Writing a monograph is usually a time-consuming enterprise, requiring one to work for several years on one topic to advance our knowledge of it. Some authors of monographs are so intensely engaged with their topics that the reader can immediately see their fascination with their subject and this passion has an infectious effect on the reader. Domenico Arturo Ingenito's Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry certainly belongs to this category as it is written in such an ardent style that it stimulates the reader to continue to read. This enthusiasm shines out through the pages of this book in a prismatic way. The book is about the thirteenth-century poet Saʿdi, one of the first Persian sages who became known in Europe as early as in the seventeenth century and remained popular until the Enlightenment, inspiring figures such as Voltaire, who wrote his Zadig as if it were a translation from Saʿdi. Beholding Beauty is not about the poet's reception in modern times but a profound analysis in three parts of Saʿdi's writings, especially his poetry. As Ingenito admits, the book “might be read as three different monographs constantly referring to each other” (p. 3). It is a successful attempt to examine Saʿdi's writings within Persian ethico-philosophical and mystico-religious traditions. The subjects Ingenito focuses upon are all in one way or another related to beauty and aesthetics, whether sensual, mystical, intellectual, or political.
The book consists of an introduction, three parts, and a short epilogue. It also has an appendix in which all the original Persian texts cited are collected. After the introduction (pp. 1–42), outlining the organization of the book and Saʿdi's biography, we enter Part 1, which consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to “Homoerotics of Political Power and the Emergence of Gendered Desires,” discussing the relationship between praise poetry and lyricism whereby homoeroticism plays a central role in the politics. Chapter 2, “On Movements and Gazes in the Rose Garden,” discusses various aspects of Saʿdi's Rose Garden (Gūlistān) in terms of homoerotic gaze, desire, and love. For Ingenito “the imagery of the rose garden represents the gamut of phenomenological possibilities of the lyric subject's contemplation of the world as an act of cognition of the self with respect to the creative power of words and images” (p. 100). Despite Saʿdi's centrality in Persianate culture, not much has been written about him and the Rose Garden. This work is regarded as a book of ethics, but Ingenito provides a fresh treatment of this masterpiece, searching for “sensual subtexts and [to] put them in conversation with Saʿdi's lyric production” (p. 104). Chapter 3, “The Obscene Revisited,” is devoted to Saʿdi's pornographic literature, a subject which is understudied, and Ingenito's analytical take is a welcome contribution to Persian erotic literature. After a definition of the term “pornography,” the author commences his analysis of Saʿdi's reasons for composing such facetious texts. In a typical style, characteristic of Saʿdi, he says that he wrote them because he faced “the threat of being executed” by a sultan and “as salaciousness in speech is like salt with food” (p. 156). As in the other chapters of the book, Ingenito amply engages with primary and secondary Persian sources and theoretical and methodological publications. In this chapter we see, for instance, how the author rightly connects Saʿdi's facetious writings with the poet Sanaʾi (d. 1131) as an originator of such genre in Persian poetry, writing bawdy poetry to question the piety of the religious hierarchy. Ingenito also elaborates on the notions of lust and desire, connecting them to Ghazali's treatment of these subjects.
Part 2, “Through the Mirror of Your Glances: The Sacred Aesthetics of Saʿdi's Lyric Subjects,” commences with an introduction and consists of five chapters. In the introduction, Ingenito discusses, among other things, the notion of imitatio, and comes to the conclusion that Saʿdi's ghazals in relation to Sanaʾi's poems show that they express another form of spirituality. In Ingenito's own words, “This comparison, along with other analyses that will follow, urges us to read the so-called ‘mystical’ dimension of Saʿdi's works as the product of a conflation of specific strands of a ‘sober’ Persian Sufi tradition with psychological and epistemological approaches that, by percolating through literary and non-literary texts that circulated between Baghdad and Fars in the early 13th century, indirectly influenced the novelty of the poet's lyric voice” (p. 211). Ingenito sees a Sufi line of thought between Saʿdi and Ghazali, tracing how Saʿdi follows Ghazali's “spiritual and aesthetic interpretation of the Avicennian epistemological legacy in the context of the relationship between the perusal of the visible world and the quest for supernal beauty and truth” (p. 211). In the chapters that follow Ingenito engages extensively with various ethical and mystical texts, including Hujviri's Kashf al-mahjub, to show how authors such as Hujviri and Ghazali deprecated sexual and sensual connotations of the beloved's body when the beloved is praised in an amatory poem and the poem is used as a song at musical gatherings of the mystics. The remaining chapters deal with Saʿdi's depiction of an ʿarif, a gnostic, emphasizing that this poetic persona in Saʿdi's poetry is self-referential. Inspecting Avicenna's sensorial regime, Ingenito shows how man perceives the beloved using the external senses and imagines all the other invisible qualities and realities through internal faculties, that is, through the five internal senses. In contextualizing the mystical dimensions of Saʿdi's poetry, Ghazali plays a central role for Ingenito, as he appears in several chapters of the book, and passages of Ghazali's works are translated to demonstrate how a certain mystic idea is introduced by him and how Saʿdi has integrated it in a poetic manner in his own writings. So, one entire chapter, “Spiritual Cardiology,” is devoted to the heart. Ghazali was a key figure in creating a synthesis of a shariʿa-based Sufism with a lived theology in which system the heart played an essential role. The heart is the central organ, the seat of God's secrets, which could reflect the whole universe. Ingenito digresses in his chapters to pay attention to the intellectual tradition that produced figures such as Saʿdi. Sometimes these digressions are lengthy, but they are inserted to give a broad context in which to appreciate the ideas behind Saʿdi's poetry.
Part 3, “The Lyrical Ritual (Samāʿ) as the Performative Space of Sacred Eroticism,” consists of an introduction and two chapters. These chapters focus on the genre of lyrics, their performative and ritualistic aspects. Ingenito wishes to give an all-embracing analysis of the Persian lyrics. The author tries to offer an alternative understanding of how to read the ghazals differently. For instance, he says, “In spite of the common prejudice that invites one to read the spiritual dimensions of Saʿdi's ghazals as a vaguely mystical exercise of observation of the divine detached from any mundane experience of beauty, it is not possible to conceive of the metaphysics of Saʿdi's lyric subject without taking into account its psychological involvement with the phenomenal world” (p. 444). In this engagement music plays a part, especially in how such poems were performed by professional singers at mystical gatherings aimed at enabling the mystic to commune with the divine. Ingenito suggests referring to “samāʿ as a ‘lyrical ritual,’ thus accounting for the poetic and spiritual ‘performativity’ that this practice usually entailed, both as performance proper and as a ‘thing’—in Austin's terms—that its words ‘do’” (p. 445).
It is not easy to discuss many of the qualities of this book in this short review. I certainly recommend the book to students of Persian, Middle Eastern, and medieval studies as it has many virtues, ranging from an aesthetic, mystical, and performative analysis of Saʿdi's poetry to novel discussions of Saʿdi's understudied facetious corpus, and a fascinating discussion on love and desire, and poetry's indispensable role in society. Saʿdi is a complex and central poet in the constellation of the Persian literary, ethical, and moral universe. Anecdotes from his Rose Garden and Orchard (Būstān) as well as many lines of his poetry and his adages have become part of the Persian language. Saʿdi's definition of the ethics of desire, love, lust, and beauty and his Machiavellian codes of behaviour have become part and parcel of Persian culture. For instance, Saʿdi justifies lying for the best interest of a person or, as Ingenito phrases it, truth has a “relative nature … in the face of … beneficial falsehood” (p. 135). Saʿdi defends the proposition that being rich is better than living in poverty like a renunciant dervish. Ingenito's multilayered analyses of Saʿdi as a convoluted medieval intellectual deserves much praise. His painstaking and complex monograph is a must for anyone interested in Persian medieval art, literature, and culture.
