From the time she began publishing in 1954 to her death at 32 in a car accident about thirteen years later, Forugh Farrokhzâd, a prominent poet of twentieth century Iran, composed poetry that challenged some of the fundamental precepts of conservative, patriarchal Iranian society. She wrote openly autobiographical poems from a female perspective, poems that defied tradition in their unapologetic celebration of feminine sensuality, in their rejection of conventional women’s roles, and most importantly, in their emphasis on individual experience and self-awareness. This paper will argue that although Farrokhzad was primarily an urban poet, she frequently focused on the beauty of nature as a medium of self realization. Sometimes devastating, as in “Vahm-e Sabz” [Green Delusion], often inspiring, as in “Fath-e Bagh” [Conquest of the Garden], nature in Farrokhzad’s work tends to associate with the advancement of individuality in constant opposition to cities representative of its repression. This extends past common characterizations of nature as genuine, contrasting with urban artificiality. The extent of Farrokhzâd’s emphasis on the individual becomes clear in light of the fact that most of her social criticism links stagnation and progressive degeneration of the external environment with individual lack of self-awareness. Nature enables human growth; the speaker of “It is Only Sound that Remains” aligns herself with nature, which she places in opposition to the society that she portrays as numbed, more insect than human. I will be examining the social criticism inherent in Farrokhzad’s creation of and emphasis on the dichotomy between society and often unthinking conformity to models on one hand, and nature and the development of individuality on the other. The conception of self as reflected in her poetry is conveyed through a filter of patriarchal mores, and although she did not run the risk of governmental persecution for her poetry, the personal cost of her life and writing outside of conventional boundaries is frequently reflected in her work. The often stark illustrations of her isolation, for example, invite reflections on her society. My sources include Karl Weintraub’s The Value of the Individual, Farzaneh Milani’s Veils and Words and “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective,” Mohammad Hoquqi’s Forugh Farrokhzâd az Âghâz tâ Emruz [Forguh Farrokhzâd from the Beginning until Today], Ardavan Davaran’s “’The Conquest of the Garden’: A Significant Instance of the Poetic Development of Forugh Farrokhzâd,” and Michael C. Hillmann’s A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzâd and Her Poetry.

Sa’di of Shiraz (d. 1292) lived a long and full life. He came to be described as many a moralist, a humanist, a humorous teacher, a versifier, a great lyricist, a legal conformist, a panegyrist, and a mystic of the first order. Indeed, the rainbow of his life experiences has had too many colors for the conventional charts of expectations developing over the centuries. While most critics have testified to the diversity of his approach to art and life, at times, his openness to the full range of human experiences has earned him harsh criticism or a respectful silence to avoid criticism. Among Sa’di’s controversial experiences are his unabashed use of homoerotic themes and images particularly in autobiographic episodes in the Gulistan and in some of the ghazals. While the Gulistan’s episodes are a combination of fact and fiction, some episodes, even if fictitious, validate Sa’di’s acceptance of the value of homoerotic beauty and love. In this paper which is based on a chapter from a monograph I am currently writing on the lyrical legacy of Sa’di of Shiraz, I demonstrate through close readings of Sa’di’s poems, that his vision of beauty and love do not erect a barrier between the physical and the spiritual. From this perspective, all creation is beautiful and therefore lovable. Homoerotic love and beauty are part of the bigger continuum of human experience. Sa’di’s contemporaries, and many later hagiographers and anthologists, do not seem to have seen a conflict between his non-heteronormative expressions of love and his religious, ethical stance. I also touch on the fact that the 20th and the 21st century critics (i.e. Ahmad Shamlu the prominent Iranian poet in Persian, and Cyrus Zargar in his recent monograph Sufi Aesthetics in English) take a different approach to this issue. They either ignore Sa’di’s (and other Sufis’) references to homoerotic love or justify them as purely abstract, universal, and mystical.

From the time of al-F?r?bi and Ebn Sin?, philosophers in the Islamic tradition have accounted for natural beauty by arguing that God as al-Jam?l, the Beautiful, created a world that manifests this aspect of his being. But Moll? Sadr? (d. 1638), leader of the later School of Isfahan, was probably the first to extend this argument to the creation and purposes of the beauty intentionally fashioned by humans in the form of the arts. This paper will examine how Moll? Sadr?’s aesthetic theory may intersect with the poetry of the foremost verbal artist of seventeenth-century Persia, S?’eb Tabrizi (d. 1676). Though it is unlikely that the two were personally acquainted, S?’eb spent most of his life in Isfahan and certainly knew two of Sadr?’s foremost students and sons-in-law. More significantly, S?’eb’s poetry also repeatedly explores the nature, practice, and ethics of the creative process. Perhaps the key term in this poetics is feyz, the emanation, effulgence, or spiritual force that animates all aspects of the cosmos and a word that appears hundreds of times in S?’eb’s poetry. Although the neo-platonic ontology to which this concept is central can be forbiddingly abstruse, S?’eb gives this philosophical abstraction a visual or tactile form with images such as dawn light, the coming of spring, and the hospitality of the banquet. The cognitive semantics of these images not only delineates S?’eb’s apprehension of poetic creativity, but also enacts this dynamic force in a complex play of metaphor and figurative language that is the distinctive beauty of his Fresh Style.

As the work of numerous scholars (foremost, Chabbi, Hermansen, Mojaddedi) has demonstrated, Sufi biographical works (tabaqat/tazkereh) should not be treated as simple “repositories of factual information.” Rather, they are better understood as highly-structured discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) that seek to inscribe a transhistorical communal identity and establish normative Sufi behavior through the discursive construction of Sufi exemplars. While this understanding of the Sufi biographical literature limits the utilization of these works as transparent reflections of social reality, it also opens up new avenues of research for scholars interested in discursive analysis. Theoretically, the present work is based on this latter approach. In this paper, I examine the narratives of homosexual desire and shahed-bazi in some of the major biographical accounts of the famous thirteenth century Persian mystical poet, Fakhr al-Din ‘Eraqi, in order to advance some preliminary hypotheses about the “cultural poetics” of Sufi homoeroticism within the larger discursive tradition of medieval Persian Sufism. The principle conclusion of this paper is that within pre- and early modern Persian Sufism we see what I would like to call a “regime of aesthetic homonormativity” that simultaneously celebrates male beauty and homosexual desire while condemning its actualization in physical acts. At the theoretical level, these observations have important implications for the ongoing “genealogical” study of “pre-homosexuality,” as David M. Halperin has termed it. My case study is principally based on the biographical accounts of ‘Eraqi’s life in the long, anonymous introduction to ‘Eraqi’s divan (which was appended to many early manuscripts of his d?v?n and is the earliest biographical account of him); Nur al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s lengthy entry on him in his "Nafahat al-Uns min Hadarat al-Quds"; and Dowlatshah Samarqandi’s "Tazkerat al-Shu’ara’." Some consideration is also given to the smaller accounts/references to ‘Eraqi’s life in Jami’s "Ashi’at al-Lama’at," Sultan Huseyn Bayqara’s "Majalis al-‘Ushshaq," and ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazvini’s "Tazkereh-ye Meykhaneh."