerified. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. London: Michael Joseph, 1963. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: The Dial Press, 1963. Baldwin, James. Interview by Mavis Nicholson. Aired February 12, 1987. Accessed January 6, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3Wht4NSf7E4&ab_channel=ThamesTv. Baldwin, James. Interview with Nazar Büyüm in Istanbul in 1969. Qtd. in Eddie Glaude, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America And It’s Urgent Lessons For Our Own. New York: Crown, 2020. Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York: Dial Press, 1979. Baldwin, James. No Name in the Street. UK: Dial Press, 1972. Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. Dial Press, 1961. Baldwin, James. “The Price of the Ticket.” Accessed on November 1, 2021. http:// jamesbaldwinproject.org/AboutJBTopics.html. Baldwin, James. “To Crush a Serpent.” (1987). In The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Edited by Randall Kenan. New York: Vintage, 2010. Bamberg, John H. The History of the British Petroleum Company, vol. 2, The Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928–1954. Cambridge, 1982. Bertrán, Antonio Pamies, and Daniela Natale. “Floral Symbolism in Creative Metaphors and in Phraseology.” In Bis dat, qui cito dat: Gegengabe in Paremiology,

Bibliography

151

Folklore, Language and Literature. Edited by Grandl, Ch. and McKenna, K., et al. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015. Bible, New King James Version. https://www.bible.com/bible/114/GEN.1.NKJV. Blint, Rich, and Nazar Buyum. “‘I’m Trying to Be as Honest as I Can’: An Interview with  James Baldwin.” James Baldwin Review, vol. 1, 2015. Bonjean, Francois. “Quelques causes d’incompréhension entre I’Islam et l’Occident,” L’Islam et l’Occident. Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1947. Bradshaw, Corey J. A., et al. “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” Frontiers in Conservation Science (January 13, 2021). https://doi. org/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419. Bryson, J. Scott. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. University of Utah Press, 2002. Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment. Library of America, 2018. Carson, Rachel. Speech. “Exceeding Beauty of the Earth.” https://awpc.cattcenter. iastate.edu/2018/01/09/exceeding-beauty-of-the-earth-april-21-1954/. Chittick, William. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn ‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. Chittick, William. “The Religion of Love Revisited.” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 54 (2013). https://ibnarabisociety.org/the-religion-of-love-revisitedwilliam-chittick/. Accessed November 15, 2021. Chivian, Eric. “Environment and Health: 7. Species Loss and Ecosystem Disruption— The Implications for Human Health.” Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2001. “Civil Rights: James Baldwin Interview; Mavis on Four.” November 1, 2014. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3Wht4NSf7E4&ab_channel=ThamesTv. “Conversations with the Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin.” November 11, 2021. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=O6sFgaZBs-U&ab_channel=AfroMarxist. Cox, Harvey. The Market as God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Cudworth, Erika. Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Cyganiak, Sarah. “The Method of María Zambrano: An Analysis and Translated Selection of Essays Centered on the Concepts of the Word, the Person, Compassion and Love.” PhD diss. University of Michigan, 2011. Dabashi, Hamid. Iran: A People Interrupted. New York: The New Press, 2007. Dabashi, Hamid. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Daily, Gretchen, and Paul Ehrlich. “Global Change and Human Susceptibility to Disease.” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 21 (1996). Darwish, Mahmoud. “Antithesis.” Le Monde Diplomatique. January 2005. https:// mondediplo.com/2005/01/15said.

152

Bibliography

Davari Ardakani, Reza. Sha’eran dar Zamane-ye Osrat [Poets at the Time of Adversity]. Tehran: Nil Publishers, 1350 HS/1971 AD.  Davari Ardakani, Reza. “Sha’ere Shabe Siahe Ghorbate Shahre Sangestan.” Name-ye Farhang, no. 29 (1377 HS/1998 AD). Davari Ardakani, Reza. She’r o Hamzabani [Poetry and Affinity]. Tehran: Rasta, 1392 HS/2013 AD. Davary, Bahar. “‘King-Slaves,’ in South Africa: Shrines, Ritual, and Resistance.” In Monge, San Chirico, and Smith. Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. de Ros, Xon, and Daniela Omlor. The Cultural Legacy of Maria Zambrano. Modern Humanities Research Association, Legenda, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Descartes, Réne. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A Cress. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1998. Dianoush, Ilya. Berahne ba Zamin [Naked with the Earth]. Tehran: Morvarid Publishers, 1390 HS/2011 AD, 19, 195 (in Farsi). Dihlavi, Ḥasan Sijzi. Divan-i Ḥasan Sijzi Dihlavi. Edited by Masʿud ʿAli Maḥvi. Hyderabad: Ibrahimiyyah Press, 1934. Diouf, Sylviane. “What Islam Gave the Blues.” In Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College. June 17, 2019. Accessed on November 19, 2021. https://renovatio. zaytuna.edu/article/what-islam-gave-the-blues. “Dozens of Canada’s First Nations Lack Drinking Water: ‘Unacceptable in a Country so Rich.’” The Guardian, April 30, 2021. Accessed October 1, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/30/ canada-first-nations-justin-trudeau-drinking-water. Drexler-Dreis, Joseph. Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Ekwall, Steve. “The Racist Origins of US Gun Control.” Accessed September 21, 2021. https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/29093/the-racist-origins-of-us-guncontrol.pdf. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Persian Poetry.” The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1929. Encyclopedia Iranica. Accessed March 19, 2019. http://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/simorg. Ernst, Carl W. Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World. Chapel Hill and London: UNC Press, 2003. Espin, Orlando O. Grace and Idol: On Traditioning and Subversive Hope. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014. Excerpts from Rachel Carson’s speech to the sorority of women journalists, Theta, Sigma, Phi. “Exceeding Beauty of the Earth.” Columbus, OH, April 21, 1954. Accessed on November 21, 2021. https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2018/01/09/ exceeding-beauty-of-the-earth-april-21-1954/. Fakhry, Majid F. Ethical Theories in Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1994.

Bibliography

153

Fani, Aria. “A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli.” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 523–52. Farabi, Abu Nasr. al-Ta’liqat. Edited by Jafar Al Yassin. Tehran: Hekmat, 1371 HS/1992 AD. Farzan, Massud. “The Neo-Sufic Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri.” Books Abroad 47, no. 1 (winter 1973). Farzan, Massud. “Whitman and Sufism: Towards ‘A Persian Lesson.’” American Literature, 47 January, 1976. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Ferdowsi. Shahnameh. Tehran: Nashr-e Roozegar, 1379 HS/2000 AD.  Filsoufi, Mahmood. Hamkelasiam Sohrab. Tehran: Asim, 1385 HS/2007 AD. Fomeshi, Behnam M. The Persian Whitman: Beyond a Literary Reception. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2019. Futuhat. In Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God. Yale University Press, 2013. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who are You?” and Other Essays. Translated and edited by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. Gade, Anna M. Muslim Environmentalism: Religious and Social Foundations. New York: Colombia University Press, 2019. Gentic, Tania. “Rethinking the Cartesian Subject in Latin America and Spain: Decolonial Theory and María Zambrano’s Philosophy.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 16, no. 4 (2015): 415–35. Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019. Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Glaude, Eddie. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. New York: Crown, 2020. Goodman, Lenn E. Islamic Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Goody, Jack. “Love and Religion: Comparative Comments.” In New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert. Berghahn Books, 2010. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984. Haberman, David. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hallett, Vicky. “Millions of Women Take a Long Walk with a 40-Pound Water Can.” NPR, July 7, 2016. Accessed October 1, 2021. https:// w w w. n p r . o r g / s e c t i o n s / g o a t s a n d s o d a / 2 0 1 6 / 0 7 / 0 7 / 4 8 4 7 9 3 7 3 6 / millions-of-women-take-a-long-walk-with-a-40-pound-water-can.

154

Bibliography

Hangen, Welles. “Mossadegh Gets 3-Year Jail Term.” New York Times (December 22, 1952). Hess, Scott. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth Century Culture. University of Virginia Press, 2012. Holmes, Oliver W. The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes: Memoirs of R. W. Emerson and J. L. Motley. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1892. hooks, bell. All About Love. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Hoquqi, Mohammad. She’r-e Zaman-e Ma: Sohrab Sepehri [Poetry of Our Time: Sohrab Sepehri]. Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1374 HS/1995 AD. 21st edition. Hume, Angela. “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2012). Ibn Sina. “On the Soul: The Floating Man,” Excerpt from the Psychology of the Book of Healing: On the Soul (Kitab al-Shifa: Tabiyat Ilm al-Nafs) (1020 AD). Translated by John McGinnis and David Reisman. Accessed May 29, 2021, https:// wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/Avicenna2. Ibn Sina. “A Treatise on Love.” Translated by Emil L. Fackenheim. Medieval Studies 7, no. 1 (1945). Ilahi-Ghomshei, Husayn. “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry.” In Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry. Edited by Leonard Lewisohn. I.B. Tauris, 2010. Inayat Khan, Pir Zia. “Persian and Indian Versions of the Living Earth.” In Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. Edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. California: The Golden Sufi Center, 2013. Jain, Pankaj. Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011. James Baldwin Interview with Kay Bonetti. “James Baldwin Interview 1984/The Post Archive.” October 21, 2015, YouTube video, 1:00:41. Accessed on June 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dua3dtrvq84&ab_channel=MatthewSiegfried MatthewSiegfried. “James Baldwin: From Another Place,” directed by Sedat Pakay (1973). https://www. sedatpakay.com/. James Baldwin in a Conversation with R. H. Darden, Broadcasted: KPFK, April 1, 1968 (60 min.). Accessed on June 10, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Cs7DxbZnxhY&ab_channel=SecretTarotSecretTarotVerified. “James Baldwin.” James Baldwin Review 1 (2015): 112–29. James Baldwin National Press Club Speech, 1986. You Tube Video. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7_1ZEYgtijk&ab_channel=thepostarchive. “James Baldwin Speaks! Social Change and the Writer’s Responsibility.” September 19, 2016, YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cZQ5OA4rtag&t=948s&ab_channel=MatthewSiegfriedMatthewSiegfr ied. “James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley: A Legendary Debate from 1965,” at Cambridge University, titled “American Dream at the Expense of

Bibliography

155

the American Negro.” YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ&t=619s&ab_channel=AeonVideo. Jordan, Rob. “Stanford Researcher Declares that the Sixth Mass Extinction Is Here.” Stanford Report, June 19, 2015. Accessed October 26, 2021. https://news.stanford. edu/news/2015/june/mass-extinction-ehrlich-061915.html. Kabilsingh, Chatsumarn. “Early Buddhist Views on Nature.” In This Sacred Earth, Religion, Nature, Environment. Edited by Roger S. Gottlieb. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Kaldas, Samuel. “Descartes versus Cudworth on the Moral Worth of Animals.” Philosophy Now, 108 (June/July 2015). Kapur, Nandini Sinha. Reconstructing Identities: Tribes, Agro-Pastoralists and Environment in Western India (Seventh-Twentieth Centuries). New Delhi: Manohar, 2008. Keshmirshekan, Hamid. Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives. London: England, Saqi Books, 2013. Khan, Dominique-Sila. Conversions and Shifting Identities: Ramdev Pir and the Ismailis in Rajasthan. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1997. Khan, Dominique-Sila, and Zawahir Moir. “The Lord Will Marry the Virgin Earth: Songs of the Time to Come.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 28 (2000): 99–115. Khorchide, Mouhanad, and Sarah Hartmann. Islam Is Mercy: Essential Features of a Modern Religion. NP: Verlag Herder, 2014. Knickerbocker, Scott, Eco-poetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Kose, Samet. “Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdallah ibn Sina.” Bulletin of Psychopharmacology 26, no. 3 (September 2016). Kubik, Gerhard. Theory of African Music, vol. 2. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. “Lake Urmia.” NASA Earth Observatory. Accessed on November 20, 2021. https:// earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/84116/lake-urmia. Laozi. Tao Te Ching: A New English Version. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. London and New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Latour, Bruno. “Will Non-Humans be Saved? An Argument in Eco-Theology.” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 463. Lawson, Todd. The Qur’an, Epic, and Apocalypse. Oxford: One World, 2017. Leaman, Oliver, ed. The Qur’an: An Encyclopedia. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Lee, John M. “Silent Spring Is Now a Noisy Summer: Pesticides Industry Up in Arms Over a New Book; Rachel Carson Stirs Conflict—Producers Are Crying ‘Foul’; Rachel Carson Upsets Industry.” New York Times, July 22, 1962. Accessed on November 21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/1962/07/22/archives/silent-springis-now-noisy-summer-pesticides-industry-up-in-arms.html. Lewis, Franklin. Rumi Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Oxford: One World, 2000.

156

Bibliography

Lings, Martin. Sufi Poems: A Medieval Anthology. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2005. Lloyd, Vincent W. Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Lovecraft, H. P. “The Silver Key.” Weird Tales, January 1929. Lovecraft, H. P., and E. Hoffmann Price.  “Through the Gates of the Silver Key. ” Weird Tales, July 1934. Lowe, Lisa. “Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert.” In Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, 75–101. Cornell University Press, 1991. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt207g5rk.6. Majd, Hooman. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Majd, M. G. Iran Under Allied Occupation in WWII: The Bridge to Victory and a Land of Famine. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2016. Marmura, Michael. “Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ in Context.” The Monist 69, no. 3 (July 1986). “Mars One’s Journey: 2011–2021.” Mars One. http://www.mars-one.com/. “Matsuo Basho Poems.” My Poetic Side. Accessed November 8, 2021. https:// mypoeticside.com/poets/matsuo-basho-poems. Meskoob, Shahrokh. “Ghese-ye Sohrab va Nooshdaroo.” In Bagh-e Tanhayi. Edited by Hamid Siahpoosh. Tehran: Negah Publishers, 2010. Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: In Search of an Environmental Ethic. Los Angeles, CA: International College Guild of Tutors Press, 1972. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2011. Mina, Parviz. “Oil Agreements in Iran: 1914–1978.” In Encyclopedia Iranica, July 20, 2004. https://iranicaonline.org/articles/oil-agreements-in-iran. Miquel, André. L’Islam et sa Civilization: 7e-20e siècles. Paris: Colin, 1968. Mirzababazadeh Fomeshi, Behnam, and Farideh Pourgiv. “Two Green Poets: A Comparative Ecocritical Study of Sepehri and Emerson.” K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature 15, no. 2 (January 2013). Monge, Rico, Kerry P.C. San Chirico, and Rachel Smith, eds. Hagiography and Religious Truth: Case Studies in the Abrahamic and Dharmic Traditions. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Moran, Rachel F. “Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us about the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage.” Hofstra Law Review 32, issue 4, art. 22. Morrison, Toni. Annual Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality. “Goodness, Altruism, and the Literary Imagination” at Harvard Divinity School, December 6, 2012. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJmVpYZnKTU&ab_channel=HarvardDivinitySch ool. Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad: A Conversation. Hamid Zar’e, ed. Tehran: Qoqnous, 1399 HS/2020 AD. “Mostanad-e Sohrab: Zendegi va She’r-e Sohrab Sepehri” [“Sohrab Documentary: Life and Poetry of Sohrab Sepehri”]. September 22, 2016, YouTube video, 0:43:52.

Bibliography

157

Accessed January 11, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG6z9QCJqrQ (in Farsi). Murphy, John J. “Meister Eckhart and the Via Negativa: Epistemology and Mystical Language.” New Blackfriars 77, no. 908 (1996): 458–72. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/43249917. Na’Allah, Abdul-Rasheed. “Ogoni, the Eagle Birds’ Agony in the Delta Woods.” In Ogoni’s Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria. Edited by Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc., 1998. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, ed. The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: Harper One, 2015, 1745. Nguyen, Martin, Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Nicholson, Reynold. Selected Poems from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History. Translated by Adrian Collins. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nomanul-Haq, Syed. “Islam and Ecology: Toward Retrieval and Reconstruction.” In Islam and Ecology. Edited by R. C. Foltz et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003. Nynez, Christina. “Climate 101: Deforestation.” The National Geographic. https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/deforestation. Accessed January 5, 2021. Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pak, Chris. Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Parker, Laura. “The World’s Plastic Pollution Crisis Explained.” National Geographic, June 7, 2019. Accessed October 21, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ environment/article/plastic-pollution. Parshina-Kottas, Yuliya, et al. “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed.” New York Times, May 24, 2021. Accessed September 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html. Pattanaik, Devdutt. Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols, and Rituals, from the Heart of the Subcontinent. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2003. People & Power. Aired February 21, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=j3vvy8xsqeM. People & Power. Aired November 12, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VPIMoiiIU6U&ab_channel=AlJazeeraEnglish. Popova, Maria. “James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society.” The Marginalian. August 20, 2014. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/20/james-baldwin-the-creative-process/. Puzo, Mario. “Review of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, by James Baldwin.” New York Times (June 23, 1968).

158

Bibliography

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007). Qur’an. https://quran.com/. Rafi’, Mehdi. Masahat-e Ehsas: Sohrab Sepehri va Hunar-e ‘Irfani dar Jahan-e Mu’aser [The Scale of Sentiment: Sohrab Sepehri and Mystical Art in the Contemporary World]. Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1394 HS/2015 AD. Rahman, Fazlur. Selected Letter of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi. Pakistan: Iqbal Academy, 1968. Razavi, Mudarres. Divan-e Ḥakim Sana’i Ghaznavi. Edited by Badi’uzaman Foroozanfar. Tehran: Entesharat-e Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1336 HS/1957 AD. Report on International Decade for Action “Water for Life” 2005–2015. Accessed on September 19, 2021. http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml. Ritter, Hellmut. The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid al-din Attar. Translated by John O’kane and Bernd Radtke. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003. Rohrer, Matthew. “Translations from Hafiz.” The American Poetry Review 41, no. 6 (2012). Romero, Oscar, Violence of Love. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. Roudaki Samarqandi, Abu Abdullah. Divan-e Roudaki-ye Samarqandi. Edited by Saeed Nafisi. Entesharat-e Negah, 1393 HS/2014 AD. Rumi. Jalal u-Din Muhammad. Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. Edited by Badi’uzaman Foroozanfar. Tehran: Entesharat-e Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1336 HS/1957 AD. Rumi. Jalal u-Din Muhammad. Masnavi-ye Ma’navi [The Spiritual Couplets]. Tehran: Entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1336 HS/1957 AD. Sa’di, Koliyat-e Sa’di. Edited by Kamal Ejtema’i Jandaqi. Tehran: Entesharat-e Sokhan, 1385 HS/2006 AD. Safi, Omid, trans. and ed. Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978. Sana’i Ghaznavi. Divan-e Ḥakim Sana’i Ghaznavi. Edited by Badi’uzaman Foroozanfar. Tehran: Nashr Azadmehr, 1381 HS/2002 AD. Santamaria, Alberto. “Poetry and Realization: Towards a Knowledge of the Poet’s Place in María Zambrano.” In The Cultural Legacy of María Zambrano. Edited by Ros, Xon de and Daniela Omlor, vol. 24. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017. Sarami, Arefe, and Bahar Mokhtarian. “Pisces and Iranian Two-Symbolic-Fish Pattern, Herati: A Structural Analysis of Iconographic Symbols and Metaphorical Expressions of Bicorporal Fish Pattern.” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2015). Sarshar, Houman. “Sohrab Sepehri.” Encyclopedia Iranica, August 15, 2009. https:// iranicaonline.org/articles/sepehri-sohrab. “SCETV ‘James Baldwin’ 1988.” January 26, 2018, YouTube video, 0:14:21. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DaoaEAE27lo&ab_channel=AlkebulanNationTV.

Bibliography

159

Schimmel, Annemarie. Rumi’s World: The Life and Work of the Great Sufi Poet. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992. Schwartzstein, Peter. “The Return of a Once-Dying Lake.” BBC: Future Planet, February 25, 2021. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/future/ article/20210225-lake-urmia-the-resurrection-of-irans-most-famous-salt-lake. Sedarat, Roger. Emerson in Iran: The American Appropriation of Persian Poetry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Sepehri, Paridokht, ed. Hanouz dar Safaram [I Am Still Travelling]. Tehran: Farzan, 1380 HS/2001 AD. Sepehri, Paridokht. Sohrab: Morgh-e Mohajer [Sohrab: The Migrant Bird]. Tehran: Tahouri Publications, 1375 HS/1996 AD, 9th edition. Sepehri, Sohrab. Hasht Ketab [The Eight Books]. Tehran: Tahuri, 1376 HS/1997 AD. Rights owned by Zehnaviz Publishers, used with permission. Sepehri, Sohrab. On the Side of Grass or the Burial of Love. Kashan, Iran, 1947. Sepehri, Sohrab. Otaq-e Abi. Edited by Pirooz Sayyar. Tehran: Soroush, 1392 HS/2013 AD. First published in 1369/1990. Sereshk, M. “Hajm-e Sabz,” in Bagh-e Tanha-yi: Sohrab Sepehri [The Garden of Solitude: Sohrab Sepehri]. Edited by Hamid Siahpoosh. Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1389/2010 (text in Farsi). Shamisa, Sirous. Negahi be Sepehri. Tehran: Sedaye Mo’aser, 1393 HS/2014 AD. 10th edition (in Farsi). Sheibani, Khatereh. “Kiarostami and the Aesthetics of Modern Persian Poetry.” Iranian Studies 39, no. 4 (December 2006). Short, Damien. Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide. London: Zed Books, 2016. Siahpoosh, Hamid, ed. Bagh-e Tanha-yi: Yadname-ye Sohrab Sepehri. Tehran: Negah Publishers, 1389 HS/ 2011 AD. Sikand, Yoginder, and Manjari Katju. “Mass Conversions to Hinduism among Indian Muslims.” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 34 (August 20, 1994): 2217. Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Racial Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991. “Sohrab Sepehri Tree Trunk Paintings Lead Tehran Auction.” Tehran Times, May 28, 2016. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/402928/ Sohrab-Sepehri-Tree-Trunk-paintings-lead-Tehran-Auction. Sponsel, Leslie E. Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012. Stanford Earth Staff. “Losing Species: The Science behind Extinction.” Stanford Earth Matters Magazine, December 9, 2020. Accessed October 25, 2021. https:// earth.stanford.edu/news/science-behind-extinction#gs.e4ez15. Tavakoli Targhi, Mohammad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

160

Bibliography

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Tefera Dibaba, Assefa. “Eco-poetics of Place: Reclaiming Finfinne, Past and Present.” In Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change. Edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. “The Trial of Khosrow Golesorkhi (1974).” May 13, 2020, YouTube video, 0:15:07. Accessed on September 18, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=utMxG0A1ERY&ab_channel=Zarghami-ez. Trungpa, Chögyam. The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness. Shambhala Publications, 2013. Turner, Martin. “Sohrab’s Way.” Parsagon: The Persian Literature Review, October 2017. Tyshchenko, Natalia. “Symbolic Meanings of Phytonyms in the English and Ukrainian Languages.” Widening Our Horizons. April 2018, vol. 1 83. http:// ir.nmu.org.ua/handle/123456789/154245?show=ful. United Nations. “UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating.’” Sustainable Development (blog). United Nations, May 6, 2019. Accessed October 25, 2021. un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/201 9/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/. West, Cornel. Keeping Faith. New York: Routledge, 1993. White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155 (1967): 1203–7. Whitman, Walt. “A Persian Lesson.” In “Good Bye My Fancy” from Leaves of Grass, 1891. Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud. Accessed November 20, 2021. Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/45557/the-tables-turned. Accessed November 12, 2021. “World of Change: Shrinking Aral Sea.” NASA Earth Observatory. Accessed November 20, 2021. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/world-of-change/AralSea. Yarshater, Ehsan. “Contemporary Persian Painting.” Highlights of Persian Art. Edited by R. Ettinghausen and E. Yarshater. New York: Westview Press, 1979. Zambrano, Maria. Algunos Lugares de la Pintura. Edited by Pedro Chacón. Madrid: Eutelequia, 2012. Zambrano, Maria. Algunos Lugares de la Poesía. Madrid: Trotta, 2007a. Zambrano, María. “Filosofía y poesía.” In Libros (1930–1939). Edited by Pedro Chacón y Mariano Rodríguez, vol. 1 of Obras completas [Complete Works, vol. 1, Books (1930–1939)]. Edited by Jesús Moreno Sanz. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015. Zambrano, Maria. Notas de un método. Madrid: Mondadori, 1989. Zambrano, María. Person and Democracy. In “The Method of María Zambrano: An Analysis and Translated Selection of Essays Centered on the Concepts of the Word, the Person, Compassion and Love.” Translated by Sarah Cyganiak. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2011.

Bibliography

161

Zambrano, Maria, and Rosa Chacel. Two Confessions. Translated and edited by Noël Valis and Carol Maier. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Zammito, John H. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Zar’e, Hamed, ed. A Conversations with S. Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad (Tehran: Qoqnous, 1399 HS/2020 AD).

Index

Ahmed, Shahab, 46, 34n39 Akhavan-e Sales, Mehdi, 109, 125 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 113, 135n17, 149 Ahimsa, 86 Akinoomaage, 85 Al-Adawiyyah, Rabi’a, 12 Arkoun, Mohammed: adab, 9 paideia, 9 ‘Attar, Farid u-din, 3, 12, 24, 31, 33n30, 65, 74, 89, 122, 133, 139n120 Baldwin, James, 4–5, 7–8, 21–22, 27–31; humanism, 111–15; poets and artists, 41–42, 110, 142; race and decolonization, 109–14, 121, 134n10, 142 Baraheni, Reza, 109, 133n7 Beats, 76–77 Bhakti Movement/ideology, 92, 94 Bonjean, Francois, 10 censorship, 126 Chipko Movement, 95 Christian liberation theology, 11 Cleaver, Eldridge, 109, 110, 133n1 counterculture, 76, 77

Dabashi, Hamid, 46, 47, 48, 67n20, 68n34, 74, 117 Darwish, Mahmoud, 113, 114 Davari Ardakani, Reza, 42, 66n7, 113, 129 decoloniality, 9–11, 19, 89, 141–42; decolonial love, 29; liberation theology, 29; race, 112–14; revolutionary poetry, 121–22 Derrida, Jacques, 19 Divan-e Shams, 26, 74 Divan. See Hafiz Eckhart, Meister, 81, 111, ecopoetry and earth poetry, 42–43, 45, 53–54, 58, 69n68, 88–90, 122, 142; black poetry, 54 ecocriticism, 66; Reilly, Evelyn, 51; Skinner, Jonathan, 51 ecotheology, 2, 74–76, 85, 89–92; the Bishnoi, 92–95 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 42, 49, 50 Enlightenment, 19 environmental ethics: Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 44–45; ecocide, 55; 163

164

Index

environmental crisis, 19, 43–44, 53–55, 75–76, 124–26; humanities, greening of, 43–44; Meeker, Joseph, 3 Evers, Medgar, 121, 135n22 Farrokhzad, Forough, 7, 131, 5n2 Ferdowsi, Abul-Qasim, 80 Francis, Saint of Assisi, 3, 76, Francis, Pope, 102n17 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1, 5, 89, 104, 141, 144, 153 Gade, Anna, 76, 101 Gathas, 82 Ginsberg, Allen, 77 Goodman, Lenn, 46, 47 Hafiz, 13, 50 Hallaj, Mansour, 11, 22, 33 Hasht Ketab: books in, 2, 74–75; decoloniality in, 89; eight, meaning of 1–2, 46, 67n21; God in, 78, 85; Islamic philosophy in, 96–101; translations of, 2

Miskawayh, Ibn, 9 Mississauga, 85 mysticism, 4, 27, 51, 65, 80, 95, 97; seven stages of, 20 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 44, 76 Nasr, Hamid Abu Zayd, 47 Navajo, 84, 125 Nietzsche, 62 orientalism: Said, Edward, 47, 113–14 Persian poetry, 1, 3, 12–13, 89, 99; bird imagery, 74, 102n6, 122; Earth, connection with, 42, 45; humanism, 46–47 qibla, 96, 97, 98, Qur’an, 8, 13, 15–17, 20, 82, 97, 99–101

Lloyd, Vincent, 29, 30 love, 4, 7–31, 65; Bhakti and Hinduism, 92; Islamic tradition, 9–20; Sufi saints, 11, 17, 65–66, 73–74, 92, 99

religion, philosophy of, 1, 3; Bishnoi, 92–95; Hinduism, 91–92; Islamic humanism, 46–47; Islamic poetry, 80; nature, Christian view of, 76; Tantric Buddhism, 79; Taoism, 80, 90; Zen Buddhism, 49, 76–77, 86–87, 90 romanticism, 49–50, 90 Rumi, Mowlana Jalal a-din 3, 14, 56, 74; Baldwin, influence on, 30; crying tree, 100–101; Konya, road to, 8; love, ontology of, 8, 13–14, 21–22, 65, 98; ney/nah, 82–83; Sepehri, influence on, 95, 97–101

Malcolm X, 39n129, 112, 121, 135n22 Masnavi, 37n102, 56, 82, 98, 100 Merwin, W. S., 87

Sa’di, 13–14, 50, 60, 99 scientism, 19, 53 Sepehri, Sohrab, 1–4, 20–27, 31;

Jain, Pankaj, 91, 93, 94, 105n93, 106n98 Jainism, 91 Khejri, tree, 93, 95 Kiarostami, Abbas, 131 King, Martin Luther, Dr., 126

Index

1953 coup, 117, 119; apple, image of, 5, 21, 26, 27, 128, 138n98; ahimsa, 86–88; Bishnoi, influence of, 91–95; Blue Room, significance of, 78–79, 117, 130; decoloniality, importance of, 117, 126, 131, 143; God, doubt and certainty of, 79–84, 97–98; ecopoetry and nature, 4, 42, 45, 50–53, 58–59, 63, 66, 88–91, 122–26, 142; ecopolitics, 122; ecotheology, 89–91, 101; humanism, 47–49, 56, 59, 66, 111– 12, 114–15, 131; indigenous traditions, influence of, 84–85; Islam, influence of, 95–101; Japanese poetry, influence of, 91; journeys, concept of, 87–88; love in, 20–21, 66, 77, 132–33; “The Message of the Fish,” 117–21; metaphor and censorship, 126–28; mysticism, 51–52, 65–66, 74; nenuphar, symbolic meaning, 79; painting, 51–52; public reception of, 109–10; religions, influence of, 75, 83, 86, 89–95, 141; Rumi, influence of, 95–101; social class, hierarchical structure, 123; “The Sound of Water’s Footfall,” 41, 62–65, 80–81, 84, 87, 96, 126; travel, 128–29, 131;

165

war, 115–16, 129–31. See also Hasht Ketab; Persian poetry Shahnameh, 80 Shamlu, Ahmad, 109 Sheikh Baha’i, 97, 98 Shibli, Abu Bakr, 99 Simpson, Leanne, 85 Sina, Abu Ali Ibn, 17–18, 20, 101; floating person, 18 Simurgh, 74, 139n120 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 7, 42 United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity, 19 Veda/Vedic hymns, 3, 20, 81, 82, 90, 118 White, Lynn Jr. 44, 55, 75, 76 Wordsworth, 64–65 Wu-wei, 95 Yamuna River, 91 Yung, Carl Gustav, 3, 81, 95 Zambrano, Maria: “sterile reason,” 10; poetic language vs. philosophical discourse, 10, 143; poetic reason, 56–57; poetry, 41–42, 45, 63; “remembering,” role of, 26 Zoroaster/Zoroastrianism, 3, 14, 79, 104n53 Zhuangzi, 81, 82

About the Author

Bahar Davary is professor of religious studies and affiliate faculty of the Ethnic Studies and Asian Studies Departments at the University of San Diego. Her research and publications are broadly within the field of Comparative Study of Religion. She is also the author of Women and the Qur’an: A Study in Islamic Hermeneutics.

167