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Ruzbehan Baqli Shirazi

HENRY CORBIN AND MOH. MO'IN (ED.) (522/1128-606/1209): Le jasmin des fideles d'amour (Kitab-e 'Abhar al-'ashiqin). Traite de soufisme en persan publie avec une double introduction et la traduction du chapitre premier. (Bibliotheque Iranienne, Vol. 8.) [iv], 129, 244, 113 [ii] pp., 6 plates. Teheran: Departement d'Iranologie de l'Institut Franco-Iranien; Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1958.

This is the eighth volume to appear under the auspices of the Institut Franco-Iranien, and again it is M. Henry Corbin who has already done much to bring little-known mystical treatises written in the Persian language to our attention, who appears as the principal editor: and his collaborator in this task is again Professor Moh. Mo'in who has done more than almost any other living Iranian to re- publish in critical editions the often almost forgotten classics of his language. M. Corbin's name has hitherto been principally associated with the works of the Shaykh al-Ishraq, Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi, and it is with some relief that we are allowed to pass on from that thinker of literally 'fantastic' difficult to Ruzbehan Baqli whom hitherto we have only been able to know as a source for al-Hallaj and his contemporaries through Massignon's numerous monographs. This is not to say that Ruzbehan is an easy author; far from it. Both editors are agreed that both his thought and his expression of it are elusive in the extreme: 'his discourse is like a flower which crumbles away no sooner do you touch it, or like a chemical substance which evaporates the moment it comes into contact with a little heat', says Professor Mo'in (p. 100), and we can but agree.

It might be asked why the two distinguished editors insist on publishing works so difficult and abstruse as to be unlikely to attract all but an infinitesimal minority of either French or Iranian readers for whom the series is presumably intended. Their justification is that not only have the works of such writers as Ruzbehan and Yahya Suhrawardi been almost totally neglected in the past, but that their writings form a bridge between the earlier mysticism which culminated in Muhammad al-Ghazali, and the later specifically Iranian mysticism of Sana'i, Iraqi, Rumi, and Jami, to mention only the biggest names. Abu Yazid al-Bistami and Hallaj are without doubt the twin seeds from which the later and openly unorthodox mysticism grew, and the later Persian poets are its copious fruit. The task that M. Corbin has set himself and to which he has dedicated himself with such enthusiasm, is to throw what light he can on the transition period of flowering between the seed-time and the harvest.

If this was his aim (as I am sure it was), he did well to select the 'Abhar al-'ashiqin of Ruzbehan as the next text on his listt for publication, for, like the volume that precedes it in this series, it too is a Jami' al-hikmatayn, a bringing together of two 'sciences' in this case of human and divine love. It belongs to the same tradition as the Kitab al-Sawanih of Ahmad al-Ghazali and forms a bridge between him and the seemingly scandalous 'Iraqi. It is not possible in a review to give even a synopsis of Ruzbehan's particular brand of mysticism, and it can only be said that, unlike the majority of his predecessors, he regards Platonic love between humans as a propaideutikon to the more serious business of the love of God: it is the philosophical justification of the nazar 'ala'l-murd in which the early Sufis had seen nothing but 'a plague of the Sufis' and 'a sure road to disaster' (Sulami)-- the justification of the contemplation of human beauty as being a mirror of the divine. It is a natural development of Hallaj's main theses (i) that God is love, (ii) that man is made in the image of God and is therefore in a sense divine, and (iii) that the human soul is uncreated in the sense that it has its existence outside time. All this and much more including the legitimacy of the nazar 'ala'l-murd, had already received the sanction of Muhammad al-Ghazali, particularly in the Persian Kimiya-yi sa 'adat.

Ruzbehan takes over the Neo-Platonic ideas of Universal Mind and Universal Soul from Ghazali's Risalat al-ladunniyya, as also does Sana'i, and like Sana'i, he subconsciously resents them: in so far as they fit into his scheme of things at all, they are there only to be transcended (or ridiculed). It is, then, perhaps rather a pity that the editors decided to publish the 'Abhar before Ruzbehan's diarium spirituale, the Kashf al-asrar, which presumably gives the facts of his own experience on which the metaphysical superstructure of the 'Abhar is based.

It can be assumed that the main purpose of this admirable 'Bibliotheque Iranienne' is to make the major works of Iranian mysticism and idealist metaphysics better known to Western readers. If this is so, the present publication seems to fall between two stools, for we have two introductions, one in French and one in Persian, which largely overlap, but a French translation of only the first chapter of the Persian text. The Western student of comparative mysticism (unless he is lucky enough to know Persian) would have welcomed a full translation rather than a massive French introduction which (following the Persian one) is so largely devoted to biographical detail that it is only of interest to the historian of Iranian mysticism.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Professor Mo'in's Persian introduction should stick so largely to the external facts connected with Ruzbehan and his work, while M. Corbin should see himself rather as the defender of Iranian mysticism against what he calls 'profanation' (p. 109). This seems strange in the editor of a work devoted to what might be called the 'marriage of love sacred and profane'. As a corrective to a too 'starry-eyed' approach to Sufism M. Corbin might care to re-read the later parts of Sana'i's Hadiqat al-haqiqa which denounce the open immorality connected with the so-called nazar 'ala'l-murd and Ibn Munawwar's Tawhid al-asrar, which exhibits the Jungian 'shadow' of the movement at it silliest.

R.C. ZAHNER