The "Haft Paykar", one of the five 'treasures' of Nizami Ganjavi (1141-1209), is a highly elaborate romance that unpacks the natural order of Creation within its rich symbolism and multi-tiered structure. At its core is an investigation of Love as the primary evidence and agent of God's will within the natural world, following the Neoplatonist thought of Plotinus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Sina. Although love, as a derivative of the divine essence, was ultimately a positive force, it could be subverted and lead to the lover's demise if it upset the natural hierarchy of reason over body. Nizami explores this issue in the middle section of the Haft Paykar, a period of reflection and repose for the hero, Bahram-i Gur, who retires to his palace to hear stories from his seven queens, seized from the seven climes of the world. Each story bears a cosmological significance, with correspondences to the seven planets, the seven days of the week, and seven colors, which all illustrate the myriad of ways love could either elevate the spirit towards God or enslave it to the demands of the body. While the black love of the unknown and unknowable could compel the lover to probe the secrets of divinity, only the white love of purity could illuminate the lover towards the correct orientation of his desire. Red love, the color of action and potency, could portend great bloodshed, but might ultimately also overcome impossible odds, while green and turquoise could respectively lead the lover down paths of patience and reward, or greed and misfortune. This paper will focus on the two colors most opposed to each other, the stories of the Black and White Domes, which open and close the sequence, to consider in detail two different attitudes towards love which may be surprisingly more ambivalent and even counter-intuitive than the surface black-and-white dichotomy might suggest. Shorter readings of the Red, Green, and Blue Domes will further explore this symbol of Love within Nizami's moral and religious world-view.

Shams al-Din Tabrizi is well known as the muse who inspired Rumi's embrace of poetry as a vehicle to express the ecstatic and ineffable. In a large percentage of his ghazals, Rumi (1207-73 CE) lavishes encomiastic praise on Shams, in a symbolic discourse that virtually apotheosizes him, and at the same time emulates or impersonates him (Rumi regularly uses the takhallos of Shams in his Divan, as if speaking in the voice of Shams). And yet, Rumi speaks of a multiplicity of guides and saints in his poetry, indeed sketching out in the Masnavi a doctrine of the hierarchy of saints (variously designated as vali, imam, qutb, pir, shaykh, etc.). Rumi also relays the "teachings" of particular Sufi saints of the historical past: Shebli, Ma'ruf-e Karkhi, Bayazid, Ebrahim-e Adham, Jonayd, Hallaj, etc. After the departure of Shams from Konya (1247-48 CE), Rumi also quite remarkably shifts the object of his hagiologic encomia first to Salah al-Din Zarkub (d. 1258 CE), and then to Hosam al-Din Chelebi (d. 1284 CE), in a fashion that seems to replace Shams with other living figures. This paper analyzes Rumi's hagiological discourse by: 1) identifying the specific symbolic roles played by the past historical saints named in his poems; 2) assessing the successive transference of the language of apotheosis from Shams al-Din to Salah al-Din and then Hosam al-Din, and how they are made to represent the living saintly guide; 3) comparing Rumi's poetic representations of the Prophet with that of the saints; and 4) evaluating the extent to which Rumi intended his pronouncements on the hierarchy of saints as theosophic doctrine, or theopoetic discourse.

The Muhit-i A'zam is the first of four long narrative poems by Mirza 'Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1644-1720), who is perhaps the foremost representative of the Indian style of Persian poetry. In this mystico-philosophical masnavi Bedil describes - through the symbolism of wine - the manifestation of the universe as a stage-by-stage unfolding or 'outpouring' and the eventual return to the divine essence (as earlier envisioned by Ibn al-'Arabi). Drawing on the long tradition of wine poetry in Persian literature, but at the same time aiming to transcend it, Bedil utilizes the rich imagery of wine for the illustration of mystical themes, as well as for the structural organization of his poem. He divides the Muhit-i A'zam - "the tavern of the manifestation of realities" - into eight chapters, or "rounds" (dawr), referring to the wine-cup's round around the circle of drinkers, as well as to the stages of ontological descent and ascent. This paper focuses on the closing "round" of the poem, titled "Sealing the Scroll of the Wandering of Language," examining the description of a contest between the ingredients of the betel roll (which takes up most of the chapter) and its relationship to the overall structure, imagery, and thematic content of the poem. More than a mere addition of Indian flavor to the poem, the description serves as a visually striking illustration of the doctrine of the Unity of Being and an equally striking and compelling ending to the poem.