Was the prominent Persian poet Nezāmi Ganjavi (d. about 1209) a pious Muslim or a mystic? Or, as Talattof argues, was he “mystified” by scholars and literary critics, who interpreted his poetry through the lens of Islam or Islamic mysticism? Talattof's newly published book attempts to contextualize Nezāmi's poetry within the tradition of Persian classical literature and revise Nezāmi's established image as a mystic poet who promoted Islamic or Sufi teachings. For scholars, researchers, and students of Persian culture and classical literature, this book opens a new window into the creative world of Nezāmi's mind, and it does so by analyzing excerpts from his masterpiece, Panj Ganj (Five Treasures), otherwise known as Khamseh (Quintet). Through meticulous analysis of Nezāmi's poetry, Talattof tries to reorient the readers’ attention to the poet's “métier as a Sakhon writer and romancer” (p. 11). Reintroducing Nezāmi as a humanist master of rhetoric, this book is a roadmap to understanding the complexities of Nezāmi's allegorical narratives.
Following Ritter's seminal monograph on Nezāmi's metaphors, Über die Bildersprache Niẓāmīs (1927), Talattof provides a new scholarly effort investigating this poet's main purpose for writing poetry as aesthetic art. With this fresh look at the subject, Talattof invites his readers to appreciate Nezāmi's uniquely inventive mind. He suggests exploring Nezāmi's mastery in creating eloquent speech, which he describes by using the Persian term sakhon (also pronounced as “sokhan”), meaning “discourse” or “eloquent speech.” To substantiate this argument, Talattof contextualizes Nezāmi's sakhon within the Persian classical literary tradition, comparing the application of the term sakhon in masterpieces by prominent figures such as Ferdowsi, Jāmi, and Rudaki, among others. This investigation is Talattof's means of conceptualizing what sakhon meant to Nezāmi: the “most essential element in existence” or that which “created not only the world but the soul, too” (p. 28). Distinguishing between spirituality and religion, Talattof asserts that in Nezāmi's mind, “poets have nearly divine status and a highly sacrilegious attitude” (p. 4–5). However, a poet's main occupation, namely creating sakhon, was not a religious matter for Nezāmi. Instead, it had a material value. Sakhon was a means to prosperity, a legacy, a life challenge, and a means of living. Talattof highlights the fact that among “Nezāmi's approximately 30,000 verses, more than 2,500 deal with issues of language, aesthetics, and rhetoric” (p. 40). For Nezāmi, sakhon was the vessel, and his themes or subjects were merely the ingredients. Love, wine, women, health and medicine, peace, justice, behavior, kings, homeland, identity, and religion (Islam or Zoroastrianism) were among the plethora of themes and subjects Nezāmi used to create what Talattof calls “Nezamian pictorial allegory.”
How does Talattof convince his readers to question and rethink Nezāmi's image as a poet who advocated for Islam or Islamic mysticism? Building on his pivotal argument that Nezāmi was a master of poetry, Talattof conceptualizes this art as a play of pictorial allegory, defining Nezamian pictorial allegory as “a short, structured and interconnected passage with a surface story constructed using descriptions of science, religion, religious references, nature, space, man-made gardens, and animals and a second level story focused on his character or events” (p. 175). Talattof postulates that such allegories “do not promote any particular religion, but rather serve to move along his story in an eloquent way to showcase his mastery of the language” (p. 175).
The story of the prophet of Islam's ascension in Nezāmi's Panj Ganj is an example of such a pictorial allegory. Talattof suggests that the ascension story in Nezāmi's work can be read as “a self-generating system of literary techniques and configuration” (p. 108). In his analysis of this system, Talattof shows that Nezāmi's primary concern was with language itself, rather than “messaging.” He argues that Nezāmi used an exceptionally religious story but rendered it in several different versions featuring fantastic and “non-ideological” elements. Talattof uses Nezāmi's renditions of the ascension story to elaborate on the poet's “concepts of rhetoric and poesy rather than his faith” (p. 108). Other scholars have used the story as evidence of Nezāmi's ideological beliefs. Talattof contends that this story is merely another “pictorial allegory,” among others, that gave Nezāmi a “premium theme for his poetic process of imagination and the expression of his cosmic knowledge” (p. 109). For Talattof, Nezāmi's story of ascension can be used to question his faith. As Talattof states:
I will not go as far as to say that Nezāmi was a heretic, but perhaps a somewhat secular (to the extent that the twelfth century could allow) poet. However, I can say with confidence that Quranic verses were simply other sources of reference to him and sometimes he could be subversive toward them. (p. 129)
What Talattof regards as a “subversive” attitude toward Quranic verses is shown by Nezāmi's intense focus on the fields of astrology and horoscopes in the ascension story, because discussing these subjects was deemed punishable in Islam.
Nezāmi's characterization of women in love stories and their relationships with men in Panj Ganj gives plausible reason for seeing Nezāmi as a progressive, humanist poet. In terms of literary context, Talattof locates Nezāmi in an interesting sequence: the poetry of Ferdowsi (who inspired Nezāmi) and the poetry of Jāmi (who was inspired by Nezāmi). Talattof believes that, unlike Ferdowsi (writing two centuries before him) or Jāmi (writing three centuries after him), Nezāmi represented women in a diverse variety of roles unusual in the patriarchal Iranian society of the twelfth century. In the “unique, humanistic, and eloquent” (p. 59) representation of women in Panj Ganj, Talattof finds traces of Nezāmi's awareness of both women's status in pre-Islamic Iran and Zoroastrian principles. In one example, Nezāmi depicted women as equal to men, or even superior, in ruling a country, as shown in his romance Khosrow o Shirin, which he referred to “as shahvat-nama, the book of concupiscence” (p. 65). In this narrative, Shirin's aunt Mahin Bānu is depicted as the wise and rational ruler of Armenia, who teaches Shirin to be sensible and judicious in her life and relationships with men. Talattof reasons that Ferdowsi and Jāmi's representations of women were influenced by two elements: the genre and historical context. Ferdowsi was more engaged with the spirit of epic poetry when nationalism was the major focus of his poetry. Jāmi was influenced by the Sufi ideology of favoring homosexual eroticism over love for women, indicating that women were to be avoided for the sake of preserving piety. Nezāmi, however, due to his expansive worldview and range of experience, represented women in a humanist, liberal light. Partly for this reason, Talattof writes: “I do challenge the view that Nezami was an advocate of Islam, as a mystic and the views that see his poetry as Sufi poetry” (p. 229).
Do Talattof's arguments provide sufficient evidence that Nezāmi saw religion, particularly Islam, as nothing more than another theme for his creative art rather than a source of inspiration or personal predilection? Talattof emphasizes that religion was simply one of the many themes (such as wine, women, love, etc.) about which Nezāmi wrote. Talattof uses what he considers Nezāmi's references to women's status in pre-Islamic Iran to introduce him as a progressive humanist with liberal views about sexuality and male-female relationships, stating: “Nezami's interest in ancient Iranian culture and in philosophy, and his peculiar interpretation of Zoroastrian teachings … may further explain his liberal approach to women and sexuality” (p. 72). Therefore, Talattof advises, “we should not assume that all Nezami's verses and fictional figures necessarily reflect his own beliefs” (p. 8). If we agree with this suggestion, then we should ask whether Nezāmi's poetry can be used as evidence of his secular or liberal beliefs. The proposition that Nezāmi's unique purpose for writing poetry was to create aesthetic art can also imply that his non-religious or non-Islamic ideas were likewise merely themes for his poetry and not necessarily representative of his beliefs.
Nezami Ganjavi and Classical Persian Literature: Demystifying the Mystic is a brilliant attempt to adopt a systematic, analytical approach for interpreting Nezāmi. Through meticulous analysis of poems from Nezāmi's Panj Ganj, and through the literary contextualization of his work, Talattof argues that Nezāmi's main purpose as an artist was “the representation of the world through Sakhon writing” (p. 237). In considering the religious, political, and social context of the twelfth century, Talattof shows his awareness of the need for a thorough investigation into why Nezāmi, a well-educated poet, is assumed to be part of a Sufi movement or order. He soundly argues: “reading a passage of Nezami as solely a Sufi expression is tantamount to ignoring the enormity of Nezami's conceptualization of human sensibility and his creative imagination” (p. 78). However, detaching Nezāmi from his Islamic context for the sake of “demystification” can also obscure important aspects of his art. Overall, the book makes thought-provoking arguments and is organized in well-designed chapters. One minor criticism is that a final edit to improve the cohesion between chapters and remove the almost inevitable repetitions and occasional typos could have improved the book's flow of discussion.
