Sanā’ī and the Rise of Persian Mystical Poetry

Summary

Since the days of the fifteenth-century tadhkira-writer Dowlatshāh it has become a cliché to describe the importance of ˙ hakīm Majdūd-i Ādam Sanā’ī (who died in Ghazna in 525/1130) to the development of Persian mystical poetry by quoting a line of verse which is attributed to Mowlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī:

ʿAṭṭār was the soul and Sanā’ī his two eyes

we came in the footsteps of Sanā’ī and ʿAṭṭār

As a matter of fact, almost everything about this quotation is wrong. To begin with, it is not a line by Rūmī himself but it can be traced back to a ghazal of his son Sulṭān Valad. In the printed Dīvān of the latter we find a reading for the second half-verse which differs considerably from the one quoted by Dowlatshāh. It runs:

we have come as a qibla to Sanā’ī and ʿAṭtṭār.

If this is the original reading of this half-verse (and there is no reason to doubt that), the fact that the poet identifies himself with the point to which his predecessors direct their worship cannot be interpreted as an expression of his indebtedness to their works. It is, on the contrary, a typical example of fakhr, the conventional boast of the Persian poet. What Sulṭān Valad is saying in fact is that his own poetry has taken the place of Sanā’ī's and ʿAṭṭār's poems; that it contains the perfect expression of the things they could only hint at. This is confirmed by other ghazals of Sulṭān Valad in which the same topos has been used in various forms, e.g.: “That Face which we have seen, has never been seen by Sanā’ī” or “We are the source of knowing and it was from the sea of our knowledge / that a drop has come to Sanā’ī and to ʿAṭṭār.”

We may very well assume that Sulṭān Valad made these statements not merely on his own behalf but on that of the early Mowlavī tradition as a whole.